The pitch is being rolled for Keir Starmer’s entry to No 10. Titles on the prospect of a Labour Britain already line the bookshop shelves, from Oliver Eagleton’s The Starmer Project to Lisa Nandy’s All In. Who is he really? Is he a socialist in sheep’s clothing, or just another moderate, pragmatic, oh-so-hesitant Labour leader trapped in an ideological no-man’s-land between left and “left-of-centre”?
The one label that no one could pin on Starmer is “radical”. After the trauma of Liz Truss, economic policy has sunk into a grim torpor. Starmer has eschewed alternative economic models, terrified of the reaction of markets and thus, possibly, of voters. He is so fearful of the issue of Brexit – which many Britons who voted for it now regret – that he has become its most effective supporter. On social policy, Labour is all platitude and nothing structural. Britain is drifting down Europe’s league table on health outcomes, drug abuse, prison population and reception of migrants. Yet Labour only promises to do broadly more of the same. A Starmer government would be a more generous sort of Tory one.
