In his first speech of 2024, the message from the man who will be prime minister this time next year (barring a large asteroid crashing into Earth) was, of course, a call for “national renewal”. That’s the traditional leader of the opposition’s “new year message of hope”.
Those alive for the exhilaration of the 1997 general election night will remember the miracle of renewal when a dead government vanishes into thin air with the birth of a new one.
But there’s always the fear, too. Be afraid, warns Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s director of campaigns, reminding his MPs of the many elections when polling leads were overturned, resulting in a shock loss. Complacency is the enemy. My first election as a cub reporter in 1970 was a salutary, lifelong reminder. Harold Wilson, the bookies’ dead cert, was ahead of Edward Heath by a country mile until the last 48 hours, and suffered a plunging defeat. Lose, lose and lose again is Labour’s experience.
Approaching the final furlong, shedloads of unbidden advice, warning and exhortation travels to shadow cabinet ears. In one ear, they hear “be bolder, faster, loosen those tightfisted fiscal reins”. In the other, it’s “hold steady, take no risks, change nothing now the race is almost yours”. Labour backers biting their fingernails at the finishing line veer from one view to the other, as do I sometimes.
Listen to that other great anxiety: election night joy will be fleeting and victory pyrrhic when Labour wakes the next day to the scorched desert of a ruined public realm, a flat economy and hopes dashed by an empty exchequer. The Financial Times’ annual survey of 90 economists warns of a “grey gloom” year ahead. In this bleak midwinter economy, how should Labour manage expectations without killing hope?
Starmer’s speech on Thursday struck a rich seam. He can set the tone from day one with his pledge to “restore standards in public life”. At a time when “trust in politics is now so low, so degraded, that nobody believes you can make a difference any more”, he insists his “total crackdown on cronyism” will “clean up politics”. Start that as a day-one action.
Labour needs to move fast and mend things: hit the ground running with democratic renewal in its first 100 days, to quell public cynicism (the worst ever recorded by the Electoral Commission). First, the quick emergency cleansing of “Augean filth”, which Starmer has previously referred to, that the Michelle Mone controversy seems to symbolise. What does it look like, Starmer asks, when rule-makers fail to follow the rules, when people are honoured for crashing the economy under Liz Truss? “No more VIP fast lanes, no more kickbacks for colleagues,” he said. “No more revolving doors between government and the companies they regulate.”
Reforming the Lords with an elected senate may take aeons, but its worst excrescences can be fixed at a stroke: sack the 91 hereditary peers and the 26 bishops. Make each party – and crossbenchers – cut their numbers by 50%, however they choose to do it. They will be best at removing their own dross, the non-attenders and expenses-claimers who do nothing else. Starmer can clean up peerage-appointments and bar large donors – he has already renounced his future resignation honours.
Yes, that’s only a stopgap, but quick radical reform will be a down-payment and a signifier of Labour’s character and intent, blasting fresh air through the corrupted corridors of Westminster. After the array of disgraced MPs and ministers, only 30% of voters now believe the authorities will take appropriate action on their rule-breaking. Starmer may have boasted yesterday: “I’ve put expense cheat politicians in jail before and I didn’t care if they were Labour or Tory … Nobody will be above the law in a Britain I lead.” But he wisely avoided Sunak’s risky moral claim to “integrity”: no party is ever without sin.
There is more for the Labour party to do at once. Seize this moment of maximum public disgust to cleanse money from politics: end large donations and fund politics honestly from the public purse. The Electoral Commission’s records show just 24% of the public believe party funding is transparent. Everyone sees those paid-for peerages and preferments, those seats on quangos and departmental boards, with cronies rewarded for cash – and their faith in politics ebbs.
Next, Starmer needs to repair all the Tory gerrymanders and restore fair alternative voting for mayors and police and crime commissioners. He should restore the electoral register after the Tories deliberately shut out those unlikely to vote for them by demanding ID and stopping young people being registered by family through household registration or at college. With a record 8 million people not correctly registered to vote, make registration automatic with every contact with the state, utility company and landlord, as in many countries. Virtually all over-65s are registered, but only 67% of voters aged between 20 and 24, who are constantly on the move.
Match Scotland and Wales – give 16-year-olds the vote – and make it compulsory for their first vote so they get into the habit. Register them in families and colleges, as they were until David Cameron stopped it. That sends every political candidate into every school and college obliged to offer as much to the young as to the triple-locked pensioners.
All this sets the mood music for a fresh government. Ahead lie the far harder dilemmas of tax-and-spend for public services and the green prosperity plan. But there is no need to fear tax-and-spend jibes by the incompetents and ideologues who, as Starmer said, drove the country “into the rocks of decline”. Instead, Labour should take heart from those 90 economists surveyed in the FT, with many stating that “higher public investment would be the key to lift the UK’s long-term economic growth rate”.
Starmer is right to use the new year to ring in a great cleansing of politics from day one – not so much with a new broom as a huge shovel – as a way to signal to a weary and distrusting nation that there is a better politics ahead. Government is hard, but these things are free and fast to do.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
