We Need to Talk About Keir

Lets face it, the role of Leader of the Opposition is a terrible job. You are powerless to affect any real change, you are constantly sniped at by the different factions in your own party, your ideas and proposed policies are derided and poo-pooed by the government (unless they are stolen in which case you get no credit), or simply ignored, any government success is treated as your personal failure and every government failure is never credited to your success. Why the hell would anyone want to do it?

As it happens, for all but 13 years of my entire adult life (I am now 60), the Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party has been the same person. Let me be clear here. I am and, I suspect always will be, tribally loyal to the Labour party. I have in my life always voted Labour, in the full expectation that the leader of the party would be walking into Downing Street the next morning, and for the most part that proved to be the supreme victory of hope over experience. In these circumstances, in the early hours of the morning after, countless experts, including every Labour voter, continuously focus on the flaws and failures of the particular leader. These are usually articulated in terms of two main character faults. Firstly, that people don’t know the real person behind the political front. Because this is such a pointless and valueless way of deciding who should run the country, you get the weird sight of serious commentators discussing, using random vox pops for emphasis, the sartorial and visual. Such things as whether Neil Kinnock is a windbag, why Michael Foot looks a bit like a Trot in his donkey jacket, how voters could trust Gordon Brown when he won’t emotionally break down on live telly, what to make of Ed Miliband’s inability to eat a Bacon Sandwich elegantly. Of course in recent times Tories seem to have no compunction about providing some (almost always confected) insight into the “real person” behind the heinous politician, whether its Thatchers constant harking back to her ordinary Grocers Daughter upbringing, Majors incredulous wonderment at his old Brixton House still being intact and upright, Camerons parading of his children constantly as political props, and who can forget Alexander B DeP’s almost surrealist story about how, to relax after a hard days doing whatever it was he thinks he was doing, he paints model buses out of old wine crates. Needless to say, none of these insights into “the real person” actually provides any real sense of what that person would do when in power. But the media lap it up and contrast it with the almost always staid and private personalities of Labour Leaders (Gordon Brown unwilling to parade his family for the cheap publicity, Ed Miliband unwilling to allow his relationship to his brother be discussed as a political talking point). Tony Blair as always remains the exception to this rule but more about him in another blog.

The second of these character flaws is that the person has not articulated a sellable “vision” for the country. This is another one of those things that is almost impossible to define, only identifiable by its absence. It is also usually discussed after the event, as an explanation as to why they lost. I mean what the hell was David Camerons vision for the country, or Alexander B DeP’s? Even Tony Blair or Margaret Thatchers vision would have been impossible to articulate at the time, and in a sense looking back at their legacy, and calling that a Vision, was as much driven by circumstances (the Falklands War and the Miners Strike for Thatcher; the Iraq War for Blair) than any real long term strategic objectives.

So what can be done? Recently it has become obvious that telling bare faced lies to get elected or even just to get out of a sticky situation, seems to draw no real consequence, at least for the current Tory party. Even when the lies become so obvious that even the broadcast media find it hard not to at least address them, it is not the lies themselves that are discussed, but whether people should actually care about being lied to. This results in serious journalists pointing out that the popularity of the politicians that lie (BJ in particular) is proof that the lies (yes, the same that have lead to that popularity in the first place) are not worthy of discussion. It is truly this Looking Glass view of the world that is so depressing. So should Labour politicians especially the leader adopt the lying approach themselves? Well, apart from the obvious fact that Lying is a just a BAD THING to do, what we have also learned in the recent past (actually its more of a confirmation of something most of us has always known) is that no matter what Tory governments fuck up (from unnecessary austerity, the botched reorganisation of the health service, Brexit, the pandemic response etc etc), any criticism from Labour is challenged with a demand to state in explicit detail exactly what they would do, how they would pay for it and who they would get to implement any changes now and for ever more. Heaven help them if they even try to say simply that they wouldn’t have started from here so why should they explain how they would rescue the Tories from their own mess. Look what happens when Labour leaders even try a bit of dissembling rather than outright lies. When broadcasting heavyweights such as Philip Schofield (who is not Jewish) demand apologies from Jeremy Corbyn on behalf of all Jews, and then unselfconsciously poses for selfies with lovable Boris Johnson, like a giggly schoolboy meeting one of his heroes (Johnson being a man whose unblemished past utterings and actions require no challenge and certainly no apology) you know that the expectation of a Labour Leader is ridiculously high compared to any Tory Leader. I suspect that an attempt at outright lies would backfire very rapidly on any Labour politician.

What we do know is that the Tories have become very adept at wrapping their lies up in bland sounding, sort of optimistic and fairly meaningless catchphrases that they can then add the word “agenda” and justify any number of appalling and viscous policies. “Take Back Control” for example, allows Priti (awful) Patel to say that tough immigration policies are all part of the “Take Back Control Agenda”! “Get Brexit Done” allows untrustworthy Liz Truss to claim any pathetically insignificant trade deal selling our farmers, fishermen or other industries up the river, as key elements of the Getting Brexit Done agenda! Of course the blandness and inexactitude of these phrases also allows the PM, Alexander B. DeP. Johnson, leeway, if these policies prove unpopular, to blame the cabinet ministers themselves for misunderstanding his “vision”.

I’m not suggesting that Labour wrap themselves in a series of meaningless catchphrases that have no basis in real world policy, but I would suggest that the simplicity of these statements are worth following. At the 2019 election, Labour proposed a plethora of policies, most of which were individually quite popular, but taken together they just seemed an incoherent mess of ideas that would be impossible to implement. What they should have down, and should still do, is simplify these policies into clear themes. These should be articulated as not only simple ideas, but essential to recover from 15 years of heinous and incompetent Tory government. I suggest these:

• Rebuilding Britain - After 15 years of disastrous government Britain is in a parlous place requiring a complete rebuilding activity akin to what happened after the second world war. Here all the policies associated with infrastructure (including nationalising the train companies) as well as the disastrous results of government ineptitude over devolution, both from a UK perspective as well as the English regional persepctive. Labour needs to develop a series of policies around finding a home for non-Nationalist voters in Scotland, Wales and NI that are an alternative to the English Nationalism of the Tories. Within this theme you should also include the rebuilding of all aspects of the national health of the country. By this I mean such things as the education system, which for the past 15 years has been restructured significantly to favour the private sector, similarly the Health Service, the police service, general social services etc. I don’t know how we ever allow as a matter of seemingly little consequence instead of national shame, the existence of Food Banks to provide for predominantly in work poor!

• Tackling the Climate Crisis. This involves treating the climate crisis as a crisis, demanding urgent and specific actions. Alexander B. DeP. has attempted to acquire some level of cachet around the environment by stating some simplistic targets with no real policies to support theses aims. He then, as ever in his ludicrously lazy and inept way, assumes that that is job done, climate crisis dealt with. What it actually means, given the targets are things like all Cars being EV’s by 2030 and all gas boilers in peoples houses being replaced with something else by 2025, is that activities to meet these targets are being driven purely by the market, meaning that where they can be met, only the upper middle class will be able to afford them. Have you seem the price of an EV these days, and how on Earth would someone living in a council estate, or in the private rented sector, be able to sort out ground source, air source, biomass heating in their homes? It will be complicated enough for those people who have the resources, time and interest to do this. Also, leaving the installation of EV charging points to the private sector or to local authorities, which seems to be the plan now, will create a real postcode lottery and make the ownership of EV’s next to impractical in large swathes of the country. If we take Climate change seriously, then we have to provide central government investment in facilitating the changes required. This means investing in technology to provide for this non-carbon future, as well as the infrastructure to manage it (eg. EV charging points in every electricity bearing item on every street). This will mean making the switch to a non carbon economy becomes one of the key drivers of any Labour Government. It also means that the nationalisation of the energy companies would almost certainly be required.

• A fair economy. Supporting the other themes. Actually the real difference (or at least it should be) between the two main parties in this country is that Labour should always view economic policy as a supporting mechanism that enables everything else, whereas the Tories always view economic policy as the reason to be in power, and any thing else needs to be subservient to the economy. If, in order to pay for the recovery from 15 years of treacherous anti-societal bollocks the tories have inflicted on us, we need more money then we should be unafraid to raise tax. This should be a no-brainer for anyone earning more than say 250k a year, but if it requires the current top rate tax payers to pay a penny in the pound more in tax then we should state it loud and be proud that we are all contributing.