Since Sir Keir Starmer was elected leader of the Labour Party, he has dedicated himself to the task of persuading the public that the party has something worth saying to which people needed to pay attention. This will not ensure that Labour will win the next election, but it does ensure that people will take the party seriously as a party of opposition.
At the last election, most people had no idea what the Labour Party intended to do in government, or the contents of its manifesto. This is because people knew and understood two things about Labour. One was that the party could not make up its mind about Brexit ; the other was, that the party appeared to have a problem with antisemitism, and seemed incapable of dealing with it. (Labour is not looking forward to a report on this issue by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission). Of course, an extremely partisan press magnified these problems, but that bias is no news to Labour, and cannot be used as an alibi for the party's own failures. The public may also have been rather hazy about the Conservative Party's ultimate intentions, but thought it knew one thing about them: they seemed determined, at whatever cost, to accomplish our exit from the European Union. That was enough to inflict on this country the catastrophe of a government manifestly unfit to govern. Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party cannot escape its responsibility for that outcome.
Since Starmer became leader, he has sought to make these two problems of marginal significance. First, he has concentrated on the woeful deficiencies of the government's response to coronavirus. Second, he has sought to minimise the importance of Brexit by not discussing it, and therefore making it the Conservatives' problem, and their problem alone, which they have to own. Third, he has taken action on antisemitism. That means taking action against those who blame Israel for problems which are not Israel's responsibility, such as racism and police brutality in the United States. I am not asserting that Starmer is a master political strategist, only that he is doing the minimum necessary for the Labour Party to be taken seriously and to be heard. It does not guarantee anything, except that a number of Labour Party members will disagree with his decision. On the other hand, a great number of uncommitted people may start listening to Labour again.
None of this means, of course, that Labour will be elected in four years' time. People still hold Labour to higher standards than the Conservative Party. Imagine the public outcry if Labour had been elected in 2019, and then had clearly been responsible for thousands of preventable deaths in a public health catastrophe. The Conservative Party's obsequious ciphers in the press would have been convulsed by paroxysms of rage. Public opinion, reinforced by a Conservative press with an attitude to truth and integrity reminiscent of Pravda, is willing to tolerate a Conservative government inflicting disasters on the country because it does not expect much from them.
The Labour share of the vote in the constituencies which Labour lost in the Midlands, the North and Wales has been declining for years, and started under Blair's leadership. (Labour's position in Scotland is even more intractable). The erosion of the institutions which were part of the network which nurtured the Labour Party (trade unions, the co-operative movement, Methodism) have also been in long-term decline. Corbyn was not to blame for any of that ; he may merely have accelerated a process of disenchantment with Labour that was already well under way. I will look at these problems in a future blogpost.
I expect that quite a number of readers of this blogpost will object to its perspective, and suggest that Starmer's recent decision to sack Rebecca Long-Bailey is a clear move against the Left in the Party. I doubt it, for two reasons. One is that the statement which Long-Bailey endorsed was indefensible, had no basis in fact, and has been disowned by its originator, the actor Maxine Peake. Senior politicians have a responsibility not to endorse inflammatory statements, which Long-Bailey did not discharge. (This does not affect Labour's firm opposition to Israel's ongoing illegal annexation of the West Bank, which has recently been emphasised by Lisa Nandy). Starmer had to show that Labour holds itself to a higher standard than the Conservative Party. Second, there is no suggestion that Labour intends to abandon its radical economic policies, as outlined in the 2019 manifesto. Indeed, as the world faces an extremely severe economic crisis, these policies are more relevant than ever.