‘Blue Labour’ Boris Johnson has Keir Starmer trapped

The prime minister has the initiative: in power, he can do things which leave the Labour leader explaining and losing, writes John Rentoul

Boris Johnson, the social-care prime minister (Reuters)

Allister Heath, a columnist in The Daily Telegraph, condemns Boris Johnson: “This government is no longer Thatcherite, or even conservative: it is Blue Labour.” He is absolutely right.

He is furious about it, but the prime minister must be delighted. Blue Labour was a term coined for the kind of socially conservative, working-class politics that Maurice Glasman, briefly Ed Miliband’s guru, urged Labour to adopt. Blue as in Tory and as in blue collar: clever, eh?

Well, Miliband didn’t think so, choosing to take the Labour Party in the opposite direction, towards a socially liberal, middle-class socialism – a journey accelerated by Jeremy Corbyn.

Which left a huge space in politics where New Labour used to be, and Johnson has occupied that territory with all the guile and ideological flexibility that his opponents so often misjudge.

One New Labour era minister this week compared his sixth sense of politics to that of Tony Blair: just as Blair realised that there was a gap in the market left by Margaret Thatcher, and that this was a historic opportunity for him, so Johnson sees the hole left by Blair and he has filled it.

Where others have been confused by the cross-currents of Brexit, Johnson has kept his focus on the centre ground. By definition in a country that voted by 52 per cent to leave the EU, the centre ground is a bit Brexity, but not overwhelmingly so. (Blue Labour was always a bit Brexity, but not overwhelmingly so.) What the centre ground is, as in Blair’s time, is worried about schools and hospitals first.

Hence the strategic trap into which Johnson has led Keir Starmer. He announced a tax rise to pay for the NHS, just as Blair did in 2002, and just as Starmer would have done if he had been designing a Labour manifesto for an election this year. Starmer and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, agree with spending more on the NHS, but disagree with the way the government is raising the money.

Unfortunately for them, they won’t say how they would raise the money instead, because the main alternative that would be (slightly) more related to ability to pay would be an equivalent rise in income tax. “Income tax rise” is still, 31 years after the end of Thatcher’s government, the electric fence of politics. All Starmer and Reeves could do, therefore, was to hint weakly at taxing property more.

They are quite right. The undertaxing of more expensive homes, and of second homes, is a scandal in this country, but putting that right wouldn’t by itself produce enough revenue to save the NHS.

I thought Starmer and Reeves made the best of a defensive position in the Commons on Wednesday. Reeves in particular has a swashbuckling confidence at the despatch box, challenging Jesse Norman, the junior Treasury minister, to answer her question about how people could meet care costs without selling their homes. He rose to the bait, giving a clever answer to a slightly different question; she threw it back at him; he tried to respond again, and she refused to give way: “The minister has had a chance and he did not manage it.”

But Labour is on the defensive. It agrees with the government; it merely quibbles with the detail. It is important detail, but once you are explaining you are losing. Johnson has the initiative: in power, he can do things, and if he does Blue Labour things, it leaves Starmer explaining and losing.

That means that Allister Heath is eloquently enraged. “Shame on Boris Johnson, and shame on the Conservative Party. They have disgraced themselves, lied to their voters, repudiated their principles and treated millions of their supporters with utter contempt.” But while he rants into the void of where Johnson’s very similar columns once used to be, and while Esther McVey, Philip Davies, John Redwood, Christopher Chope and Neil Hudson (new Tory MP for Penrith, replacing Rory Stewart – now, there’s a parable) vote against their government, Johnson has those Blue Labour voters under lock and key and he’s not going to let them go.