Keir Starmer has walked into a trap in Labour’s campaign for the May elections

‘A vote for Labour is a vote to support our nurses,’ claimed the Labour leader. John Rentoul explains how this could go wrong

‘A vote for Labour is a vote to support our nurses’ – Keir Starmer at the launch of Labour’s May elections campaign (PA)

The message of Keir Starmer’s launch of Labour’s campaign for elections in England, Scotland and Wales on 6 May is: “A vote for Labour is a vote to support our nurses.” It is a direct and emotional appeal to people’s values on the one subject where Labour has the strongest connection with the electorate.

So, Starmer could say that it doesn’t matter that English local government and police and crime commissioners have nothing to do with setting nurses’ pay. The Scottish and Welsh parliaments do, and Labour is looking for a broad message to convey the kind of things it stands for across the UK.

But there is another, more serious problem. It is almost as if Boris Johnson, knowing that the Conservatives are always going to be on the defensive on the question of who loves the NHS more, has set a trap. He has painted “Stand Here” on a trapdoor; and now that Starmer has followed the instruction, the prime minister is ready to pull the lever that opens the door.

Starmer has attacked the government for proposing a mere 1 per cent pay rise for nurses, which, by the time they get it, would amount to a pay cut in real terms, because inflation is expected to be higher than that.

After his speech today to launch Labour’s election campaign, Starmer was asked how much the nurses should get instead. He ignored the part of the question that asked if he agreed with the demand by the Royal College of Nursing, the nurses’ trade union, for a 12 per cent pay rise; and said that he thought the 2.1 per cent that was promised in the NHS Funding Act last year should be the “starting point”.

So all Johnson has to do, when the NHS Pay Review Body produces its report, expected “by May”, is to decide that the nurses should get 2.1 per cent after all. Then, if the voters want to “support our nurses”, they will be free to decide to vote Conservative if they think they are more likely to get their bins emptied that way (or, in Scotland or Wales, if they think the SNP-Green or Labour-Lib Dem coalitions have done a bad job).

That said, it is hard to see what else Labour could do, if it wants a unifying theme to energise its activists and to try to gain the voters’ attention in the early stages of the campaign. The elections are so different in different parts of the country that the theme can do no more than advertise the party’s high-level brand identity.

Even if Johnson does operate the nurses’ pay trapdoor late in the campaign, Starmer is getting floating voters nodding along with him now – and it is the only subject on which Labour is making any kind of headway against the Tories while the vaccines continue to be such a success.

It is no wonder that Starmer devoted so much of his speech and his answers to journalists today to playing down expectations of how well Labour will do. With the Tories opening up an average eight-point lead in national opinion polls, the results are likely to be mixed at best. If a Scottish National Party landslide can be held back in Scotland – if Mark Drakeford remains first minister in Wales, and if Liam Byrne can win the West Midlands mayoralty from Andy Street – then Labour will be able to claim that they are making progress “under new management”.

But these elections are unlikely to suggest that Starmer is on his way to 10 Downing Street in three years’ time. When that time comes, Labour will have to offer more than a pay rise for nurses that can easily be matched by a pragmatic, high-spending Conservative Party.