Keir Starmer is showing leadership on vaccine passports by going against public opinion

The Labour leader looks as if he has got off the fence to oppose an unworkable scheme, writes John Rentoul

The Labour leader visiting Sheffield yesterday (Getty Images)

One of the laws of politics is that it is no use saying, “It’s more complicated than that.” Just as it is one of the laws of journalism that “the headline is the story”. So it is no use Keir Starmer complaining about The Daily Telegraph’s front page lead story this morning, headlined, “Starmer: Vaccine passports un-British.”

That is not quite what he said. What he actually said was that it was complicated – “I think this is really difficult and I’m not going to pretend there’s a clear black-and-white, yes-no easy answer on this” – but that if “we get the virus properly under control, the death rates are near zero, hospital admissions very, very low, that the British instinct in those circumstances will be against vaccine passports”.

So, yes, the headline was a fair four-word summary of what he said, without all the conditions attached. Therefore, it is fair to respond to The Telegraph’s reporting of its interview by suggesting that the leader of the opposition is actually opposing the government – even if a detailed textual analysis suggests that he has not quite shaken off his reputation for sitting on the fence.

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I doubt if Starmer will be upset to have anti-lockdown Telegraph readers exclaim, “At last, some real opposition,” but what is striking about the position he has adopted is that it is opposed not just to what the government is edging towards, but to public opinion as well.

Opinion polls suggest that voters are in favour of vaccine passports, with 62 per cent saying they support them for being able to visit pubs or restaurants (only 22 per cent are against, with the rest saying they don’t know). Any politician has to respect public opinion, but the test of a good politician is that they know when to lead it.

I think Starmer has got this right. Not just because I agree with him – I have argued that domestic passports are pointless and unworkable – but because I think he has read public opinion correctly. Some people support passports because they are fearful of the virus and back all manner of restrictions designed to prevent its resurgence, but others support them because they think they are a route to opening up society more quickly.

So, I think that if the number of coronavirus cases is low, people will decide that passports would be hard to enforce and would serve little purpose even if that were feasible. Indeed, I suspect that the government will come to the same conclusion once it tries to design a scheme. In that sense, Starmer is not really opposing the government at all – he is merely getting ahead of where the government will soon be, which is half the art of skilful opposition.

There is only a short period during which domestic passports make even theoretical sense: while a large fraction of the population is still unvaccinated and infection levels are above negligible. By June, all adults should have been offered a vaccine, and even if take-up is lower among young people, it should be high enough to drive infection rates right down.

Of course, there are objections in principle to the use of identity checks, which is why Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, finds himself giving interviews opposing vaccine passports on the same day as Starmer. Unfortunately for him, few voters care about the civil liberties implications of the policy. This is a country where the government, without really realising what it was doing, managed to criminalise protest for long periods of lockdown – and hardly anyone noticed or cared.

Davey’s timing is doubly unfortunate. He and his party have only just started to oppose the government. Last week, Lib Dem MPs voted against extending coronavirus restrictions – just at the moment when the government amended the law specifically to allow protest as one of the reasons for a public gathering.

And now, on the day when Davey opposes vaccine passports unequivocally and on principle, Starmer will get all the attention for his careful and pragmatic opposition to an unworkable idea.