What we learnt from Keir Starmer’s speech about Labour’s 2019 election disaster

Four years on from the Corbyn humiliation, is Labour’s overhaul really ‘more than just a paint job’? Sean O’Grady examines the leader’s claims

Keir Starmer delivering his speech in Milton Keynes on Tuesday (AFP/Getty)

It is a measure of Keir Starmer’s confidence, misplaced or otherwise, that he chose to mark the fourth anniversary of one of the worst electoral drubbings his party has ever received with a speech. Labour has travelled some distance since the general election of 12 December 2019, after which many had written the party off for a decade; this is something in which he can take some pride. It now seems an eternity ago but at the time it seemed as if the Tories would remain in the ascendancy for the 2020s.

Their campaign had been masterminded by Dominic Cummings, and Boris Johnson promised to “get Brexit done”, “level up” and “unleash Britain’s potential”. The results were dramatic. The Conservatives scored their highest Commons majority since 1987; the best vote share since 1979; conquered safe red-wall Labour seats; and managed to win more support among the unemployed, state pensioners and semi-skilled and unskilled workers than Jeremy Corbyn’s party. Suddenly, the Tories were the party of the working class. By contrast, Labour went down to its lowest parliamentary showing since 1935. A lot has happened since then, as Starmer has been delighted to point out in his speech…

What does Starmer think went wrong four years ago?

He didn’t spend much time on psephology but, if he had, he’d have pointed out that Johnson’s party capitalised on winning almost all of the 2016 Leave vote plus a slice of voters who were suffering from Brexit fatigue and wanted the issue settled. By contrast, Remainers were split between two parties in England and three parties everywhere else: Labour and the Liberal Democrats, plus the SNP and Plaid Cymru.

However, there’s no denying Labour’s lack of appeal under Corbyn, and that’s what Starmer blames. There’s some truth in it; despite a pretty strong showing at the previous general election in 2017, when the Tories under Theresa May ran a disastrous campaign, Corbyn was a poor candidate for prime minister. Starmer puts it in almost cultural terms: “Working people up and down our country looked at my party, looked at how we’d lost our way, not just under Jeremy Corbyn, but for a while, and they said: ‘No. Not this time. You don’t listen to us any more. You’re not in our corner. You don’t fight for our cause’ … We’d taken a leave of absence from our job description. Reneged on an old partnership, the Labour bargain that we serve working people, as they drive our country forward.” Note there, by the way, the reference to “for a while”, implicating Ed Miliband’s leadership for the lost election of 2015.

Is Starmer’s criticism fair?

Not entirely, given that Starmer was a mostly loyal member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, was much more enthusiastic than his leader about the EU and a people’s vote on the terms of Brexit and, as Rishi Sunak often points out, campaigned to make Corbyn prime minister.

What does Starmer think he’s done right?

This is a bit unspecific: “Everything I’ve done as leader, every fight I’ve had, has been to reconnect us to that purpose. To make sure we never put working people in that position again. That we say to them: you can choose Labour and know that we see our country through your eyes. Know that we have changed fundamentally.”

Has Labour changed fundamentally?

In some ways. The fact that Corbyn has lost the Labour whip and won’t be permitted to fight the next election as an official Labour candidate speaks volumes. A once-feted party leader hasn’t been treated like this since Ramsay MacDonald betrayed the Labour movement in 1931. The policies are mostly radically different and, disappointingly for many, the party has accepted Brexit and pursued a studiously cautious path on the Israel-Hamas conflict. Much of the old extremism and antisemitism has been banished but no party’s grassroots can change that much in a few short years. Many still pine for socialism and would happily have Corbyn back. Stamer’s claim that his changed party is “not just a paint job, a total overhaul, a different Labour Party, driven by your values, relentless in earning your vote” is a little overstated.

What about his mum and dad?

The best-known political parentage since Margaret Thatcher’s grocer father broke onto the scene made yet another shameless but weary appearance: “I grew up working class, my dad was a toolmaker, my mum was a nurse, and this was in the 1970s when – like now – we had our fair share of cost of living crises. I know what this feels like. I know all about the ‘what next’ anxiety of rising prices.” It is worth pointing out at this stage in Starmer’s career that virtue isn’t hereditary, his dad isn’t the modern-day equivalent of St Joseph, and he can please give it a rest now.

Anything new?

No, and at least one passage was almost comically recycled from his previous speeches. Thus he told his audience in Buckinghamshire: “People who never before missed a payment in their life working harder than ever for the wage in their pocket, who now dread the thought of Christmas shopping, picking up little presents for the stocking before quietly putting them back…” He told his party conference in Manchester last October: “That’s what this cost of living crisis does. It intrudes on the little things we love. Whittles away at our joy. Days out, meals out, holidays – the first things people cut back on. Picking up a treat in the supermarket just to put it back on the shelf.” Politicians always use familiar slogans and old material, but it makes them sound a little less authentic when the folksy, anecdotal stuff gets repurposed.

When do we find out what Labour would actually do?

Not before the manifesto is punished; and perhaps not even then. Contrary to Tory claims, Labour has outlined plans for the public finances, green investment, migration and the NHS; but, as in war, no plan survives its first brush with reality unscathed. What Labour doesn’t say as often as it ought to is that there isn’t going to be much public money. That’s why Starmer was wise to make a virtue out of saying that he’ll focus on delivering basic services better and being decidedly downbeat and prosaic about it: “It’s not about wave machines, or armoured jetskis, or schemes like Rwanda you know will never work. It’s about doing the basics better. The mundane stuff. The bureaucratic stuff. Busting the backlogs. Rebuilding a functioning asylum system. Removing people more quickly so you don’t have to run up hotel bills. And a cross-border police force that can smash the smuggler gangs at source.”

What will Labour achieve?

Starmer was careful to manage expectations: “I have to be honest about the size of the hole we are in.” If the 2019 election was won by Johnson and the Tories on a wave of boosterism, then the next one will be won by Starmer and Labour on grim realism. In Starmer’s words: “A hope that levels with you about the hard road ahead, but that offers you an open hand and a clear destination.” No wonder Starmer says he wants two terms and a “decade of renewal” – he knows he won’t have much to show for his first term in office. If nothing else, it’s a long-term view.