How Keir Starmer rescued Labour from Jeremy Corbyn’s political fantasies – Brian Wilson

General elections are always more about closing down negatives than revealing positives. The time for the latter is past. Great initiatives pulled from hats in the course of a campaign are more likely to turn into hostages to fortune.

By and large, the public’s mind is made up unless compelled to change it. As far as the Tories are concerned, it was made up long ago – somewhere between the Downing Street parties and Liz Truss. Not only are they arrogant and prone to corruption but also terminally incompetent, for which many people have paid high personal prices.

Having taken hold, these impressions were not going to fade away. The magician’s act of getting inflation and the economy back to where they were before the show began was never likely to impress. And Rishi Sunak is no magician.

Jeremy Corbyn proved popular at the Glastonbury festival in 2017 but less so at the ballot box (Picture: Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

The Tories who believe escape is possible hark back to 1992, even if they weren’t born then. In fact, the circumstances were very different. The Tories had already performed their magicians’ trick by defenestrating Margaret Thatcher and scrapping the poll tax. There had been, in many eyes, a “change of government”.

The Truss effect

That one doesn’t work this time because there have been four Tory Prime Ministers in a decade with no novelty at all in the current one’s emergence from the pack. For change, read chaos. If the Tories had gone straight from Johnson to Sunak, they might have got away with it – but not via Truss.

Events of the past week have reinforced all previous perceptions – chaos, incompetence, rats deserting the sinking ship. The latest YouGov poll puts Labour 25 points ahead whereas in 1992, the margins were always tight and pointed to either a narrow Labour majority or a hung parliament.

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That takes me to the other critical factor – the trustworthiness of opponents who aspire to taking over. In this respect, the background was similar. Labour had made itself unelectable in 1983 with a manifesto described as “the longest suicide note in history”. It was the age of Bennite madness which Neil Kinnock inherited.

Kinnock is rightly recognised as the man who rescued Labour from obscurity. He faced down Trotskyite entryism, took the party back into the mainstream (with a huge contribution from Scotland) and brought it to the verge of electability. In the end, he could not quite get it across the line.

The main reason was one of time. Labour had changed but not enough to make itself immune from old ghosts and Tory lies. John Smith produced a Shadow Budget which was honest about the need for the best-off to pay more tax. The Tories pounced with a mendacious efficiency their successors must envy.

David Ward, who was Smith’s adviser, wrote: “In fact under Smith’s package, eight out of ten taxpayers would have been better off. In the end the Shadow Budget failed, not because of its actual commitments, but because it proved impossible to defuse the Tory’s ‘Tax Bombshell’ lies that had been seeded more than a year before the 1992 election.”

Starmer’s key message

Lessons to be learned from 1992 are contained in that sentence which has influenced any sensible Labour politician ever since. Every demand for Labour to make spending commitments or to promise any tax increase will have only one practical outcome, which is to hand the Tories and their media attack-dogs the red meat they covet. By 1997, Tony Blair was the beneficiary of the work that had gone before with a relatively small mountain left to climb.

It was a very different task that Keir Starmer inherited just five years ago. Once again, Labour had wandered into the foothills of political fantasia to achieve its worst result since 1935, led by unreconstructed relics of the 1980s.

Whatever the sins of the Tories, Labour could not be in its current position without the discipline Starmer has brought to it since then with the unrelenting message that “Labour has changed”. From now to polling day, Labour’s sole vulnerability would lie in any compromise on that assurance to voters.

When I hear about “attacks on the left”, it takes me back to the vocabulary of times past. The genuine Labour ‘left’ understands it can do nothing to advance the cause of working people and their families without being in office. There is also a soi-disant ‘Left’ which basks in the virtue of permanent opposition. The distinction will always be crucial.

Scotland is different, we are told, but only within limits. Particularly since 2014, the fault line has been around the constitution which has guaranteed the SNP electoral success despite referendum defeat. In 2019, Scottish voters essentially had the choice between two opposition parties, since Corbyn’s Labour obviously wasn’t going to win.

Arrogance and entitlement

Hardly anyone now bothers to pretend that this general election in Scotland will be about the constitution. In most constituencies, anyone who prioritises removing the Tories from government will vote Labour to do so. Anyone who wants Scotland to have a major stake in a potential Labour government will vote Labour to achieve that. These are very different choices from 2019.

Like the Tories, the SNP have been around for too long, whether in Edinburgh or in their Westminster manifestation where they achieve the square root of hee-haw. To be fair, that is the fate of all permanent oppositions. One problem with being around too long is that it fosters arrogance and entitlement, which is certainly now true of Swinney and his friends.

Just to remind us of that, we have been offered Mairi McAllan’s presumption that the conduct of Michael Matheson is a “Holyrood bubble” matter that “hasn’t cut through” with the Scottish public. So that’s all right then? Maybe on July 4, her own education on life outside the Holyrood bubble will start to be improved upon.