Starmer’s message is more of the same, when we need radical reform

Like everybody else in the world, I believe that the Conservatives will lose the next general election. The salient questions then become: by how much?, to whom?, and, what happens next? On the first point, I do not think they will lose by a landslide, whatever the polls are saying now or even what they are likely to be saying closer to the time. Given the press coverage that the Tories are getting, you would have to be a phenomenally strong-willed respondent to tell an opinion pollster that you supported them. But even assuming that a good deal of the public disgust and ridicule is quite genuine, it is hard to imagine how the Starmer Labour alternative could excite much enthusiasm, since it seems to offer only a change of faces not of policies. And the faces are pretty uninspiring. The country may put them in government out of sheer desperation – or revenge – but not with any sense of a new beginning or a fresh approach to the country’s problems.

So there might be a Labour working majority but not one that will license radical reform – of, for example, the NHS or the benefits system – which is the only possible way that a Starmer government could make a truly historic difference to the future. You may recall that even the Blair landslide of 1997, which had promised welfare reform, failed to accomplish it. Frank Field, who had been assigned the task of ending the epidemic of benefit dependency, was sacked and it all came to nothing. The most dramatic change to the system came much later in 2012 with Iain Duncan Smith’s Welfare Reform Act, which was designed to incentivise work.

(The truth is that reducing benefit entitlement once it has become an entrenched expectation is diabolically difficult. Thus far, no advanced society has succeeded in doing it on any significant scale.)

For the life of me I cannot see anything in the Labour prospectus that suggests an alternative programme of systematic improvement or change to the predictions of inevitable decline. If anything, Sir Keir seems to spend most of his time telling us that he is not radical at all – not a woke merchant, not a social engineer, certainly not a neo-Marxist Corbynite. In his own words, he is really scarcely any different from a sound one-nation Conservative: patriotic, a supporter of the Union and of the sacred principle of national sovereignty that inspired Brexit. What he is offering in effect is competent Conservatism.

Those who (rightly) criticise the Tory leadership for adopting democratic socialism should also note how much Labour has adopted the fundamentals of conservativism. But the question for disillusioned Tory voters must be: if you are furious with the Conservatives (whom you normally like) because they are too much like Labour (whom you normally loathe), why would you vote Labour? How can that make sense? So a Labour win will be more a sigh of national despair than a paroxysm of celebration. But what if it isn’t much of a win at all? Again, in his campaign to reassure the electorate, Sir Keir has repeatedly said that he will not enter any coalition with the Scottish Nationalists. Since the price of such a coalition would almost certainly involve the promise of another independence referendum, he probably means it. But parliamentary agreements can stop short of formal coalition. A deal with the SNP (and possibly, God help us, with the Liberal Democrats as well) would create an incoherent mess at Westminster at just the point when economic recovery required clear, consistent judgement. If you think the country is fed up now, just wait until it is faced with a hedging, backroom-dealing, indecisive “cooperation agreement” that renders Westminster hopelessly ineffectual.

On the other side of this electoral equation, the Tories are likely to be coping with a revived Brexit movement. Nigel Farage is suggesting that he might return to the front line with a resurgent Reform party dedicated to challenging what can be depicted as either a Remainer coup or just backsliding on the Tory benches. If the UK’s trade position (and its net migration numbers) continue on their present trajectory then Nigel’s New Model Army could be persuasive enough to damage Conservative results, thereby giving Starmer a better result than he deserves. But then again, it could actually deprive Labour of votes in those volatile Red Wall seats, which it must regain if its credibility is to be restored.

Alternatively, maybe such a manifest danger will push the Tory leadership into a firmer commitment to Brexit goals – as indeed, it seems to have done over the “Swiss model” farrago. Who knows? Everybody is being so evasive and ambivalent that it is impossible to make any proper analysis of the party’s respective positions. You have a choice between two lots of people who are both pretending to be each other.

There is, of course, just a possibility that – contrary to every fashionable prognostication – Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt will produce something like a decent recovery. Or at least a not-so-terrible outcome. Mortgage rates may not go through the roof. Energy and food prices might be managed in a way that proves tolerable. Russia’s imperialist horror show could result in the West finding alternative sources of energy, thus undermining Putin’s economy and his threat to the world order. This story may not be as far-fetched as it seems at the moment. In my experience, the nightmare fate that is widely predicted almost never happens. Either because it has been over-hyped or because it is foreseen and thus prevented. It is the catastrophe that nobody sees coming (like the crash of 2008) that really comes closest to ending the world.

So what would happen then? What could Labour possibly say? That they were right all along because what succeeded is what they would have done? How persuasive would that be? Whatever the result, the next election will not be the end of the political argument – or of the Tories.

Britain’s problems are severe and need innovative solutions. Labour’s failure to offer them means the Tories won’t be wiped out at the election

On his own works, Sir Keir is really scarcely any different from a sound one-nation Conservative