Keir Starmer needs a Clause IV moment with a twist

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The writer is a political strategist and former adviser to Tony Blair and Julia Gillard

The UK Labour party has had a commanding lead over the Conservatives for the past 20 months. Yet there is consensus between its leadership, its membership and political commentators that the party and its leader, Keir Starmer, have not yet “sealed the deal” with the voters.

There is some truth in the claim that Starmer needs to unveil his “retail offer” at the party conference in October. Pledges in the key areas of health, education, crime and living standards would go a long way to providing some crunch and specificity to Labour campaigning.

But Starmer needs to go further. In the American phrase, he needs to “reach across the aisle” as he develops his policies. I don’t mean he should be engaging with centrist Conservatives — they need to retain energy and ideas for the bitter rows that will rack their party after an election defeat.

Instead it is time for Starmer to look within the Labour party and engage with the leftwing thinkers and the ideas that underpinned the 2017 and 2019 Labour manifestos. Every family has its hidden secrets — and in Labour it’s the fact that Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, asked many of the right questions, even if he came up with the wrong answers.

Universal free broadband was an eye-catching idea with an eye-watering cost, but it struck a nerve. It’s obvious why. Broadband is the backbone of public service delivery, business productivity and the levelling up of regional inequality. Progressives should want to deliver those benefits — though the question Corbyn didn’t answer satisfactorily is how that can be done practically and pragmatically.

There is an example to draw on, however. In Washington this year I met a union leader who said that President Joe Biden was the most “pro-labour president since FDR”. Partly, that stems from his background — he has had union backing since his first Senate race. It’s also because when Bernie Sanders retired from the Democrat primaries, members of his policy team joined the Biden campaign. The basis of the “Bidenomics” that UK shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves admires is the product of progressives and centrists working together.

There’s an example closer to home. The intellectual spine of New Labour was provided by Marxism Today, which still described itself as the “theoretical and discussion journal of the Communist party”. The thinking done in it by Stuart Hall and others on “post-Fordism” and new modes of production and consumption was never directly quoted by Tony Blair, but it ran right through his government.

Core to Hall’s analysis was Gramsci’s quote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” This is as appropriate to a 21st century of artificial intelligence and climate crisis as it was to the age of Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Starmer understands implicitly that the UK is at a critical turning point. Yet while he is clear about the politics of his changes to Labour — the end of Corbynism — he is not explicit about the change needed in Labour’s political economy. The party has promised a “mission-driven” approach to government, which, in reality, means the end of marketisation of public services, or “neoliberalism”.

Currently, the Labour leader and his front bench are caught in a sterile debate with the media and the party about whether or not they will restore cuts and raise taxes. Being more explicit about the underlying politics of Starmerism would be liberating.

To define himself, Blair took on his party by amending Clause IV of its constitution committing it to nationalisation. Starmer, by contrast, is already in total control of the party. He now needs to make peace with it in order to achieve definition with the public. This would be a “Clause IV moment” with a twist.