Labour needs a message and to stick to it

Usually watching England play in a major football tournament is a depressing affair, which is why I was pleasantly surprised at how well the team did in the 2018 World Cup. I’m not a football expert, but it seemed like new manager Gareth Southgate had got the team to function better as a single unit. The ball was skillfully passed and players were on point to receive it. 

When it all fell apart in the semi-final against Croatia, the formerly well-functioning team had turned into what I called “Shit England”, as it seemed they were just hoofing the ball up the pitch and hoping for the best.

This is how I feel about Labour right now. Like England, a change in manager seemed to deliver some good results initially. Keir Starmer introduced himself to the country and received a positive reception from people who don’t follow politics closely. The polls were moving in the right direction and Starmer had avoided the initial landmine of being accused of playing politics during the outbreak of a deadly disease.

Seeing what sticks

Recently the slick performance has given way to an undisciplined fumble. Like Shit England, Labour are throwing out anything and seeing what sticks. This reminds me of some of Ed Miliband’s cringe-worthy mistakes, such as constantly trotting out new era-defining buzzwords - One Nation, predistribution - only for it to be forgotten a week later in the desperate search to find something to make the Labour Party popular.

The latest example of this is the idea that Labour should be more pro-business. This annoys me more than the last idea, seemingly thrown out at random, that Labour should be more patriotic. Making Labour look more patriotic is about how the party is presented to the voters, not about policy. Patriotism can equally accompany neoliberal or radical economic policies. If Labour wants to appear more pro-business, this will require specific pro-business policies.

Politics for the wealthy

Britain doesn’t need another pro-business party, when we have the Tories (the party of the wealthy) the Lib Dems (the party of the wealthy with a bit of a conscience), UKIP (the party of the people who think that Britain is both a company and an Empire and should be run according to the worst aspects of both) and the SNP (who will turn Scotland into a low tax, low regulation, tax haven to lure away business from England).

Politics is already slanted towards the interests of the wealthy, without another party attempting to court the votes of the rich (and the confused people who aren’t rich, but seem to think it’s important to make life as easy as possible for those who are).

A vision for the future

All this flailing around is distracting people from the important work of outlining an alternative to the Tories. It comes at the same time a Starmer attempting to outline his vision for the future.

Starmer argued that Tory ideology made the UK more vulnerable to Covid-19. This framing came alongside a platter of policy announcements, including that Labour would “keep the universal credit uplift, end the pay freeze for key workers, prevent council tax rises, extend business rates relief and the VAT cut for hospitality and leisure, and renew the furlough scheme.”

LabourList editor Sienna Rodgers’s said: “It tied together the themes we’ve seen in Labour’s interventions over the past year: family, dignity, security, fiscal responsibility and long-term thinking.”

Tackling the problems of Britain

It’s good that Starmer is making the argument that 10 years of Tory rule led to the UK having the highest Covid-19 death rate in the world, but how does being pro-business fit alongside this?

Being pro-business is at odds with a number of the things a Labour government needs to do to fix the problems with this country. Can Labour be pro-business whilst taking on the fossil fuel companies destroying the planet? Can Labour be pro-business whilst tackling the issue of slum landlords and sky-high property prices, which blight the poor and the middle-class? Can Labour be pro-business whilst fixing the problem of too many companies offering low pay and insecure work? A commitment to tackling these problems puts the Labour party at odds with “business”.

Starmer’s pledges

When Starmer stood for Labour leader, he made a series of pledges. Many Labour members, myself included, took this as an indication of his commitment to a left-wing policy platform, or at least a commitment to a centre-left socially democratic policy platform.

The first of these pledges was: “Increase income tax for the top 5% of earners, reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax and clamp down on tax avoidance, particularly of large corporations. No stepping back from our core principles.”

Is decreasing the income of the top 5% pro-business? Or is it the politics of envy, advocated by greedy socialists who want to take money away from hard-working innovators and give it to feckless teachers and nurses? The sort of thing Jeremy Corbyn would do?

Who will this win over?

The idea of chasing the support of business (or the people who enjoy a good lick of a millionaire’s boot) are at odds with what the Labour Party should stand for. There is a middle ground between Lenin’s War Communism and whatever “pro-business” means in actuality, such as taxing the wealthy a bit and using the money to offer a helping hand to the poorest in society.

This is not what Labour should stand for and it’s another example of Labour being Shit England. This “pro-business” idea is just hoofed out there to see if it scores a goal by accident, in the absence of anything resembling a strategy.

Who is this designed to win over? Everyone who voted Labour in 1997? It will take more than Keir Starmer praising Richard Branson as a job creator to achieve that.

Losing momentum

Starmer has lost momentum (in more ways than one), since the start of the year. He pitched himself as the competent alternative to the Tories, but as the government has successfully rolled out the vaccine program the wind has come out of Starmer’s sails.

There’s no better illustration of this than this recent video from Joe.co.uk talking to Red Wall voters.

Labour needs a clear communication strategy and not jumping from framing to framing, as they did under Miliband. Talk about being pro-business or more pro-flag is distracting from making the case that Starmer outlined in his speech about the future.

A message that needs to be repeated

As Sienna Rodgers said: “the argument that the Tories left the UK exposed to the worst of Covid must be repeated ad nauseam.” This simple message is what Labour needs to stick to. Just as David Cameron repeated over and over that Labour’s spending caused the financial crash or how “take back control” became ubiquitous during the referendum campaign.

Labour pitching themselves as pro-business is just throwing out things that Corbyn wasn’t in the hope that the polls will narrow. It’s the same as Shit England, firing the ball around and hoping for the best. It looks desperate even to the untrained eye and no amount of energetic kicking is a substitute for a solid strategy.

"File:Official portrait of Keir Starmer crop 1.jpg" by Chris McAndrew is licensed under CC BY 3.0