A new dawn? Yes, please ...
Memo to Keir Starmer: Under-promising is all well and good. Under-delivering is not an option.
On 2 May 1997, a newly-elected Labour prime minister stood in front of his adoring supporters in the Royal Festival Hall and uttered eight words destined for the history books.
'A new dawn has broken, has it not?'
On 20 January 2009, a newly-elected US president stood in front of the Capitol building in Washington DC and said: ‘The challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America: They will be met.’
I am not expecting poetry from Keir Starmer on Friday. He is not, and never will be, either Tony Blair or Barack Obama. But he will have to come up with something memorable, because after a miserably dispiriting election campaign, with only Ed Davey’s jolly japes to cheer us up, it is surely time for a bit of inspiration.
Remember ‘Yes we can’? Obama fashioned those simple one-syllable words into an immensely powerful message of hope. Starmer’s one-word equivalent — Change — somehow didn'’t quite do it, even if it was the word on millions of voters’ lips.
It has long been the case that politicians at election time succumb to the temptation to over-promise. Then once they win power, they under-deliver. Starmer’s Labour party is hoping to do the opposite: first under-promise, then over-deliver.
As a result, it won’t really be possible for Starmer to talk of a ‘new dawn’ on Friday morning. But I hope he’ll manage something more uplifting than ‘We’ll do our best to make the country a better place to live in, but it won’t be as much as you want, nor will it be as quick as you’d like.’
Last Sunday, writing in The Observer, he looked back to a time when he said voters believed that politics was about offering the hope of a better future. ‘It is hard to argue that this hope burns brightly in Britain at the moment,’ he wrote. ‘But be in no doubt – a vote for Labour this week is a vote to relight the fire.’
The stakes couldn’t be higher. With a populist nationalist wave rolling across the European continent, now enveloping even France, Labour will have to convince British voters that inward-looking nationalist fervour is not the answer to this country’s many problems.
Starmer insists that he is well aware of the dangers and that Labour is ready to hit the ground running. So he’ll waste no time in scrapping the nonsensical Rwanda deportation scheme; he’ll reverse the de facto ban on onshore wind farms; initiate immediate talks to end the junior doctors’ strike action; and unveil a new policy framework to encourage the building of new homes.
He knows it won’t be long before he runs into some strong headwinds. His battalions of new MPs, some of them representing formerly true-blue seats, won’t take kindly to plans to build new homes on their patches, nor will Ed Miliband be happy with Rachel Reeves’s unrelenting grip on the public finances as he tries to advance his green agenda.
So a test of his mettle will be how he handles the incoming Westminster storms. And given that the Tories look likely to be reduced to no more than a squabbling, squawling rump, the opposition will be overwhelming from his own side.
Andrew Marr got it right in the New Statesman: Labour will need to move fast, deliver fast and keep a close eye on public opinion. In other words, it will have to prioritise, at least in the short term, policies that deliver immediate, visible improvements to what is sometimes grandly called the ‘public realm’.
Ideally, that will mean incoming Chancellor Rachel Reeves finding some way to free up more cash for local councils so that they can fix the potholes, repair crumbling school buildings, and improve the pay and conditions of care workers. Doing something about NHS waiting lists, railway and water companies are all vying for attention at the top of the to-do list.
Under-promising is all well and good. Under-delivering is not an option.