Rodney’s Rods

Sir Keir Rodney Starmer KCB QC has made two rods for his own back which will fatally undermine his core electoral strategy of exposing the Tories’ dishonesty.

  • 1. Condemning Corbyn and his policies having served under him, praised him and supported his policies

This has already been used as a regular attack line by Boris Johnson at PMQs. Because Starmer has based his leadership on distancing himself from the policies from the 2017 and 2019 manifestos having campaigned for them at the time, the Tories will have an easy put-down for everything he says at the next election: “did you pretend to believe what you said before or are you pretending now?”

The more he condemns Jeremy Corbyn, the more of a hypocrite he will be exposing himself to be. What should be Labour’s core support, the left and the wider labour movement – amongst whom Corbyn and his policies were and still are popular – will be increasingly alienated and disinclined to give Labour their vote. And the supposed target audience for the about-turn – disaffected Tories and floating voters – will simply see him as a dishonest opportunist.

  • 2. Breaking the pledges he made when standing to be Labour leader

When standing to be Labour Leader, Keir Starmer promised to continue on Corbyn’s policy platform, to unite Labour and decentralise power in the party. He has since embarked on a ruthless campaign to distance Labour from Corbyn’s policies, to purge the left from the party and run the party with authoritarian centralised power. This is a problem in itself because the disunity in the party and anger from former members who have been driven out will taint election campaigns for years to come, but it also gives his political opponents another easy attack line: “why should we trust your general election promises when you broke your leadership election promises?”

He also made a list of ten pledges, including promises on common ownership and workers’ rights. His U-turn on virtually all of these pledges, and his attempt to make a virtue of this (“I’m ready to break pledges to make Labour electable”) further alienates him from the left and exposes himself to accusations of dishonesty and untrustworthiness by his opponents in an election campaign.

Another problem with having broken his own pledges is that his hands will be tied in the next general election campaign when it comes to the new Conservative Party leader’s own U-turns. Both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, one of whom will be announced as the Tory Party leader on the 5th September, have pitched their campaign towards the bigoted right of their party membership, boasting of populist policies and beliefs. What is popular with Tory Party members whose votes they are currently seeking are not as popular with the wider electorate. For instance, talk of cutting taxes for the rich when half the country is suffering under a cost-of-living crisis is likely to change during a general election campaign. But Keir Starmer can’t criticise the Tory leader at the next general election for changing their tune having made a virtue of doing so himself; he would look like a total hypocrite.