UK Election 2024: Labour and Keir Starmer's 'project hope'

An "occupational hazard" of being leader of the Labour Party is that you "receive a lot of unsolicited advice", said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. 

Although he has a 24-point lead over the Tories in opinion polls, Keir Starmer has no immunity from this. The veteran centre-left Labour MP Jon Cruddas published a book last week that branded him an "elusive leader", without a clear sense of "purpose". The common critique is that Starmer "is not offering enough hope to voters". 

He duly responded last week with what he called "a new year message of hope". Labour's aim, Starmer said, was to defeat the "miserabilist Tory project", with its "politics of divide and decline" – and to offer instead "Project Hope" for a "downtrodden country". Not a "grandiose utopian hope", he said, but a "credible hope", "a light at the end of the tunnel".

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'Decent dutiful and dull'

Although impassioned by Starmer's standards, it was not exactly a fervent speech, said Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times. In fact, like most of his speeches, it was distinctly boring. He set the tone at the start by "waxing lyrical" about the venue, the National Composites Centre in Bristol, which he was visiting for a third time. Starmer offered a particularly dull kind of hope: he seemed to be arguing, "genuinely, that boredom will put us on the path to national renewal", that the best way to get people excited after 13 years of grim Tory psychodrama is for politics to be more like Keir Starmer – "moderate, decent, dutiful and, let's be honest, dull".

Populism, he said, was exhausting, and he promised instead "a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives". It's a tricky balancing act, said Robert Shrimsley in the FT. "Starmer's appeal to voters must be a combination of hope and reassurance." The country is aching for change and better times. But he is also trying to persuade voters that "they need not fear too great a leftward lurch".

'Path of extreme caution'

If that sounds slippery, it would be entirely in character, said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. Starmer's record is "one of indecision, U-turn and big ideas, which fall apart quite regularly". His signature economic policy was announced in 2022: to follow the US on a huge green state-spending campaign, worth £28bn a year until 2030. This has now been downgraded to an aspiration. "Listen closely and you can hear other key pledges being taken outside and shot."

The ten that he published to become Labour leader – including nationalising utilities and abolishing tuition fees – have long since been deleted from his website. Starmer is determined to follow a path of "extreme caution", particularly on tax and spending, said The Guardian. This is understandable, if you consider Labour's long history of electoral disappointment, and the fact that the Tories seem to be doing his job for him very effectively. "But there are also risks attached to not taking any risks." To win a majority, Starmer will need to offer more than vague hopes and "dour" responsibility.