STARMER CAN’T LET LABOUR'S RED WALL COME TUMBLING DOWN AGAIN

At last year’s Labour conference there was a sense from the stage of the party finding its feet.

Buoyed by a disastrous spell in charge from the Tories, the feeling was that Labour was back, finally, properly, after the post-Blair years in the doldrums.

Yes, they’d lost the Red Wall of northern seats to Boris Johnson, but the next election was there for the taking – those heartland constituencies would quickly be reclaimed, their defection to the Conservatives forgotten.

That confidence was reinforced by a strong speech from Keir Starmer, the Labour leader. The best he’d ever given, was a common refrain.

There is a ‘but’ coming. But in the bars and corridors around the conference centre there was muttering. The party had gone overboard on the green agenda, turning the iconic red rose into a green bloom and promoting the slogan, “a fairer, greener future”. Sounds like an advert for washing-up liquid was one repeated refrain. Starmer had been got at, he’d been “Ed’d”.

The hand of Ed Miliband, the former leader now Shadow Energy Secretary, they moaned, could be detected everywhere. He was close to Starmer, part of his inner circle, the boss deferred to him on key issues, not just to do with policy but with discipline.

Central to Starmer’s platform last autumn was the creation of a publicly funded energy company. That was trumpeted by those around the leadership as a return to true Labour, that after the Blair years of pushing back on state ownership here was an assertion of core values.

The problem was that it felt gimmicky, as did much of Starmer’s address that day and the backdrop and mission statement felt, well, a bit naff. It also missed a vital point: that Blair won three elections on the trot.

Roll forward to today, and as the party goes into summer, soon succeeded by the party conference season and what must be a rousing send-off for a looming general election campaign, the same accusation is being made.

Starmer is said to be working on plans to end all new North Sea oil and gas projects. In place of the fossil fuels will be clean energy, with Britain becoming a green superpower.

That would be fine, if the country was well advanced towards replacing petrol and diesel cars with electric; if charging points were everywhere; if the hydrogen, offshore wind and solar-power generation industries were much more developed; if home insulation was being installed at a furious, unrelenting pace; if new nuclear power stations were coming on-stream. None of this is happening.

It’s as if Labour was living in a parallel universe, one in which it is OK to sacrifice many tens of thousands of North Sea and fossil fuel-related jobs, in the belief they would be replaced somewhere else. But on the present evidence they won’t be, not even close.

This goes to the very being of Labour: protecting existing blue-collar jobs. Not promising new ones on a wing and a prayer but preserving those that are current.

For many in the party, it carries uncomfortable echoes of the coal miners and how, in their eyes, those energy workers were betrayed by the movement, that Labour did not do enough to help them after the devastation and humiliation wrought by Mrs Thatcher and the Tories.

The truth is that Labour as a whole has never got “eco”. A section of the collective, yes, but that in the view of the rump is the trendy, non-traditional, metropolitan grouping. Which is where Miliband, a North Londoner, firmly belongs. Jeremy Corbyn is from that part of London, too, but no one would accuse him, with his consistent arch-left stance, of being the same.

Miliband lives in one of the most fashionable areas of the capital; Corbyn does not. Miliband, with his famous academic father and elder brother, David, is entitled Labour aristocracy; again, Corbyn is not.

It matters, of course it does. But a big driver is whatever wins elections. For them, their polling dictates, that means defending and boosting the working-class, ring-fencing the NHS, guaranteeing law and order, advancing state education, housing.

Victory at the poll box and saving other jobs, those of MPs, is the prime focus. Miliband, for all his personable charm and lifelong adherence to Labour and service, cannot be forgiven by his party critics for leading them to crushing, humiliating defeat in 2015.

There was the suspicion in some quarters that Miliband was complacent, believing victory was in the bag when it never was. Proof of that came from the “Edstone”, the 8ft 6in plinth he had commissioned for the No 10 Downing Street garden, carved with winning Labour campaign pledges.

It was an embarrassment, fuelling the belief that Miliband will always be out of touch with the grass roots, that people like him were precisely those folk the Red Wall sided against when it signalled its discontent with Labour.

Starmer’s problem is that he needs Miliband or something similar. Solid virtues such as hard work and following principles are among his strengths; expounding a future vision is not. Unfortunately he is cut from similar, capital elite cloth. They look like a pair, bonded, both far removed from Labour traditional members.

The green energy policy is right, no question. But arguably, given the slow progress being made by the present government towards transitioning and replacing fossil with renewable, it is too far, too soon.

If Labour wants to triumph in the next election, it must focus on those main issues. Green is in the category of 'nice thing to have, as time goes on a must thing to have'. But for Labour’s voters, not now and not at the cost of losing present jobs.

2023-06-06T13:22:52Z dg43tfdfdgfd