Keir Starmer said in his Labour conference speech that the threat from Reform is as great as the challenge of rebuilding after World War II – and that it will require the same energy to restore this country now as it did in 1945.
As he put it:
We can all see that the country faces a choice, a defining choice.
Britain stands at a fork in the road.
We could choose decency, or we could choose division; renewal or decline; a country proud of its values, in control of its future, or one that succumbs against the grain of our history to the politics of grievance.
It is a test, a fight for the soul of our country, every bit as big as rebuilding Britain after the war.
And we must all rise to this challenge.
Appeasement instead of rearmament
As ever, Starmer failed to join the dots – a political art form he has made his own.
What he did not apparently appreciate as a consequence of what he said, was that if the threat is so great – but Reform has yet to deliver the destruction it is promising – then the issue that we face now is not one equivalent to rebuilding. It is one equivalent to rearmament when all the while, all he is offering at present is appeasement.
Reform does not have power as yet, and there are four years left to prevent it from doing so. But if that is to happen, then what Labour needs to do is put in place the defences that will ensure that it can never take control of this country, rather than put in place the rebuilding process that might be required in the aftermath of fascism. For somebody in charge of the country, Starmer’s sense of priorities appears staggeringly poor.
The defences Labour must build
So, what are those defences?
Firstly, and most obviously, we need proportional representation. Never again should a political party supported by a very small part of the UK population have a sweeping majority enabling it to act without taking into consideration the wishes of all the people in the UK – which is the position Starmer finds himself in. If he believes that we are in peril, then adopting proportional representation is the first thing that he must do.
Secondly, a country at risk abandons fiscal caution. Instead, it does everything necessary to ensure that the threat it faces is countered. In this case, that means throwing aside the stupidity of fiscal rules, and ignoring the demands of the City of London (just as these were ignored in 1914 and 1939). Then use the power of the state to:
- Build the physical resources required to defend the nation.
- Mobilise finance to achieve that goal in the ways that Lord Keynes explained – most particularly in his 1941 book ‘How to pay for the war‘.
In other words, Starmer should be putting the country on a war footing to prove that we do not need Reform because he can:
- Build the houses that we need.
- Rebuild the NHS in the way that people want.
- Deliver education that gives everyone a chance in our society.
- Put our key industries and services under state control so that they serve people, and not profit
- Fight inequality.
- Make finance our servant and not our master.
- Tackle climate change and build resilience, not least that required to ensure we have sufficient domestic food production –unless action is taken, much of our most productive land will be lost to the sea within the foreseeable future.
- Create an industrial strategy that is also focused on these goals and not providing an opportunity for financial engineering.
Why words are not enough
That is what he needed to say.
He did not, of course, say it.
He spoke about change, without specifying what it meant.
He spoke about working people, without realising how alienating this is to the young who have yet to work, to the elderly who no longer work, and to those who cannot find work. It is also alienating to those society prejudices against – because of who they are, where they are, the conditions they suffer, or the biases of employers.
Journalists already see failure coming
As I predicted, Starmer spoke in sentences that could technically be strong together in the English language, but almost none of them made any sense.
Speaking to an audience that included cabinet ministers who sat, childlike, waving flags they had been given as if they were about to place them on sandcastles at the seaside, knowing that they would inevitably be swept away by the next tide, his gibberish flowed forth, but none of it, however, included a measure of substance.
Journalists know that Starmer is doomed. Long before 2029, they are sure his political career will, like most, end in ignominious failure, which he will have deserved more than most do. The sooner that happens, the better.
The stage set for Farage
But, unless there are those in Labour who will rise to the challenges that I note above, nothing will change, and the stage will be set for Farage.
What will happen? I do not know. As ever, I can only live in hope. But the truth is the failure of successive Tory and Labour governments, in the style of the 1930s, may already have laid the foundations for the terror that Reform could yet bring — and I use that word deliberately.
This article is republished with kind permission of Richard Murphy. Read the original here.
More from East Anglia Bylines
Subscribe to our newsletters
Each of our Bylines sends a newsletter every month and we also send out a ‘Best of Bylines, featuring a selection of the best articles from across the network
