Starmer's 'major' speech offered us nothing but vacuous platitudes (2024)

Readers may remember a children’s puzzle — it may still be around — called Where’s Wally?.

The object of the exercise was to identify Wally and occasionally his friends, who were concealed among crowds in endless drawings. I could never do it.

I reckon the Tories should invent a puzzle called Where’s Keir?, to follow the Labour leader through his various manifestations. It might enliven this so far rather moribund General Election.

Is that the leader of the Labour Party joshing with his mate Jeremy Corbyn and his gang, who are protesting against Nato and Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent?

Or could that be Keir chumming up with Army brass, and declaring — as he did yesterday during questions after what was billed as a major speech in West Sussex — that defence is the ‘first duty’ of any government?

Might that be Keir staying quiet while Corbyn drove many Jews out of the Labour Party, or is that him vowing to put an end to anti-Semitism?

Is that Keir announcing his campaign to lead Labour in 2020, and promising wholesale nationalisation and higher taxes for the better-off in a programme welcomed by the Hard Left?

Might that be our ubiquitous hero lunching with City fat cats, promising them that they have nothing to fear from Labour’s stewardship of the economy?

The only trouble with the game is that Keir would be everywhere — radical and moderate, iconoclast and traditionalist, disruptor and fence-mender. Wherever you looked, you would spot him.

In his nine years as a politician Sir Keir Starmer has established himself as a champion shape-shifter. He started on the soft Left, and then got into bed with Jeremy Corbyn, then got out of bed, then kicked Jeremy out of bed before getting back in again, having changed the sheets.

It’s hardly any wonder that the British public is somewhat confused about the man who, if the polls are to be believed, will be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in less than six weeks’ time.

Yesterday’s speech in Sussex was supposedly a getting-to-know-Keir session. Those who hoped that the mask might slip will have been disappointed. Below the mask was another mask, and doubtless there’s another one below that, and so on.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps the country will vote for this enigmatic leader, without having much idea what his policies are, simply because they are sick to the back teeth of the Tories. We will see.

Sir Keir was at pains to establish his working-class credentials (the phrase ‘working people’ occurred 12 times in his half-hour speech) and he told his audience that he had grown up not far away. We were reminded that his father was a toolmaker and his mother, often unwell, a nurse.

The Tories got a bashing to an extent that some will think unfair. The word ‘chaos’ cropped up nine times in relation to this Government, while Rishi was mocked for suggesting that the economy had turned a corner. Are things really that bad?

The Labour leader said repeatedly that he is in favour of service, and wants to put ‘country before party’. Find a politician who will say differently, and the Pope will declare a miracle.

When we got on to policies, I sat up and gripped my pen. Maybe we would get some red meat at last, or at any rate a morsel. But no. We were offered vacuous platitudes.

There were, we were told, six steps. I won’t spell them out in exhaustive detail, but we can’t entirely draw a veil over them. Step one was creating ‘economic stability’. Few clues were vouchsafed as to how this would be done other than through ‘a non‑negotiable pact with working people — the symbol of a changed Labour Party — ready to serve our country’. All very clear, then.

Step two, already announced, is cutting NHS waiting times by supplying 40,000 extra appointments a week. You can choose to believe this or not. It is easy to promise.

Step three, also not new, was the creation of a ‘Border Security Command’ to thwart the small boats coming across the Channel. Because there’s so little detail about how this would operate, I don’t have any faith in it.

Step four, also familiar, is the creation of a new company called Great British Energy, ‘paid for by a windfall tax on the energy giants’ and ‘harnessing the opportunity of clean British power’. Believe it if you will.

Step five is cracking down on anti-social behaviour, though again few details were provided.

Step six, also previously announced, is supplying 6,500 new teachers, paid for by abolishing the VAT exemption enjoyed by private schools. Even as he wielded the axe, Sir Keir emphasised his respect for parents who send their children to these establishments. Big of him.

And that was it. Nothing new. What was old was mostly unconvincing. For example, Labour hasn’t taken into account the cost of accommodating, within the state system, the pupils whose parents would no longer be able to afford to educate them privately.

This much-heralded speech was in part an unilluminating stroll through Sir Keir’s past, and in part the reiteration of familiar policies, which in their modest scale certainly don’t justify the word ‘Change’ — cropping up 18 times and emblazoned on the lectern in front of him.

What would a Labour government really be like? Would it be as dull and boring and uneventful as his speech? Or does this inscrutable man harbour radical plans about which he daren’t tell us this side of an election?

The Tories have just over five weeks to help us find an answer. For we may be certain that Sir Keir won’t be forthcoming, and I’ll be astonished if the Labour manifesto offers many clues as to how the party would govern.

At least the Tories are coming up with interesting ideas. I cheered the other day when the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said that the widely hated inheritance tax is ‘profoundly anti-Conservative’. Many of us have been saying so for the past 14 years! Its reform must be in the Tory manifesto. That would strike a chord with many voters.

National Service does too. It may have the feel of an idea scribbled down on the back of a cigarette packet and not yet fully thought out, but it is bold and imaginative.

All Sir Keir could say about this plan was that it was ‘desperate’ without explaining why. In questions after his speech, he was asked about university tuition fees (would they be increased by Labour?) and voter ID in elections (would it be rescinded?). No comment.

Sir Keir’s latest act of shape-shifting is to offer himself as a largely policy-free zone. If he were charismatic or a stirring orator, one might tip one’s cap to him, but he’s neither.

Surely the Tories can make much of this. They needn’t be mean about Sir Keir’s age (he’s 61) and supposed lack of energy, as they have recently been.

What they must do is to point out repeatedly that Sir Keir Starmer is an unknown quantity offering little known policies behind which can be glimpsed the dark shadow of past extremism. I don’t know about you, but that scares the hell out of me.