Politics
Sir Keir Starmer needs to level with voters – concrete change may only come in a second Labour term
It may have been Labour’s local election launch, but it was used by Sir Keir Starmer to roll out his national campaign messaging ahead of the general election later in the year: “The country needs change and we are the change.”
It is, if you like, a dry-run for the general election as Labour strategists target areas in their battleground seats around the West and East Midlands and Tees Valley. They will talk up Sir Keir‘s “national missions” and test out Tory attack lines.
There is no doubt that Labour is expected to win big as political watchers look to see if there will be a repeat of the sort of huge gains Sir Tony Blair saw in the 1996 local elections before his 1997 landslide.
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Labour strategists might mutter that in every general election year, the government gain seats in local elections even when there’s a change of government, but the expectation is that Labour could win hundreds of seats from the Conservatives and perhaps take the scalp of the Conservative West Midlands mayor Andy Street – while Sir Keir will be looking at this as an important staging post on his path to power, his opponent Rishi Sunak is just trying to survive.
But beyond the drama of the Conservative fortunes and the prime minister’s fate, what is also emerging in this election campaign is the secondary strap of Sir Keir’s ‘change’ message.
When he says change, what he really means is patience, and that is perhaps the national conversation we are going to be having much more in the run-up to this general election.
Because while Sir Keir likes to make long speeches diagnosing the maladies brought about in Britain after 14 years of Conservative rule, he’s less good at giving us remedies.
On Thursday in Dudley, when he laid into Mr Sunak for “strangling” levelling-up “at birth” and accused Boris Johnson of “preying on people’s hopes” and not delivering, his own answer is greater devolution of powers to local leaders to better deliver local growth and level up communities.
A (possible) solution that is a very slow medicine indeed at a time when local councils across England are struggling to provide basic services let alone more opportunities for their communities.
The more immediate issue for towns and cities across the country is the funding crisis in local councils.
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Levelling up ‘unforgivable’ failure
One in five council leaders said in December that their councils are “likely or fairly likely” to go bust in the next 15 months.
Birmingham effectively declared itself bankrupt earlier this month and was forced to lift bills by 21%, while cutting services.
With more on the brink, the Local Government Association says an emergency £4bn will be needed just to maintain basic services in the next two years.
When I asked Sir Keir if he would be able to commit this funding, he told me he “can’t turn on the spending taps” (and also said tax increases were not an option given the country’s tax burden – many Labour voters might disagree, but he and Rachel Reeves are immovable on this).
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What he did say was this: “At the end of an incoming Labour government councils will be better funded, more sustainable, able to deliver their services than they are now,” and when asked again to clarify whether looking again at funding settlements could involve an upfront cash injection, he was unequivocal: “What it means is not a lump sum cash injection”.
In other words, you’re going to have to wait for perhaps five years for better funded councils and better public services.
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So in the coming weeks, as you watch Labour try to manage expectations for what could be a May local election landslide, watch too for more of what I got more of a glimpse of in Dudley: a Labour leader desperately trying to manage expectations of what an incoming Labour government can do.
With the decisions he and Ms Reeves have made on fiscal management of the economy – effectively sticking closely to Conservative fiscal rules and eschewing any commitment to tax rises or spending increases – this will only become a bigger part of this change story as we get closer to deciding who should take power later this year.
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Sir Keir is going to campaign on the promise of change.
Where he needs to level with voters more is that they might have to wait for a second Labour term for concrete change to come.