The Only Way Is Ethics

Ben Wildsmith

Two headlines sit next to each other in today’s online edition of the Guardian. In the first we learn that Keir Starmer ‘welcomes the collapse of Bashar al Assad’s barbaric regime.’

Starmer is pictured looking resolute and statesmanlike: a reassuringly moral figure in uncertain times.

Adjacent to this story, we see him in the same suit below the headline, ‘Starmer to meet Saudi crown prince in push for infrastructure cash.’

Oh.

The juxtaposition of these two stories brings into focus an unsettling dissonance at the heart of Labour’s approach to governance.

Moral crusade

Its appeal to the electorate is sketched out in tones that suggest a moral crusade. From Wes Streeting’s claim to be ‘saving’ the NHS, to Rachel Reeves’ performative horror at the state of public finances, ministers present themselves as innocents who have happened across a crime scene.

These are moral people who can barely bring themselves to wade through the squalor of Tory Britain.

Only their belief in a better way drives them on…

‘Tough choices’ are Starmer’s speciality. Peering gravely at us through his designer specs, it’s his sad duty to prescribe one spoonful of nasty medicine after the other.

He doesn’t want to, you understand, but is bound by his code.

It’s a style of home front leadership more usually seen during wartime and seems calculated to suppress expectations rather than cohere the nation in any common endeavour.

Politically, hairshirted earnestness is a tough act to sell. It’s not entirely unreasonable of the electorate to expect that some aspects of life might improve under a new government.

Bunce

If the previous lot were trousering the bunce as enthusiastically as Labour claim, then surely at least some of it could be de-trousered and spent on, say, affordable rail fares or capped rents for the victims of these crimes?

If the Tories can wage class war so ruthlessly that it bankrupts the nation on behalf of their donors, why is Labour so timid about redressing it?

Dire polling figures required the government to perform a worryingly early relaunch this week. Seeking to reassure the nation that it was doing something tangible, Labour put forward six ‘milestones’ by which it can be judged.

The majority of these are so vague as to be meaningless. It will have hit its unquantified growth target if it can identify any life in the economy at all, for instance.

On housebuilding, though, there seems to be a hard target of 1.5 million new homes or conversions that will be more difficult to fudge. At first glance this seems to create a hostage to fortune that could be electorally disastrous in 2029. Builders I’ve spoken to question the availability of enough materials to achieve this number, let alone trained workers.

2029, though, is a long way off. The fate of Starmer’s ten pledges when running for his party’s leadership suggest that adherence to these milestones might be taken less seriously than their launch event suggested.

Red meat

Lists of promises are red meat for political obsessives to chew on; the casual voters who win elections don’t notice them in the first place.

The rise of Reform UK, which manages to pass off nativist laissez-faire capitalism as a moral crusade creates a problem for Labour that it never had with the Tories.

Aside from its blue-rinsed diehards, nobody has believed that the Conservatives have a moral dimension for decades. Their appeal has been as successful spivs whose cunning might create a bit of cash in the economy over which we can compete.

Reform UK, on the other hand, offer an illusory moral crusade to voters who see national decline in terms of degenerate, foreign contamination.

To counter that, Labour will not be able to rely, as it did at the election, on the general assumption that it is the party of principle.

The government will need a coherent ethical case to mitigate against likely disappointment in the UK’s economic fortunes.

If it cannot deliver what the electorate hopes for, it must at least offer a coherent projection of national values.

Cherry-picking middle-eastern despots on the basis of their economic usefulness suggests the very moral ambiguity that the nation so recently rejected.