UNITY

Starmer won the Labour leadership on a simple platform. He was the unity candidate. Corbyn’s leadership had been marked by division that had played badly with voters. This was most obvious in Parliament between the minority of MPs who backed him and the majority of the PLP, some of whom worked openly to overturn his leadership. The leaked Labour Report has now exposed divisions  between the leader’s office and senior staffers, some of whom, it has been alleged, impeded the party’s response to antisemitism in order to undermine Corbyn and even sabotaged Labour efforts at the 2017 General Election.

How was unity to be achieved? Under Corbyn membership had grown massively from 200,000 to 500,000 plus. By and large they were sick of austerity targeting the poor, wanted fully funded public services, supported BAME and LGBTQ+ communities, supported an ethical foreign policy and wanted action on climate change. These were the priorities that had shaped Corbynism and figured heavily in our election manifestos of 2017 and 2019.

While Starmer was certainly not the Corbyn continuity candidate he did engage with these priorities in his ten pledges which any self respecting left winger would be happy to sign up for. The party itself, fed up with civil war and reassured that a Starmer leadership would not mean going back to the uncritical embrace of globalisation that had ended so disastrously in 2008 with the worldwide financial crash, overwhelmingly elected Starmer on the first ballot. Starmer is a consensus politician. As well as party unity he seeks to unite the nation by occupying the centre ground and, as he put it in a recent email to all members:

I stood to be Labour leader on the platform of listening to people across the country, including those whose trust we weren’t able to win in the last election.

COVID19

Unfortunately for Starmer he became Labour leader and hence leader of the Opposition (LOTO) in the middle of the COVID pandemic. Starmer’s judgement was that at a time of national crisis he would refrain from “scoring party political points” and that he planned to “engage constructively with the government.”

This goes to the heart of the problem. Faced with a raging pandemic, Starmer, understandably, thought that all parties could and should work together to deal with the public health crisis. But if, as the opposition, you are going to put country before party, there is a presumption that the government will do the same. In fact the Tories have not treated this as a national crisis that must be beaten whatever the political cost. Rather, they have treated the pandemic as a political crisis to be managed in order to minimise the impact on the government.

This is not the place to explore all the reasons for the government’s disastrous handling of the crisis. Suffice to say that the lack of capacity within the British state to adequately source and provide PPE, to test, track and isolate, the horrendous death toll especially in care homes and the mixed messaging that has characterised the political response of the government, have all been cruelly exposed by the virus. 

Unfortunately they have not been exposed by the Labour Party! By trying to be the adults in the room we have to a great extent let the Tories off the hook. Government policy is made up of a series of announcements, on testing, on PPE, on defeating the virus and being world beating. Labour says it is supportive of these measures. When the government frequently fails to meet its targets Labour says the government must learn from its mistakes and do better. We have not consistently called out their “jam tomorrow” policy that is designed to deflect from current failures.

So on track, trace and isolate Starmer has said that time is running out and the government must fix it by the end of the month. He has not challenged the fundamental flaws in the system.

The test, trace and isolate system is critical but it’s still not working properly.

Time is running out for the Government to fix it. pic.twitter.com/UBnlgk8fXN

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) August 5, 2020

He did not say the decision to outsource testing, tracking and tracing to giants like Serco who then subcontract to smaller unaccountable providers was a political choice based upon a mistrust of local government and the public sector. He did not call for funding and decision making to be devolved to local authorities, public health bodies and NHS trusts who had the local knowledge and flexibility to respond in their areas. Many local areas, Cumbria among them have instituted their own measures to plug the gaps in the national system. Labour should be trumpeting these from the rooftops as the way forward.

Instead the Tories still maintain a lead over Labour in the opinion polls. How can that be with over 300,000 confirmed cases and at least 46,000 deaths making us one of the worst affected countries in the world? Shouldn’t Labour be storming ahead in the polls? Some on the left take the view that Starmer is a closet Blairite who is incapable of opposing the Tories because he is too right wing. They forget that Blair had no difficulty in exposing the inadequacies of the Tory government and achieving a landslide victory in 1997.

Johnson, paradoxically, has benefited from the pandemic itself. It is so unprecedented that his supporters can argue that he is doing the best he can in exceptional circumstances. In this they are assisted by a largely compliant media, Piers Morgan notwithstanding, including a BBC who, in a time of crisis, have assumed the role of state broadcaster. News bulletins often resemble public service announcements on behalf of the government rather than exercises in journalism. The government has also quite cynically used scientists as a human shield, claiming that they are following “the science” even when that science is heavily contested. Presenting themselves as defenders of the NHS and exploiting people’s feelings of solidarity, as expressed through “Clap for the carers” and the thank you NHS pictures that the nation’s furloughed schoolchildren have coloured and placed in their windows all contribute to a feeling that we are all in it together and any criticism is at best churlish and probably unpatriotic.

There is a political argument to be made that austerity has left this country poorly placed to meet the crisis. Government has been hollowed out. There is no capacity to deal with the crisis. The call to defend the NHS meant throwing care homes to the wolves. Sick people, some already infected with COVID19 were returned to care homes because there were not enough beds for them and the expected influx of fresh COVID19  patients. Nightingale hospitals were left empty because we did not have the resources to staff them. We now know that testing was stopped in the early stages of the crisis not because of science, as we were told, but because we did not have enough tests.

EMERGING FROM LOCKDOWN

The Labour Party wants children back at school because enforced absence impacts most heavily on the poor and disadvantaged. The government wants children back at school so their parents can go back to work and save the economy. I want children back at school because it is safe. We lack data about safety because schools closed so early in the crisis. But emerging data suggests that reopening the schools will create another vector for disease transmission. If we are to keep the infection rate low and preserve children’s life chances we may have to close down other vectors. There is a case for severely restricting the hospitality industry and supporting it with a sectoral furlough while easing restrictions in other parts of the economy. Labour’s message seems to be, “Get the children back to school.” I would prefer, “This is what we need to get the children back to school.”

There was some evidence of this in Starmer’s interview referenced above. But we need to take advantage of the easing of lockdown and the growing political debate about what happens in the future to hammer home our criticisms of the government. And it is not just mistakes. The care home scandal has been cited as a possible example of corporate manslaughter by no less a revolutionary hard left Trotskyite than Alistair Campbell.

Alastair Campbell says "we have to hold Boris Johnson personally culpable and the government culpable for tens of thousands of deaths…government departments can be liable for prosecutions for corporate manslaughter and that's what we're looking at now"@tvkev | @campbellclaret pic.twitter.com/UT2OtN9A4p

— TalkTV (@TalkTV) June 6, 2020

And now the PPE scandal is revealing potential evidence of corruption that would in ordinary times signal the end of ministerial careers, if not the government itself. If this government is failing in its duty to us, the citizens, and if it is to be seen to be failing, then it important for the Labour Party to be seen exposing that failure. Otherwise we may find ourselves being held to account for complicity in their failure.

THE FIRE NEXT TIME

Coming into this crisis mistakes were inevitable. This government was not alone in getting it wrong. Richard Horton has written a coruscating account of the failure of national leaders on the world stage to get it right. But we have all been on the learning curve. This was not a drill. We can expect a resurgence of Coronavirus this winter alongside the annual flu epidemic. There is unlikely to be a COVID19 vaccine by then. IF AND ONLY IF we have established supply chains and distribution networks for PPE, IF AND ONLY IF we have managed to suppress Coronavirus and have regional teams in place to test, track, trace and isolate, IF AND ONLY IF we are able to enforce local  lockdowns at a level of granularity that is beyond the reach of national government and underequipped call centre staff, then we stand a chance.

And IF AND ONLY IF we have a Labour opposition calling out government failures and arousing popular anger to hold the government to account, will we see the changes necessary to bring this about.

CONCLUSION

In the end the problem boils down to this. Starmer wants the votes of those people who did not trust Corbyn. His message to date is, “Trust me. I am not Corbyn. Labour is under new management.” But one judgement on the Coronavirus crisis from Deborah McKenzie that “hindsight helps you win the next battle, not the last one” applies equally to the battle ahead for the Labour Party. At the next election Starmer’s opponent will not be Corbyn. It will be Johnson or his successor. Instead of standing in opposition to Labour’s past he would be well advised to oppose the Conservative present if there is going to be a Labour future.