Forget easy answers – Labour has no answers at all
Lots of rhetoric, not many policies. But there was a theme that resonated throughout: I may be dull but I am at your service. It wasn’t so much an apology for being boring as a full-blooded justification of it. I will not be a star performer, Sir Keir said in almost those words, but that is deliberate: I will dedicate myself to providing the quiet, calm, diligent resolution of the country’s problems.
“Service” was the word that came up repeatedly because it was, he said, the responsibility of power: it is what public office is about. So I may have no charisma but I am not in the business of clamouring for personal attention. You the people should be the stars of this show.
This is a rather clever pitch for a politician whose failure to excite any real enthusiasm has become notable. But there is a problem with this: it is not actually the case that calm and humble devotion is enough to provide national leadership. When there is a crisis – or even serious anxiety – the people who elected you expect more than dull plodding. They need inspiration: personality and magnetism are not optional extras. Saying that you are just going to get your head down and get on with the details is not sufficient for a leader of a democratic society.
There were a lot of compliments to the British people for their tolerance and their generosity of spirit which are certainly deserved, and they were used as a weapon against political opponents who sought to exploit resistance to migration. That is a legitimate argument but it was not altogether clear that there was a clear distinction between the resentment of mass migration (which he acknowledged and said he could understand) and the bigoted hostility which had erupted in the riots of the past summer.
Somehow he seemed to imply that the Tories’ Rwanda policy was exactly the same in its intent as the thugs who attacked asylum seekers. He offered no alternative disincentive to illegal migration and no detail at all on his campaign promise to “smash the gangs” of people smugglers.
There was one particularly ambiguous statement to the effect that if we want a process to cut illegal immigration we will have to accept that some people will be granted asylum. What does that mean? That Labour will just eliminate illegal migrants by granting them all asylum? An effective amnesty? His assertion that racist thugs do not represent the views of all those concerned about immigration is certainly true – but it wasn’t at all clear what followed from that in terms of actual policy.
The Tories he said had used the “politics of easy answers” but he seemed to offer no specific answers at all, even to the questions that he was posing himself. There was one alarming clue in his peroration. The difference between Labour and the Conservatives, he said, centred on the word “control”.
Tories, he said, were the party of the “uncontrolled market”. That meant, he implied, that they rejected controls of all kinds. (Neither of those statements is true, of course.) But if you want controlled immigration, you have “to take back control”.
Does this mean that he believes that taking control of our borders would require taking control of markets? Or what? Where is the equivalence here? He went on to say that working people – who are the only kinds of people Labour is interested in – want decisive government. Does that mean a government that takes control of things that had not been controlled before? If so, what exactly does he have in mind? He has yet to tell us.