Sorry Keir Starmer, the people don’t want more power, they just want better politicians

The lot in life of a would-be Labour leader in January 2020 is a difficult one.

All sounds emanating from within the party agree quite rightly that it must “reconnect” with the public as a matter of urgency.

But the public has made abundantly clear that it does not want to be reconnected with.

It shouldn’t be controversial, or a slight on the good name of Brexiteers, to say that the public knows more about Brexit – about the customs union, the single market, alignment, divergence and all the rest of it – than it did at the time it voted for it.

It also shouldn’t be controversial to suggest what all polling on the subject also suggests – that the public, on balance, accepts there will be an economic cost to Brexit, but that it wants it done anyway.

It is not an unfair interpretation of the 2019 general election result, and the vindication of the promise to “Get Brexit done”, to say that it was the public literally paying the politicians to go away.

Here. Take my money. Just leave me alone. I can’t take any more. It was a vote to be put out of one’s misery. It was the mangled fox, limping and howling all the way to the polling station to cast its desperate vote for the Please Come Back And Reverse Over Me Party.

As far as the public is concerned, the torture is now over. Our fate is sealed.

It is, in short, a difficult time to be reaching again for the torturer’s instruments, as Keir Starmer, in particular, seems so desperate to do.

If the question is: How do we win back voters who have just voted to make themselves poorer and their lives harder as a willing price to pay for a moment’s peace from us?

It is fair to suggest that the answer, perhaps, is not the one Starmer has come up with and has launched today. Which is – deep breath now – “a new constitutional settlement ... building a new long-term political and constitutional consensus ... built on the principle of federalism.”

This, apparently, is “the only way to restore trust in politics”. Starmer wants more power for local and regional authorities, a proper federal structure of government for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and so on and so forth and stop me if you think that you have heard this one before.

Empowering him and her, devolving this and that, is a noble sentiment. In theory, everybody likes democracy. But in practice, there is no shortage of evidence that people frankly do not want more politics in their lives. This has been tried in recent years, with, for example, regions electing their own police and crime commissioners, and absolutely nobody voting for any of them.

In 2002, the people of Hartlepool responded to the thrilling obligation of being able to directly elect their own mayor by returning to office a man dressed up in the official monkey costume of the local football club. When, in 2009, he was re-elected for a third consecutive term, the council responded – not entirely unfairly – by abolishing the position.

Of course, Starmer knows that Labour has no hope of governing again unless it wins back support in Scotland, and though you can’t blame a man for trying, it is hard to see that this is the answer. Way back in 1997, many Scottish unionists could be found warning that ultimately devolution would be the gateway to independence – that given more power, the SNP would only ever use its power to further its sole objective. Such warnings were not without merit.

It is very hard to see how a federal UK would return centre-left SNP-minded voters to the Labour fold. It is easier to see how it would assist the nationalist cause.

More generally, it’s not actually simply the case that voters want to be left alone.

The trust that has been lost in politics is simultaneously very easy to restore and nigh on impossible. You just need trustworthy politicians. You cannot give the voters a choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson and expect them to respond with anything other than revulsion.

It is distinctly possible that politics is about to re-enter a more normal, more boring phase. A government with a majority, going about its business, and an opposition with a leader, capable of scrutinising it.

Should Starmer win the Labour leadership race, he will find he doesn’t have to think that hard about how to restore people’s faith in politics. Not being Corbyn will be transformative enough, as will running a functioning opposition.

That, really, is all that the people want: confidence in the people they vote for to do their job, not more of that responsibility devolved to them. It may just be that Starmer is the answer to his own problem.

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