It is a brave move for a politician to do an LBC phone-in, and not just because the territory is haunted by the ghost of Nick Clegg’s political career: Keir Starmer has a monthly slot, at the job-interview hour of 9am on a Monday, which started this week. Some of it, he handled very deftly. He neatly swivelled a question about the teaching unions and whether or not they had behaved the right way over schools reopening towards a criticism of the prime minister.
Other answers enraged elements of the left, such as when he decried the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol on Sunday. It was actually more nuanced than that, since he started by saying the statue should have been taken down years ago, as there was no place in the 21st century for the glorification of slavers. His was not a classic establishment line, but it was certainly cautious, and overall if his intention had been to dispel this impression of himself – caution, and a lack of fireworks – then it didn’t succeed. That was not, I think, his intention. Rather, he wanted to underline that he was the grownup in the room, and that he had been the grownup in many important rooms of the recent past. The image he crafted was not so much man-of-the-people as adult-among-children (the children, here, being other politicians, rather than the people calling in).
Relatedly, earlier this month the shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds, in discussion with James Meadway, a former policy adviser to John McDonnell, raised the issue of what voters actually wanted from the Labour party. They didn’t want grand economic visions of the future, she said, they wanted to see competent, sober-minded politicians asking searching questions about the policies affecting people today: the furlough scheme, immigrants’ access to benefits, unemployment. Meadway, surprisingly, agreed, adding that most of the “grand visions” ascribed to the previous Labour leader were really just imputed: Corbyn didn’t release Labour’s economic blueprint until a few weeks before each election. You can cover a surprising amount of distance, in vision terms, just by looking like the kind of person who probably has one.
I would argue that it’s always worthwhile having a structured, ambitious and coherent programme for change, imminent election or no. But right now, in political terms, it’s the only vaccine that will drag us out of this chaos. The relationship between the state and the market has completely changed, in the simplest possible terms because the government is paying many people’s wages. A vast Keynesian stimulus was needed, and it materialised – but the Conservatives, having no alternative economic future they want to build, are just paying their rent with their credit card, muttering darkly about the almighty debt to be met at the end of it.
The opposition cannot deal with that on an issue-by-issue basis, or it will find itself complaining about government parsimony one minute, and profligacy the next. It has to start asking serious questions about what state spending is for – about social security, about corporate welfare, about public services. This will bring it to another seismic shift of the crisis: the realisation that the jobs previously considered low-skilled are actually just poorly paid, that the workers habitually denigrated for their low aspirations are actually the most necessary, not to mention courageous, people in the economy. You could test and retest this with Social Attitudes surveys, but there is no more powerful symbol of it than the fact that Anisa Omar, a Waitrose cashier, was on the cover of Vogue. A huge number of political precepts – the distinction between strivers and shirkers, the endless argument about contributory versus universal benefit systems, concepts that were always more difficult and divisive for Labour than for the Conservatives – are swept away by this change, but the new possibilities it creates have to be articulated before they evaporate.
It is understood that an opposition must craft itself as a government-in-waiting. But how long is it prepared to wait? “Fixed-term Parliaments Act,” people will say, rolling their eyes, as if anyone who doesn’t accept the current reality until 2024 must be naive. We’ve had three elections in the nine years since that act was passed, so it’s really no more meaningful than a debating point. Starmer and his shadow cabinet all seem focused on presenting their level heads, rather than their blue-sky thinking, and the message discipline is, I suppose, laudable.
But when you bring a mature eye to a shambolic government, it becomes frankly irresponsible to abide by these conventions of realism and sobriety. You can’t “hold to account” a government that isn’t truthful. You can’t “not interrupt your enemy while he makes a mistake”, when that mistake is measured in deaths. You have to think bigger than critique.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist