Andy Maciver: Sir Keir must do more than say 'we are not the Tories’

With hindsight, the last Conservative government did precisely that for 14 years. Mr Cameron was a bit better than Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. Theresa May and Boris Johnson were a lot better than Jeremy Corbyn. However, the lesson we can learn is that if you really believe in change, if you really believe in legacy, and if you really back yourself, you can win because you are you, not because you are not the other guy.

Read more

• Independence may be down but it's not out

• Firework bans are a must, but what about proper Glasgow Bonfire Night?

That is the experience of Mrs Thatcher. And, perhaps more pertinently for Sir Keir, it is the experience of Mr Blair. Extremely rare in politics, Mr Blair was both a good Leader of the Opposition and a good Prime Minister, two very different jobs. He created ripples of hope as Leader of the Opposition and turned them into a wave of optimism as he was propelled into Downing Street, three times.

People talk about Sir Keir being the heir to Blair. So far, this is an unsubstantiated desire (or fear, depending on which side of the political fence you sit, reader). So how can he make it happen?

By doing three things. Firstly, he must redefine his purpose. His 72 days in office have been relentlessly negative, bemoaning his Tory inheritance and appearing almost as a reluctant CEO employed to turn around a failing business. Every new government does this to some degree; it is a political trick as old as time to exaggerate the awful mess that has been left, and then extract maximum credit for a swift tidy-up. But this has been going on too long, and risks becoming baked into his style of government in the long term.

Bobby Kennedy, borrowing from George Bernard Shaw, was fond of saying that “some men see things as they are and ask why; I dream of things that never were and ask why not?”. Sir Keir should put this on his office wall and start living it.

Redefining his purpose means that he is not reducing the number of pensioners entitled to winter fuel allowance because he has been forced by his fiscal constraints; he is doing it because it is a badly targeted benefit and many of its recipients are too wealthy to be subsidised by taxpayers.

He should be saying that in our country, for the first time, the working generation may grow old poorer than their parents, and that this is morally wrong. He should be saying that his welfare state will support people who need it, not people who want it or like it. That his fairer Britain will protect the people who need protected but release the workers of our country to grow the economy, to earn more, and pay more tax, and therefore provide more help to the people who really need it.

Read more

• Andy Maciver: Mayors are the opportunity from this week’s chaos
• Andy Maciver: Cheer up, nationalists... you might still win

Promoting intergenerational fairness and protecting the vulnerable, underpinned by economic growth, has been a successful strategy for centre-left parties all over Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, and there is no reason why it cannot be the same for Sir Keir.

Secondly, he must carry out his purpose in practice. A cursory glance at the UK’s expenditure would tell a high school economics student that the bill for welfare and healthcare is unsustainable, and there will be a time when the country will simply collapse under its weight. It must be reduced, and not by a small amount.

The reactionary forces in politics will immediately tell us that this cannot happen without harming people, but Sir Keir is smart enough to know that these reactionary forces are wrong, and he has a large enough majority, with a weak enough opposition, to ignore them.

He made a good start this week, in his groundbreaking speech about the state of the National Health Service. With Wes Streeting, the most honest Health Secretary I have seen in my lifetime, he has been unafraid to say that despite receiving more taxpayer funding than ever before, the NHS is broken, unafraid to say that there will be no more money without reform.

There is no reason to believe this would be unpopular outside the political bubble. Polling by YouGov, released yesterday, shows that two-thirds of people think NHS services are bad, with only a quarter believing they are good, an almost mirror image of sentiment only a few years ago. Only one-in-five believe the NHS is better than other European health systems.

(Image: Tony Blair)

They’re right; we pay slightly above the OECD average for healthcare, yet have fewer beds, fewer doctors, less kit, and demonstrably poorer health outcomes. There would be no more meaningful legacy than redesigning healthcare.

Thirdly, Sir Keir has the ability to restore pride in his country and that opportunity could come after November 5th, when the US elects its next president. The world will be better if Kamala Harris is its pre-eminent leader, but it will not be fixed by a president who clearly lacks depth in the large number of areas outside her comfort zone.

A complex world with President Harris, who has limited global experience and knowledge, President Macron, who has self-sabotaged and may struggle to recover, and Chancellor Scholz, who is largely anonymous and battling on the home front, is a roll in need of a filling.

There is no reason whatsoever that Sir Keir cannot become the calm, intelligent, respected leader who can define a new role for a post-Brexit Britain, leading efforts against the triple-threats of China, Russia and Iran.

Someone has to. And whilst today Sir Keir is simply not “the other guy”, he can yet be remembered as “the guy”.