DOMINIC LAWSON: Starmer backed Corbyn while Sunak warned against Truss. It's clear which man really puts country before party
Nerve, cheek, chutzpah, call it what you will: Sir Keir Starmer has demonstrated that, for all the criticism of his woodenness, he has this particular political prerequisite in abundance.
It was hilariously demonstrated last week when the Labour leader denounced the Conservatives for putting forward ‘a Jeremy Corbyn-style manifesto where anything you want can go in it, none of it costed’.
This from the man who not only supported those Corbynite manifestos in 2017 and 2019, but later when campaigning to succeed him as Labour leader, Starmer eulogised the 2017 manifesto as ‘our foundational document’.
And they were, in a way, ‘costed’: proposals for higher income tax rates at the top level and new taxes on wealth and property were to fund the higher public expenditure promised. Keir Starmer supported all of that — and more.
After Corbyn had eradicated the Tories’ majority in the 2017 election, DOMINIC LAWSON says he finds it hard to believe that Sir Keir had totally written off his leader as a possible PM
Corbyn himself observed last week that at the shadow cabinet meetings which ‘unanimously’ agreed the 2019 Labour manifesto, ‘he was there’.
Corbyn was blocked from standing in this election as the Labour candidate for Islington North (which he had represented in Parliament for over 40 years), after the party’s National Executive Committee approved a motion that allowing him to stand would ‘significantly diminish’ Labour’s chances of ‘winning the next general election’.
This followed Corbyn’s suspension as a Labour MP for refusing to accept in full a report by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission critical of the party’s handling of complaints about anti-Semitism in its ranks.
Yet in the run-up to the 2019 election, when Andrew Marr asked Starmer if Corbyn was a ‘danger to the Jewish community’, Sir Keir replied vehemently: ‘I don’t accept that. I don’t accept that.’
Anyway, Starmer now contrasts his own treatment of his predecessor with Rishi Sunak’s in respect of Liz Truss, the woman he succeeded as leader of the Conservative Party.
On GB News, asked about his earlier backing of Corbyn, Starmer hit back: ‘Jeremy Corbyn will not stand as a candidate at the next election. This is a changed Labour Party. He [Sunak] is not able to say the same about his predecessor who smashed the economy . . .
‘If he was serious about the future, he would ensure that Liz Truss wasn’t a candidate at the next election.’
Indeed, there is a big difference between the two of them. Which is that while Starmer was fully behind Corbyn and his policies — campaigning for him to become prime minister — Sunak had fought (unsuccessfully) to stop Truss from reaching 10 Downing Street. And he did so precisely because, as he argued repeatedly, her proposed policies were financially irresponsible.
During the leadership campaign to replace Boris Johnson, Sunak (to the discomfiture of many Conservatives) had pointed out that Truss’s plans, if they were put into effect, ‘would mean increasing borrowing to historic and dangerous levels, putting the public finances in serious jeopardy and plunging the economy into an inflationary spiral’.
And as the PM told a discomfited Leader of the Opposition in the Commons only two months ago, after Starmer brought up the ‘kamikaze Budget’ of 2022: ‘Everyone knows that two years ago I wasn’t afraid to repeatedly warn what her economic policies would lead to, even if it wasn’t what people wanted to hear at the time.’
Unfortunately, it doesn’t make people think better of the Conservatives when Sunak says, in effect: ‘I cleared up the mess left behind by my predecessor.’ Most voters just remember the chaos.
Though Sir Keir’s claim that ‘the Tories crashed the economy’ is, in fact, untrue, no matter how many times he says it. There was no recession (unlike in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis, during Gordon Brown’s period of office).
Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the woman he succeeded as leader of the Conservative Party, and former PM Boris Johnson
There was a sudden seizure in the bond markets, as traders absorbed the extent of Truss’s profligacy — and the pound collapsed almost to parity with the dollar. This could have had even more dire inflationary consequences for British consumers, given that the oil price is dollar-denominated.
But the point is that Truss never got round to implementing her plan, because the market reaction to the Kwasi Kwarteng budget forced her to sack her Chancellor and appoint Jeremy Hunt, who immediately reversed — and Sunak took over at No 10 very soon after.
Sterling recovered almost equally promptly: it is now around $1.27 to the pound, and inflation is at ‘normal’ levels. Indeed, it is striking that in his manifesto, Starmer offers no distinct alternative to the macro-economic and tax policies of the Sunak-Hunt administration. If the economy is really ‘broken’, as Sir Keir claims, it is odd that he proposes to stick to the budgetary course set by the current administration.
Clearly, while still calling himself ‘a socialist’, Starmer has abandoned all the economic policies he supported during the elections he fought as an adjutant to Jeremy Corbyn, and — which is perhaps more interesting — policies he continued to endorse when he ran for the Labour leadership in 2020.
As Corbyn, who is now standing as an independent in Islington North, said last week of Sir Keir: ‘He actually complimented me on turning politics and the Labour Party ... onto progressive economics, announced that he was a good friend of mine and then stood for election on ten points, all of which were drawn from the [2019] manifesto. It’s rather strange.’
The ‘people’s Jeremy’ might well have added that, during the 2019 election, Starmer had told the nation that Corbyn would be ‘a great prime minister’.
When asked, repeatedly, by Sky TV’s Beth Rigby last week if he believed that at the time, Sir Keir robotically responded: ‘I was certain we would lose.’
He added: ‘I campaigned for Labour, of course I did . . . I wanted a party that was capable of being changed so that we can face the future again.’ Not sure what that means, if anything.
My request to any broadcaster who gets the chance to interview Sir Keir in the final leg of the campaign: please ask the Labour leader to say just what are the qualities of Jeremy Corbyn that led him to conclude that he would be a ‘great prime minister’ — even if Starmer really had thought Labour didn’t have a chance of winning in 2017 or 2019.
Although, after Corbyn had eradicated the Conservatives’ majority in the 2017 election, I find it hard to believe that Sir Keir had totally written off his leader as a possible PM, as he now claims.
It’s striking that, in the interview with Rigby, Starmer justified his earlier uncritical support for Corbyn — he remained in the shadow cabinet, when the likes of Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper refused to have anything to do with it — purely on the grounds of what was good for Labour at the time.
And it’s striking because now, at every opportunity, Sir Keir Starmer says that he is ‘putting country first, party second’. He did not do so in 2017 or 2019. Whereas Rishi Sunak, arguably, did, when in 2022 he vigorously denounced the risks that Liz Truss was to take with the country’s finances.
But Starmer is now proving that consistency is an overrated virtue — at least when it comes to politics.