The UK opposition leader has taken a leaf out of Tony Blair's book with a new centrist manifesto.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer's 35-page credo The Road Ahead was leaked on social media on Wednesday night, two days before it was due for publication by the Fabian society, on the eve of the party's conference.
While insisting the UK was a second-rate country under Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative Government, Starmer set out to steal BoJo's Tory-blue clothes.
In a return to former PM Tony Blair's 'triangulation' of popular Conservative policies, Starmer backs the the toughening of sentences for violent and sexual offenders — contained in the government's new policing legislation that Labour has blown hot and cold over — and calls for the state and business to work as "partners".
But the leader's big idea is what he calls the "contribution society" — inspired he says by key workers "just doing their job" during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"This isn’t about being Pollyannish or sentimental," Starmer wrote. "It is about the idea of a society based on contribution: being part of something bigger, playing your part, valuing others not just because of what they can offer you."
While claiming that "years of Brexit gridlock put enormous stress on our country" and vowing to "fix the holes in the shoddy Brexit deal", the Europhile Labour leader claims to have undergone an about face to supporting Britain's exit from the European Union (EU).
"The desire of people across the country to have real power and control — expressed most forcibly in the Brexit vote — remains unmet," Starmer claims in his criticism of Johnson.
Starmer made no reference to a September 2019 Labour conference speech, in which the then-shadow-Brexit secretary urged members to vote for a policy of re-running the 2016 EU membership referendum — and stated he would campaign to stay in the bloc.
Newspaper columnist Iain MacWhirter stated that Starmer's 'mom and apple pie' list of values left no clarity between him and Johnson.
The Fabian Society was launched in 1884, and was one organisation involved in forming the Labour Party in 1906, and its predecessors, the Independent Labour Party Labour Representation Committee. In contrast to mass trade unions, the early Fabians were primarily wealthy and well-educated members of the middle-class.
Conference Controversies
Starmer is thought to be in for a rough ride at the five-day Labour conference in the Sussex seaside town of Brighton, the first live face-to-face party gathering since he assumed leadership in April 2020.
The left of the party is organising to block the confirmation of the acting general secretary, David Evans, for the job of Labour's administrative chief. Evans has acted as Starmer's 'hit-man', purging individual members, including previous leader Jeremy Corbyn, proscribing four left-wing factions with a combined membership of some 1,000, and banning party branches from debating a range of issues.
Food workers' union BFAWU has timed the vote of a special congress on disaffiliating from Labour over its own president's possible expulsion under that ruling, to coincide with the Labour conference.
The left are also expected to push for reinstating the party whip to Corbyn, amid anger over cancelled disciplinary probes into a left-wing Labour MP and the chair of the party's youth wing.
The leadership also wants to change the party rulebook to abandon the 'one member, one vote' system of electing leaders, adopted under Ed Milliband's leadership, in favour of an 'electoral college' in which the party's roughly half-million members have only one-third of the vote, with its 199 MPs and affiliated trade unions an equal share of the vote.
Super-union Unite's new general secretary, Sharon Graham, is against the move, while GMB angrily denied claims by Guardian columnist and Labour Party member Owen Jones that it had struck a backroom deal to support the move in return for ditching Green New Deal policies — although Jones' since-deleted tweet was cribbed off Novara Media founder Aaron Bastani.
A YouGov poll on Thursday suggested Starmer has an uphill battle to win over the electorate, with only four-fifths of those who voted Labour under Corbyn's leadership in 2019 indicating they would do so again.