Keir Starmer and the return of the culture wars

It’s the question every political strategist asks themselves. What is something that the public wants, is incredibly popular – and free? The answer, of course, is a good old-fashioned culture war. Amid ongoing questions about Labour’s commitment to its £28 billion ‘green new deal’, Sir Keir Starmer’s speech this morning eschewed talk of spending commitments. Instead, speaking at the Civil Society Summit in central London, he opted to defend supposedly ‘woke’ institutions against what he called the ‘weird McCarthyism’ of the Tory party.

Starmer’s argument was that the Conservatives have sought to clamp down on opposition voices in office by trying to find ‘woke agendas’ in British civic institutions. Examples include the government trying to ‘demean’ the National Trust’s work and only helping to ‘demonise’ the work of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) to save Channel migrants. Labour will ‘reset’ relations with the charitable sector if it wins the election, Starmer claimed, after the Tories’ attempts to wage ‘a war on the proud spirit of service in this country’.