Labour needs a sense of social justice

Clement Attlee, in the words of Winston Churchill, was a modest man with much to be modest about. Labour’s postwar premier has been invoked as a role model by Keir Starmer recently, in the context of Attlee’s support for Nato and robustness on defence. Starmer’s allies also argue that, like Attlee, he is an unshowy middle-England moderate who prefers quiet efficiency to ideological flamboyance. His biographer, the always perceptive Tom Baldwin, has declared: ‘There is no such thing as Starmerism.’ Nor, we are told, will there ever be. Which is exactly how, why and where this government is going wrong.

A Tory government benefits from a sense of purpose; a Labour one cannot survive without one

Movements – and Labour is nothing if not a movement – need direction. Administrations need definition. Governments need a mission or they descend into reactive incoherence. Margaret Thatcher had such a purpose. John Major did not. He offered post-ideological government – and then found that without an ideology he couldn’t run a government. He was overwhelmed by events. He became boxed in by powerful institutions whose incentives were not aligned with his interests. And he allowed media figures who were not his allies to bully him into faux-macho positions – fighting a ‘beef war’ over Mad Cow Disease, for instance – which his old friends found inauthentic and unconvincing.

Starmer should attend to the lessons of Major’s locust years. His government needs a philosophy, a set of principles, an ideology. Indeed Starmer’s need is greater than Major’s was. A Conservative administration benefits from a sense of purpose; a Labour government cannot survive without one. Progressive politics needs a galvanising, uniting, liberating, crusading temper – the arc of history may be long, but if you are on the left, unless you are bending it towards justice, it will eventually smack you in the face.