What does the Labour party stand for? That’s the big question that Keir Starmer needs to answer this week, and so far it’s proving rather more difficult to answer than you might imagine. Its frontbenchers are mostly working on policies that won’t be announced this week, so they are resorting to talking about the party’s heritage and listing the increasing number of elections the party has lost. A line that I’ve heard from a number of shadow ministers on the fringe over the past few days is ‘we need to learn from the losses of 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019’. I’ve heard rather fewer assertions about winning the next election, though. And where there are announcements they seem entirely random rather than part of a wider attempt to tell voters what kind of party Labour is under Starmer.
Last night at a fringe meeting organised by the Fabian Society, the woman in charge of Labour’s policy review, Anneliese Dodds, didn’t offer many clues about where the party is headed either.
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