Government, Keir Starmer said as he stood on the steps of Downing Street as Prime Minister for the first time last week, should “treat every single person with respect”. “Whether you voted Labour or not,” he went on, “especially if you did not, I say to you directly, my government will serve you.”
This should be no big deal: it’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to say when you win an election. Margaret Thatcher said something similar in her “where this is discord, may we bring harmony” speech, and it’s fair to say that neither her record as Prime Minister, nor the fact Starmer is channelling her words, are likely to convince those who feel suspicious about the new guy’s promises of unity.
But it felt striking nonetheless, because it made such a change of tone from what went before. The last Tory government did not think its job was to serve those who didn’t vote for it. The last Tory government seemed quite often to think its job was to punish those who had the gall to belong to hostile demographics. The last Tory government – how wonderful it still feels to use that phrase, even if “last” perhaps doesn’t carry the sense of “final” I’d been hoping for – was an object lesson in the political strategy of divide and rule.
This is not entirely new, of course – while “one nation” Toryism has a long and venerable history, so does the form of Toryism which is based on stirred up panic about enemies within. It may not have been obvious to, say, mining communities exactly how the aforementioned Thatcher government was serving them.
The modern Tory party, though, has grown increasingly explicit that it was more concerned about the interests of some groups of voters than others. George Osborne designed his programme of cuts to fall most heavily on those areas which were least likely to affect the party’s chances in 2015. There were numerous bad things about this strategy – but the worst, perhaps, is that it worked.
Then the referendum happened, and subtext became text. The will of the people had been invoked; those who opposed it could be safely dismissed, and the fact they made up nearly half the electorate no longer seemed to matter. It took several years of chaos to get there, but again, in 2019, this strategy seemed to work, and a Tory party that had spent years dismissing those who disagreed with its mission – up to and including its own MPs – was rewarded at an election with a majority.
Since then, there’s been little pretence. Older voters disapprove of working from home, so Tory ministers disapproved of it too. Older voters think too many young people are doing degrees? Ministers pursed their lips and agreed. The Conservative party became hyper-focused on the preferences and prejudices of those most likely to vote for it, until the final, most ludicrous offer of all: a Tory prime minister who had turned 18 a year after Britpop went off the boil, promised to bring back national service. We’ll never know now if he’d have actually done it. Thank god for that.
There are a few problems with this strategy. One is that governing for “your people” is all very well when they’re a constantly replenishing class interest. When the very policies your people want – most noticeably, never building a single bloody thing – locks the next generation out of that class, it places a fairly strict time limit on the strategy’s viability.
Another issue is that people don’t always want what they think they want. People may not like the disruption or expense of new prisons or pylons; they will, nonetheless, have views when the existing estate runs out of space, or their energy bill goes through the roof. At that point, claiming this is what they’d wanted all along will not necessarily save you.
And then there’s the fact that “our voters don’t care about this” slides fairly easily into “we can get away with this”. One reason for scandals like partygate is that the Tory party had lost any sense that there were some things you should not do, even if your voters won’t punish you for it. That meant they didn’t see it coming when the scandals finally did start cutting through.
Will Keir Starmer really, actually change this? Will his government genuinely govern as much for those who didn’t vote for it, as it does for those who did? In the long term, almost certainly not. For one thing, to govern is to choose – pretending otherwise is another way the Tories went wrong – and there will inevitably be people who feel like they’re on the wrong side of whatever choices a government must make. It’s all very well a prime minister claiming he’ll govern for the whole country – but if it’s your community which his government picks for that new prison, you may very well not feel he’s governing for you.
More than that, Starmer has already shown his own laser-like focus on the subset of voters required to win. There are those (the elderly people nauseatingly dubbed “hero voters”, who went from Labour to Brexit to the Tories) who’ve been coddled. There are others – those who feel strongly about events in Gaza; the full-fat left – he’s been happy to either passively neglect or actively kick.
Nonetheless: he said it. He acknowledged that the purpose of government is not merely suck up to your voters in the hope of another term. After the last 14 years, it’s a decent start.
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