Labour’s rhetorical black hole

Language is unravelling across the party.

Illustration John Holcroft / Ikon Images

When Keir Starmer appeared on the Football Clichés podcast in 2022 he listed “goals” as among his favourite features of the game. I get it, having long found “the chorus” to be my favourite aspect of “pop songs” (especially the really good ones!). But the leader of the Labour Party, interrogated about his lifelong passion, should perhaps be more careful to avoid such a clippable and risible answer. Labour has a language problem.

In the over-cited 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” George Orwell raised consternation with abstract and jargon-packed prose; bad ideas that were buried in obscure writing; lofty references that concealed base thinking. But the opposite – language weighed down by the banal literalisms of a legal mind – is bad for politics too. Keir Starmer is far removed from the political enemies of Orwell’s imagination. He is nevertheless running a party stymied by its own rhetorical failings.

The Prime Minister has changed little since his “I like goals” overture. On the far-less-scrutinised opposition benches, his plain style was praised as “methodical” and “forensic”. But now he is in power and has a course to steer, it has been recast as “uncharismatic” and “boring”, focus-grouped and buttoned-up, evasive and managerial. Good language cannot make up for bad policy, but Labour has found the inverse problem just as salient: even good policy will fail to land if conveyed via bad language.

This substance-language gap was on full display in the comedown of the riots this summer, a moment that revealed Starmer’s rhetorical limitations. Anyone would have sympathy for a prime minister whose honeymoon was truncated so aggressively by the sight of ethno-nationalist disturbances on England’s suburban streets. And Starmer was decisive in the aftermath, visible as a leader, drawing on his experience as director of public prosecutions in response to the 2011 riots. Even the Conservatives had little to criticise.

But in the following weeks and months Starmer missed an opportunity. The riots were a national crisis that could have been used as a vehicle for a coherent national story; an opportunity to reach into the past and examine how Britain ended up here; to ventriloquise the motivations of the rioters and gesture towards new leadership. Instead, the latter half of this summer was defined by winter fuel cuts and the spectre of freezing pensioners.

Starmer stands apart from his predecessors as uniquely indisposed to spinning grand media narratives. Boris Johnson relied on a kind of patrician rizz to bring the country along with him (when the Sun asked him how he unwound at the end of the day he said: “a bit of Greek lyric poetry, nothing complicated”); Gordon Brown struggled in the Treasury but electrified the nation with diatribes against Scottish independence; Tony Blair had a unique ability to introduce phrases into the lexicon (“education, education, education”); David Cameron’s “he was the future once” quip must haunt any ageing parliamentarian.

The diagnosis is simple, but there are few reassuring solutions. Starmer came to party politics too late. The years spent as DPP – where a single misplaced word or clumsily rendered sentence could collapse a case – formed his disposition. His politics are those of a man more used to committing words to paper than riffing on air, someone who assumes the media is populated by charlatans who can largely be ignored. It makes for an excellent adviser to anxious police services in a fragile Northern Ireland, but a rather hopeless laureate for the United Kingdom’s political fortunes.

And there has been scant success in injecting whimsy into his speech. At the recent investment summit, Starmer’s team ventured down the cliché mine. Labour wants to prepare Britain for growth by “mowing the grass on the pitch”, “making sure the changing rooms are clean and comfortable” and that “the training ground is good”, so when all is said and done, the businesses of this country are… “match fit”. Politics – a game of two halves, eh?

Language is unravelling across the party, not solely because of Starmer’s hackneyed style. Over the summer the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, declared her indifference to “beauty” when it came to housing strategy (an instance of linguistic nihilism that seems to inform policy). Minister for women and equalities Bridget Phillipson recently tweeted “our state schools need teachers more than private schools need embossed stationery” (as though to ascribe an implicit moral failing to privately educated children). And it seems no one in the upper tranches of the party can precisely define what they mean by a “working person”, despite the phrase having been a central feature of their rhetorical framework ahead of the Budget.

Orwell’s criticisms needn’t worry Starmer. But he may wish to take note of George Steiner’s 1961 treatise “The Death of Tragedy”. Steiner lamented a body politic that was “no longer spontaneous or responsive to reality” but instead frozen around a “core of dead rhetoric”. This is precisely where the Labour Party finds itself: staring down the camera with every chance to tell a good story, but with no idea what to say.