Last Thursday (5 January), Keir Starmer took control of the slogan “take back control”, as the catchy title for Labour’s plan for devolution. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that journalists reacted as if this was all about Brexit. But politics did not start in 2016. This move was effective long before Dominic Cummings boiled it down to those three notorious words. It neatly puts an insurgent party on the side of the “British people” against a small, over-dominant group who are holding the country back and who need to be dethroned.
In 1945, the Labour manifesto railed against the force of finance which had “control of the government… the banks, the mines, the big industries”. Labour invited voters to take back control – and won a landslide. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher told the public that winter strikes had revealed trade union tyranny: “We all saw at first hand that power and felt our own powerlessness.” People should use their votes to reassert their power.
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