Is Keir Starmer just good old Clark Kent? Or is there more to him?

The Labour leader's Five Missions is a management blueprint utterly lacking in soul. He has to do better.

The Labour party’s blueprint for government – Five Missions for Britain - is just under 2000 words long. The word ‘poverty’ appears once - in an oblique reference to New Labour’s failed pledge, in 1997, to end child poverty within a generation.

The words ‘disabled’, ‘mental health’, ‘inequality’ or ‘housing’ don’t appear at all. Neither does racism. There’s some good stuff in Five Missions: devolving power, making government accountable, green jobs, policies for the long-term.

But it’s a document largely about how to manage change. How to get things done. It’s McKinsey disguised as policy. It’s a cart before the horse. It’s also a document utterly devoid of soul.

Three years on from his election as leader after the unelectable Jeremy Corbyn led Labour to its 2019 pasting, Starmer has yet to pin his colours to the mast. What kind of country does he want to build?

Does this conscientious, plodding, conformist lawyer conceal an insurrectionist with a scorching progressive programme for government in his back pocket? Or is this it? Does Starmer have an inner Superman or will he forever be Clark Kent?

Voters who consider themselves politically homeless – and I’m one of them – would dearly like to know the answer. If Labour is elected – as seems likely – what flavours are we going to get? Social democracy with a proper regard for those who need a leg up? Or Tory-lite and more of the same with a bit of empathy on the side?

The answer to this question will determine whether the man gets not just a proper majority to do what needs to be done but also a second term without which lasting change is unattainable. No clear answer to the above will encourage tactical voting, weak government, short-termism, boom bust economics and instability. We’ve had enough of that to last two lifetimes.

What kind of country does Keir Starmer want to build?

So far Starmer has assiduously followed the politician’s version of the original Hippocratic oath to ‘ do no harm’. This diffident approach has had some success. Corbynism is banished. The party is rehabilitated. Labour is on 45% in the polls, the Tories on 27%. A majority beckons, possibly a thumping one.

Five Missions says its top priority is securing the highest sustained growth in the G7. Fair dos. Without growth we can’t fix the deep-seated problems that bedevil our economy, scar our cities and hobble our public services.  

But what would be the point of a Labour government if it doesn’t seek, as one of its core missions, to break the cycle of struggle and poverty that blights the country?

Where is the clear, blue water that sets apart a party whose driving impulse is profit – and in its present incarnation narrow nationalism – and one whose mission is to make life better for the majority?

Britain is not the only rich country that is also, in part, shockingly poor. However the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s 2023 look at poverty in the UK suggests real poverty is deepening alarmingly.

Around 13m people including 3.9m children and nearly 2m pensioners are poor.  As the foundation points out poverty is a complex issue with a wide range of causes.  But broadly we’re talking about in-work or non-retired individuals and families whose income is less than 60% of the median income-  so around £20,000 a year or less than £400 a week.

The most shocking numbers are those around what is known as deep poverty or destitution. People who can’t cope. People who are one step away from disaster. This is defined as people with an income of less than 40% of the median, so around £13,500 a year or £36 a day. Their number has increased from 4.7 million in 2002 to 6.5 million in 2020.

In families with at least one member with a disability the numbers who can’t struggle jumps to 15% or 2.3 million people. By and large people with a disability earn less. And being disabled is more expensive: wheelchairs, housing, special diets, healthcare all cost more.

Which, the consumer magazine, recently calculated that supermarket inflation in staple foods had risen by between 17% - 80% in just a few months.

When the price of budget cheddar cheese at Asda rises by 80% in three months, porridge by 35% and sliced white broad by up to 67%, how do you manage as a single mother with two kids and inflation is eating away at everything: wages, benefits, savings?

Rents are at their highest on record. Rightmove, the online estate agent, says that rents in London jumped by 15% over the past year. The average asking rent in the rest of the country was up by 9.7%

The ultra-Tory narrative ( Lee Anderson but he’s not alone) is that the poor are either deserving or undeserving. In my limited experience this is rubbish.

My local food bank is attended not by scroungers but mostly by working people down on their luck: single parents who can’t heat their home, pay their rent, buy the essentials for their kids. They certainly can’t do all three at once.

A sudden twist of fate- redundancy, illness, long Covid – leaves them facing insecurity, uncertainty and marginalisation because they’ve gone from getting by to not managing. They are stigmatised.

Poverty is not the only challenge Britain faces: fixing the NHS, getting the trains to run on time, patching up the Union, balancing the books, making sure we’re strong enough to deal with external threats, sorting out our depressingly corrupt police forces, tackling cronyism, healing the deep wounds of Brexit are all first order priorities.

Thirteen years of messy, divisive, occasionally unhinged Tory rule has left Britain poorer, more fractious, less secure and more alienated from its natural allies than ever.

Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves says her party will ‘ put working people first’. Fine. People who work are the engine of growth. But this line is borrowed from the Tories in their (unsuccessful) attempt to portray striking workers as layabouts. Or people on benefits as over-indulged scroungers.

It’s a mistake just as the most recent attack advertisements that suggest Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is soft on paedophiles is a (serious) mistake. It is unworthy of a great, reforming party.

Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour Party and its first MP, grew up in abject poverty and died in destitution. The illegitimate son of a farm girl and a miner who wanted nothing to do with him, he worked in the Lanarkshire pits from the age of 10.

The mournful-looking pioneer started a movement that over the next century delivered huge, meaningful change to every corner of Britain: the Wheatley Act that kickstarted social housing; the NHS and the Welfare State; the Minimum Wage; abolishing capital punishment; decriminalising male homosexuality;  relaxing divorce laws; limiting immigration; liberalising birth control and abortion laws.

If and when Starmer becomes Prime Minister he will have his hands full just to keep things ticking over: stagnant productivity, run-down public services, hostile global economic weather, Ukraine, the looming challenge posed by China. Money will be tight. It always is. But you still need a vision.

Keir Hardie once said “ I am of the unfortunate class who never knew a childhood.” What will his namesake do for them?