The Labour leader has blocked every exit for the Conservatives, who are stuck with a duff prime minister and a broken party
“Security. Prosperity. Respect.” Keir Starmer appeared in Birmingham on Tuesday to lay out his offer to the country. It is always, if you care about the Labour party, nerve-racking to hear its leader make an account of its core values, though nothing will ever match the dispiriting moment before the 2015 leadership election, when it named one of its core values as “having strong values”.
Shelving, very briefly, the question of who is and who isn’t centrist enough for the country, values are like an octave, or a deck of cards: they are fixed in number, at least the acceptable ones; they are always the same. “Another C sharp, another jack of diamonds,” you think. “Big wow.” It’s only once you’re in the middle of a game that any of them become precious or meaningful, and for far too long the Conservatives have been writing the rules. “Labour values” such as equality were effortlessly lifted, to become “levelling up”. The progressive party flailed to adapt – what next, are we all leveller uppers now? Do we level down? – not realising that the rules were always changing, and now jokers were wild in play too. The way to win against the Conservatives was not to find better, different, newer, or more traditional, or more decisive, or more interpretable values. It was to divest the Conservatives of the legitimacy of their rulebook.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
