(Bloomberg) — Keir Starmer will say his mission to reform the UK Labour Party is an “on steroids” version of Tony Blair’s rebrand of the opposition in the 1990s.
(Bloomberg) — Keir Starmer will say his mission to reform the UK Labour Party is an “on steroids” version of Tony Blair’s rebrand of the opposition in the 1990s.
The Labour leader’s current project goes “further and deeper” than when Blair in 1995 rewrote clause four of the party rule book to end its historic commitment to public ownership of key industries, Starmer will say in a speech on Saturday. That move became emblematic of Blair’s changes that took the party to power again after 18 years in opposition.
“This is about rolling our sleeves up, changing our entire culture – our DNA,” Starmer will tell the Progressive Britain Conference in central London, according to excerpts briefed by his office. “This is clause four – on steroids.”
Buoyed by success in last week’s local elections, Starmer is seeking to lead his party to victory in a national vote that’s expected next year, by which time Labour will have been in opposition for 14 years. But Blair himself warned in a Bloomberg TV interview that Starmer shouldn’t be complacent about Labour’s chances even after winning hundreds of council seats as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives shed more than 1,000.
There are still doubts as to whether Starmer can lead Labour to a resounding victory in a general election, and in the wake of the local vote, Sky News projected the opposition would win the most seats but fall short of an outright majority. Labour has also been buffeted this week by two claims of sexual misconduct against senior party officials, piling pressure on Starmer to root out bad behavior.
Corbyn
Starmer has been at pains to distance himself from his left-wing predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, in a bid to win support from Conservative voters. He’s already expelled Corbyn from the Parliamentary party and said he can’t stand for Labour at the next election. And by comparing his challenge to Blair’s in the 1990s, he’s likely to further alienate the left wing of the opposition party.
In his speech, he will underline that his vision for Labour is bigger than simply distancing the party from the Corbyn era. “This is about taking our party back to where we belong and where we should always have been, back doing what we were created to do,” he will say.
“If you think our job in 1997 was to rebuild a crumbling public realm, that in 1964 it was to modernize an economy overly dependent on the kindness of strangers, in 1945 to build a new Britain, in a volatile world, out of the trauma of collective sacrifice, in 2024 it will have to be all three.”
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