Same Old Short-Term Politics

If your positive message lacks credibility, your attack won't work either

Shortly after Keir Starmer finished his glitter-interrupted conference speech on Tuesday, the Conservative Party’s Twitter account posted this graphic:

Alongside the graphic, the party tweeted: “Keir Starmer's hour-long #Lab23 speech was more of the same old short-term approach that has dominated politics for the last 30 years. Only @RishiSunak and the Conservatives offer the long-term leadership that the country needs for a brighter future.”

Let’s leave to one side the fact that this is quite a good photo of Keir Starmer. The bigger question is: really?

We can learn a lot from the ways political parties choose to characterise and attack their opponents - almost as much as we can learn from the ways they talk about themselves. No attack line exists in isolation. And every attack line is a political and strategic choice, which closes off some alternative choices. If you choose to say A, that’s fine - but it means you can’t say B.

It’s easy to see why the Conservatives have chosen to attack Starmer’s Labour as short-termist. It is the logical dividing line that flows from the claim that they themselves are making Long-Term Decisions For A Brighter Future. And this in turn, by all accounts, comes directly from the Prime Minister himself, and his own perception of what he is doing and how it differs from the approach of his predecessors in both parties. 

There are at least two problems with this. One is that it is demonstrably untrue of the Conservatives, and another is that it is demonstrably untrue of Labour. 

Rishi Sunak may sincerely intend the decisions he is making now - on net zero, on HS2, on education reform - to stand for decades to come. And they might all be good decisions. But what they have in common is that they represent significant changes in policy direction which will necessarily be short-term until they have been in place for decades. A prime minister who chops and changes is only distinguishable in retrospect from one who announces a series of long-term changes in direction and sticks with them. Everything's a long-term decision until somebody changes it. Nothing's a long-term decision unless nobody does.

Meanwhile, it is of course possible that Labour’s agenda, if Labour forms a government, will fail, that it will have to change direction, and even that a Starmer-led administration will find itself changing and changing and changing again, buffeted by events and by failures of policy. It is possible. But for now, its agenda is not short-termist. It is explicitly a two-term project. Look at Keir Starmer’s conference speech:

But there’s no magic wand here. A decade of national renewal. That’s what it will take.

We will need ambition, determination, patience – absolutely. 

But also bravery. Because it’s brave to reject the hope of the easy answer. Courageous to choose instead the hope of the hard road.  

But if we give Britain the certain destination. If we walk step by step with working people. Bulldoze through the barriers in their way. Lay secure foundations at their feet. Mission Government our guide. Then yes, we can get our future back. 

You can disagree with this stuff. You can think that Labour’s policy prescriptions are inadequate to the challenges they are supposed to solve. You can argue against them. But what you cannot do with credibility is claim that they are short-termist on their face.

Dividing lines have to be credible. They have to be rooted in evidence. I mean this quite literally: they need footnotes, that a political party can show when required even if it doesn’t put them at the bottom of the posters. And they have to reflect what the public thinks or can realistically be persuaded to think.

There is a germ of a way for the Conservatives to make the short-termism attack on Labour stick, and it lies in the main criticism Keir Starmer gets from the left: he has changed his mind so often, they can say, that he can’t be trusted to stick to the decisions he is setting out now. The decisions he makes now are the same old short-term politics, and the reason we know this is that the decisions he made when running for leader turned out to be the same old short-term politics. This is an attack which has footnotes, and while Starmer and other Labour spokespeople do have defensive lines to take (in brief: times have changed and so have we) it does make them visibly uncomfortable when they have to deploy them.

But again, a focus on this is fraught with difficulty for the Conservatives. For one thing, these are pretty much all examples of Starmer moving away from more left-wing positions towards less left-wing positions. To the extent that the Tories have a view on them at all, they think Starmer is more right now than he was then. And Starmer’s critics on the left, inconveniently for the Tories, are not arguing that there is a risk that if he wins he will turn out to be more left-wing in office after all (there’s an argument that Starmer’s critics on the left might profitably spend more time thinking about how he might be persuaded to be more left-wing in office than assuming he is unpersuadable, but let’s leave that to one side for now). 

For another thing, the period of Conservative-led government from 2010-23, and especially since the 2019 election, can hardly be characterised by steadfast policy consistency. Just after Conservative Party conference Transport Secretary Mark Harper tweeted a video, presumably made inside CCHQ, with the caption “What does Sir Keir Starmer think about HS2? It’s anyone’s guess”. It showed that Keir Starmer has taken a number of inconsistent positions on HS2, and exhibited genuinely impressive video archive work - something much more common in US than UK politics, and worth watching out for in the run-up to the election. But its power was undermined by the inconvenient fact that Conservative ministers, including Mark Harper, had been committed to HS2 going all the way to Manchester until the previous week. What do the Tories think about HS2? It’s anyone’s guess.

This is why a political party’s attack strategy has to be intimately bound up with its positive messages, and why its positive messages have to be created with an eye on what their implications are for the attack strategy. Without weaving the two together, attacks can be rebutted with the frustratingly effective response familiar to anyone who has ever been in a playground: I know you are, but what am I?

This is a new Substack, and this is my first post, so who knows what will happen to it? But my hope is that it will contain regular reflections on political attack, with each post taking a recent example of a party’s attack material and discussing what it implies and what it can tell us about UK politics more widely. I don’t claim to be non-partisan: I spent ten years working for the Labour Party from 2008-18, much of that time in attack-focused roles (keen students of politics will count Labour’s election wins over that period and draw their own conclusions about how good I was at my job). But although this first post looks at some weaknesses in Conservative attack, I expect to use future posts to discuss what we can learn about Labour’s and other parties’ strengths and weaknesses from what they choose to say about their opponents.

If you subscribe - it’s free, and realistically it’s going to stay free - that will help to prompt me to write more of this stuff, and also you’ll get emails or something.

Also, if you liked this, you might also enjoy Punch & Judy Politics: An Insiders’ Guide to Prime Minister’s Questions, which I co-wrote with Ayesha Hazarika after we both spent years working together on PMQs. I have been criticised in the past for modestly missing opportunities to plug my own book, so there’s me immodestly not missing one.

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