Things Keir Starmer never said

On the difference between making things up and being invited to fill in the gaps

I was genuinely shocked this week by a misrepresentation of something Keir Starmer said.

No, not that one. Don’t worry, we’ll get to it. The one that really shocked me was in this graphic, tweeted by the Conservative Party:

The reason it shocked me is that when I first saw it, I assumed it was true. It’s a somewhat extreme and un-nuanced position for Starmer to have taken, I thought, and he might not have expressed himself as precisely as he should have done, I thought, but if the Tories have gone through the transcripts and put it on file and had someone with a job in political research approve it as something that could be attributed to him on an official Conservative Party channel, I thought, then he must have said it. I was wrong.

It’s not my belief that he’d said it that shocked me. It’s the fact that he didn't.

I can’t claim responsibility for debunking the alleged quote, because I didn’t check it; I trusted it. Not everyone was as lax as me. The tweet containing the graphic now has a community note on Twitter:

The community note includes a link, so you can check what Starmer said for yourself if you want to. The full quote, in context, is in Hansard:

We recognise that there are strong arguments for addressing skills gaps in our economy, but the Government have failed to do so, and much more needs to be done. That is why we believe that the Government should urgently focus on improving skills training and vocational education to address those skills gaps, but businesses and unions have made it clear that an arbitrary limit that cuts off skilled migrant workers is a form of economic vandalism. I remind Members of the Government’s impact assessment, which states that the impact will be a loss to the UK economy, on the figures I have seen, of £288 million over 10 years—that is the adverse impact on business.

This is absolutely a contestable argument, but what it isn’t is an argument that “any” restriction on economic migration is economic vandalism. It’s an argument that a particular kind of restriction on economic migration is economic vandalism. The claim that Keir Starmer said that ANY restrictions on economic migration is “economic vandalism” is a lie. It just is.¹

There’s a danger when you’re engaged in politics that you can think that your side are the goodies and the other side are the baddies. It can make you overlook or excuse bad behaviour on your side while claiming that equivalent behaviour by your opponents shows how terrible they are. So I’m not going to go so far as to claim that Labour has never characterised a Tory quote as egregiously falsely as this (although I don’t think this community-noted tweet, for example, is as egregious, and the correction was swift and funny).² But I am going to say this: when I was part of a Labour policy team whose job included cataloguing things that Conservative politicians said and sometimes pointing them out, it was always drummed into us that we must not overclaim, that we must always accurately quote our opponents, characterise their quotes fairly and, where we abbreviated them for length, not change their sense.³

As I say, I’m shocked that someone in CCHQ signed this off. I wouldn’t have signed it off in their position, and the people I learned from wouldn’t have signed it off in their position either.⁴ Accuracy matters, because once you get a reputation for sloppiness it’s hard to get rid of it, and there’s a risk that people will stop trusting you. I am certainly less likely to take CCHQ’s claims at face value now, as someone who was inclined - even while supporting another party - to assume that they were following basic standards of political research. It also matters because, and here I freely admit to the kind of high-minded idealism that may explain why I never made anything of myself in politics, lying is bad.

Now: the other Starmer mischaracterisation. It is flat wrong, and obviously silly, to say that he is a Thatcherite. But it is not at all a stretch to say that earlier this week he cited Margaret Thatcher in a positive way.

There is a difference, though, between what he said and how it was presented. What he said was this:

Every moment of meaningful change in modern British politics begins with the realisation that politics must act in service of the British people, rather than dictating to them. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s. A century ago, Clement Attlee wrote that Labour must be a party of duty and patriotism, not abstract theory. To build a “New Jerusalem” meant first casting off the mind-forged manacles. That lesson is as true today as it was then.

The defence of this from an anti-Thatcher point of view, which I make in a relatively half-hearted way because I don’t care about it very much, is that first, Starmer is pointing to three undeniably consequential post-war prime ministers and saying that they created meaningful change, which they did, and secondly that the specific thing he is saying about them is that each had a diagnosis of a problem and a project to solve the problem, each of which had electoral appeal in their time. But, as I say, it’s hard to get excited about it. For what it’s worth, my view on this is less John McTernan’s “strategic misstep” and more Danny Finkelstein’s “neither a masterstroke nor a fiasco”.

Anyway, here’s how the Sunday Telegraph, which carried the piece, headlined it:⁵

Even if you read it as praise, it’s hardly “piled on”. This is classic bait, for two different and mutually reinforcing audiences. It’s bait for the right, because there’s a media audience for even the most anodyne acknowledgement that Margaret Thatcher achieved some things as evidence of reaching out to Tory voters (Starmer’s team may well have briefed that he was doing this, but honestly any Tory reading what he said would be underwhelmed by the level of praise being given here). And it’s bait for the left, because any evidence of reaching out to Tory voters can be interpreted as betrayal, even if the content of the reaching out turns out to be pretty banal. So it creates a row in which the actual substance of what’s been said doesn’t really warrant the level of annoyance, and where the story is less what the row is about and more the pure fact of the row.

Even if his team wanted the day one story, I’m not sure they would have counted on, or welcomed, there being a day two story like this one:

The Mirror’s subheading here - “Fury after he praises ex-Tory PM for bringing about ‘meaningful change’” - forces you to reflect on the question of whether that’s the bit to object to. Margaret Thatcher did bring about meaningful change: that’s why people care about her. The Mirror and the Telegraph, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, can disagree profoundly on whether she was a good prime minister but not, surely, on whether she was a consequential one.⁶

But “write a piece for the Sunday Telegraph mentioning Margaret Thatcher in a broadly positive way” is a deliberate Labour move, aimed at creating a story, with the more ambiguous content underneath the headline providing cover for people like me to point out, if we can be bothered, that Starmer hasn’t actually said anything very pro-Thatcher and that what he said is perfectly consistent with thinking Thatcher made Britain worse.

When you set yourself up to be mischaracterised, it’s hard to get too upset when it happens. I can forgive people overinterpreting some relatively anodyne words when they’re being invited to assume there must be a story there. What I find harder to forgive is taking a quote and lying about it.

1. Interestingly, Rishi Sunak used the same quote at PMQs but managed to do it in a just-about defensible way:

I have a quote here from a pushy young shadow Immigration Minister, who said to this House—I directly quote this person—that limits on skilled migrants are “a form of economic vandalism”. Who could possibly have taken such a bizarre position only to U-turn? It will come as no surprise to anybody that it was him.

The lack of the word “any” here means Sunak gets away with it. Starmer did say that some limits on skilled migrants are a form of economic vandalism, and the ambiguous phrasing of Sunak’s sentence allows for that narrow meaning while leaving open the possibility of a wider one, whereas “any limits” rules out the narrow meaning. I don’t know whether Sunak’s better phrasing was deliberate after someone noticed - which would be an indictment of CCHQ’s sloppiness - or just lucky.

2. In his speech at Labour Party Conference in 2008, when I was fairly new in the job as a Labour policy officer, Gordon Brown made the following claim about George Osborne:

Do you know what their Shadow Chancellor really said? In the week that banks were collapsing the man who wants to run our economy not only said: this is not a problem caused by the financial markets but went on to say and, I quote, “that it's a function of financial markets that people make loads of money out of the misery of others.”

I can still remember the panic this caused among more senior colleagues scrambling retrospectively to defend this claim, which had been inserted in the speechwriting process at an even more senior level and was not quite true. What George Osborne had actually said was “Well look, no one takes pleasure from people making money out of the misery of others, but that is a function of capitalist markets”. It caused a minor row - see for example this little piece written at the time by Jim Pickard of the Financial Times. In retrospect, although Brown gave a garbled account of the quote I think it’s a defensible characterisation of it. But the chaos caused behind the scenes because Brown had said “I quote” for something that was a paraphrase and not a quote was, for me at least, formative.

3. In 2012, while working on Labour’s PMQs prep team, I lost an argument, in which I accept I was playing the role of that guy, about whether Ed Miliband should use a story about David Cameron saying he wanted to be Prime Minister “because I think I’d be good at it”. My position at the time, which I stuck to in the prep room for as long as I could, was the classic pedantic policy position that the story was second-hand and unconfirmed (it was in a 2010 Times interview with Peter Mandelson, who claimed to have been told it by the editor of The Daily Telegraph) and that we couldn’t justify using it. The opposing position, which was that it was probably true, that it was funny and that Cameron wasn’t going to deny it, prevailed on that occasion and you can see the result here:

I tell this story mostly to acknowledge that I can be annoying to work with.

4. Yes, I know. We lost elections. I’m surprised you think I didn’t notice.

5. Did an owl write this headline?

6. There’s a hilarious, desperate coda to this in a story in The Independent headlined Leaked email reveals Keir Starmer vetoed Thatcher criticism, about a leaked email exchange from 2021 between Starmer’s team and former shadow Transport Minister Sam Tarry’s team over whether a press release should describe Andy Burnham’s decision to bring Manchester’s buses under public control as the “biggest announcement on buses since Thatcher’s failed Transport Act in 1985”. It would be futile to speculate where this leak could have come from - it could have been literally anyone. But the LOTO staffer’s request to “take out the Thatcher stuff and instead criticise the current government” on the grounds that the press release should “focus on the current set of elections and criticise the current set of Tories” is a) obviously correct and b) obviously not evidence of pro-Thatcher sentiment on the part of the LOTO staffer, let alone on the part of Keir Starmer who would never have seen the exchange at all. The fact that even this sympathetic Independent piece sees the need to spend a whole paragraph explaining what the 1985 Transport Act actually was is further evidence that the original version of the press release may not have been very good, and that that may have been why someone tried to change it.