Daniel Valentine is a governance and communication consultant.
Who would have thought 18 months ago that the Reform party would not only be setting the agenda for a Labour Government but also dominating the Labour Party conference? During the recent Labour conference, no fewer than eleven cabinet ministers condemned the policies of the Reform Party.
Their immediate goal was to win easy applause from the audience, and to get their quotes in the next day’s news, but there is a longer-term goal at work; they want to toxify the Reform Party in the same way that they toxified the Conservative Party in the 1990s with accusations of “sleaze”.
Watching a struggling leader engaged in a political “turnaround” and trying to regain his popularity is not a pretty sight. In such a situation a failing leader is likely to do a number of predictable things: launch many “resets”, sack advisors, reshuffle his top team, blow money on brave policy ideas, and try to re-engage with his core supporters by means of “dog whistles” and “dead cats”.
Political ‘dead cats’, just to clarify, are shocking announcements designed to seize the political agenda. They are often used to kill negatives stories and to delight the activist base.
On the first day of Labour conference Keir Starmer completed the “turnaround” playbook by dropping a sizable “dead cat”. In an interview with the BBC he accused Reform of having a racist agenda, an accusation which set off a sequence of vilification and innuendo by Labour frontbenchers, who seemed to be engaged in a competition for how quickly they could join the chorus of Reform-baiting.
“I do think it’s a racist policy,” the Prime Minister told the BBC. “I do think it’s immoral – it needs to be called out for what it is.” Removing people who were here legally, he said, was wrong.
Starmer’s dead cat of the 28th September was a hurried response to Reform’s own dead cat of 22nd September, when Reform announced that they would abolish “Indefinite Leave to Remain” (ILR), the status which gives immigrants access to benefits, and replace it with a five-year visa scheme.
Reform’s tough new policy is a combined attack on both the Labour’s party’s inability to grip the current problem and also the Conservative Party’s dubious legacy of mass immigration, branded by Reform the “Boriswave”; a term which refers to the 3.8 million people who entered the UK after Brexit under looser rules brought in by Boris Johnson’s administration.
Starmer’s colleagues soon followed his lead. Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy slammed Reform UK’s migration policy as “racist” in his address to the Labour conference in Liverpool, while Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, in an interview with Michael Gove, said that Nigel Farage is encouraging racism: “what he really knows he’s done is blown a very, very loud dog whistle to every racist in the country” by proposing an immigration policy that is “worse than racist”, “immoral”, and “extreme”.
The alleged racism in question is Reform’s new immigration policy. Reform has said it would end the right of migrants to apply for “indefinite leave to remain”, stop anyone who is not a UK citizen from claiming benefits, and require those applying for UK citizenship to renounce other citizenship. ILR is the status which gives migrants the ability to stay in the UK without the need to renew a visa every few years.
Using the term “racist” is often a sign that someone is losing the argument, and so it proved on Sunday. Since Reform stands at 34 per cent in the polls, calling Reform racist was also risky. If reform is leading the polls with a racist agenda, then surely that means that a large proportion of Britain is racist? This is the trap that Starmer risked falling into. To try and protect himself from this trap, Starmer suggested that Reform voters are “frustrated” rather than racist. In short Starmer implied that Reform votes are less than intelligent in order that he could reassure them that they are less than full blown racists.
By dropping the ‘r-word’ on Sunday, Starmer guaranteed the next few days headlines. He kicked off a debate and delighted Labour activists, many of whom love throwing about such accusations, evidenced or not. However, the test of whether an announcement has worked doesn’t lie in the next day’s headlines, but a few days further out, when the announcement has been properly digested and when commentators have given their thoughts.
Starmer’s comments failed this test. By Wednesday, Starmer was in reversal mode, following justifiable outrage from Nigel Farage and many commentators. Speaking with Sky’s Beth Rigby, as part of a series of interviews following his speech at Labour Party conference, Sir Keir said he did not believe Mr Farage was racist. “I’m not for a moment suggesting that they are racist.”
Given the speed with which the Labour government announced changes to their own immigration policy following the Reform announcement, it is now possible to suggest that Nigel Farage has more control over this government’s agenda than Keir Starmer; and that spells much trouble ahead for Starmer’s leadership of his parliamentary party.
Starmer is no Blair, although it seems to have taken the Labour Party a long time to find this out, no doubt helped by the supportive press coverage which Starmer received before he arrived in Downing Street. Blair’s efforts at making the Conservative Party radioactive between 1994 and 1997 were based on careful research and media relations, planting many stories and tying them all neatly together with the help of Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell, who both excelled at the negative side of politics. Labour has no media-relations talent of their calibre today; and recent efforts to tarnish both Reform and the Conservatives have been lame and short-lived.
Since the Labour conference set the policy bar very low, the Conservative Party has been given a golden opportunity to distinguish themselves from both Reform and Labour. Conservative Party conference is almost coming to an end – have they dominated their own conference? Did they refrain from crude attacks which only backfire? And do they have credible solutions to the UK’s problems? This is the challenge and opportunity which presented itself to them. Did conference speakers follow Labour in chasing easy applause and headlines? Or have they confronted the UK’s real challenges such as border security, organised crime, long-term unemployment, economic growth and welfare reform? It’s almost time to take stock.
