Keir Starmer offers hope as a route to Downing Street

Editorial: As both parties warn of a low and dirty election battle in the coming year, the Labour leader has set out his stall as a quiet revolutionary

5 January 2024 (Dave Brown)

The British general election of 2024 will, we are advised by the prime minister, be held in the second half of the year. The result of no such contest can be judged a foregone conclusion, at least outside North Korea or Russia, but the opinion polls have long pointed to a Labour government equipped with a working majority.

It will be an administration that faces formidable challenges as it prepares Britain for the 2030s. Thus, attention is now being paid to what the leader of the Labour Party has got to say, and what he has to say turns out to be sensible, measured and sober. That matches precisely the mood of the country.

It is perhaps summed up in one passage of the keynote speech Sir Keir Starmer delivered in Bristol: “To truly defeat this miserabilist Tory project, we must crush their politics of divide and decline with a new ‘Project Hope’. Not a grandiose utopian hope. Not the hope of the easy answer, the quick fix, or the miracle cure. People have had their fill of that from politicians over the past 14 years. No – they need credible hope, a frank hope, a hope that levels with you about the hard road ahead, but which shows you a way through; a light at the end of the tunnel. The hope of a certain destination.”