MARK McGeoghegan’s article on Sir Keir Starmer and Labour (“Starmer’s party has lost the courage of its convictions”, The Herald, July 24) is measured and justifiably critical and for that reason, it is worth a similarly measured response. Above all, it needs to be appreciated how far the UK has deteriorated under the Tories.
First they took the calamitous choice of austerity and then they caved into the Ukip agenda which had previously been the preserve of the far right and the far left; having lost the EU referendum, the Tory governments that followed had no Plan B (such as EEA/Efta) which would have kept the UK in the single market. They compounded that dereliction of national duty by electing as their leader and as our PM first Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss, who crashed the economy with a programme of unfunded spending that belted home the final nails in the reputation of the UK as a competently-run country.
We are back to somewhere like the mid-1970s, when Helmut Schmidt was moved to remark that Tony Benn (then a leading Cabinet minister) was the Bertie Wooster of political economics. The implication was that the UK was a joke (even under Herr Schmidt’s social democratic Labour colleagues) and that the international markets could not trust its government to run the country effectively, and least of all to do so on the basis of sound money.
As the only politician of our times who has actually had a responsible job of national importance in his career, Sir Keir Starmer appreciates the value of getting the basics right and of convincing the rest of the world that this has been achieved. This is double the task which faced the incoming Tony Blair government in 1997 – which inherited an economy that had largely recovered after the disaster of Black Wednesday and needed only prove its own competence. Sir Keir starts at a much lower point and needs to do more.
By the end of the next Labour government, I would expect the UK to be moving once more in the right direction towards a society that is both more prosperous and more equal. How far we get in that direction will depend on many factors, not least whether Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves can achieve their massively-ambitious goal of making UK growth the highest in the G7. But the sine qua non of doing so has to be restoring international confidence in the country, in its institutions and its ability to govern itself rationally and prudently.
So we will need a solid figure of a Prime Minister who is not hyperbolic in his claims and who does not over-promise and under-deliver; and who has a demonstrable moral compass and who will not commit money unless he is certain that it is there for the government to spend. Sounds like a job for Sir Keir to me.
Peter A Russell, Glasgow.
Planet Pedro! 