Keir Starmer has nailed his colours to the mast as leader of the Labour Party.
As expected, he has chosen the way of reheated Blairism.
By attempting to move Labour back to the hallowed centre-ground – which in the UK means further right than the left of the party can stomach – he leaves supporters and opponents in no doubt about his intentions.
Rather than throwing an olive branch to the socialists by bringing Corbyn in off the naughty step, Sir Keir decided to antagonise them further for show.
By unashamedly referencing New Labour on multiple occasions in his speech, he actively rubbed salt in the wounds of the Labour left, where Blair is not only regarded widely as the devil incarnate, but where his political offspring’s decisive contribution to the collapse and subsequent monstering of Corbynism remains a source of great pain.
The centrists justify purging the left by pointing to the last election result – which was utterly atrocious.
The left reckons that result wouldn’t have been so bad had the centrists held their nose and backed their former leader – which is true.
Sadly, there is no “third way” where these two embittered factions are concerned, and so Sir Keir reasons he must now consolidate his authority by hacking his left flank off like a rotting limb – another not so subtle nod to Blair.
While members praying for a return to the New Labour heyday were always going to overstate the strength of his conference performance, Sir Keir did as well as his moderate ability would allow.
Evidently, he is cut from a superior intellectual and moral cloth from Johnson, but let’s be clear, he’s no Tony Blair.
Hell, he’s not even an Ed Miliband.
To get that band back together in the current context will require more than a few nods to famous New Labour slogans on crime and education.
It will require a dedicated tight-knit team driven by an obsession to win at any cost, uniting around a figurehead who possesses a disturbing sense of divine entitlement and a ruthless streak which borders on sociopathic.
The centrists can gloss over it all they like, but the clarity of purpose that defined New Labour’s rise to power is sorely lacking here.
By invoking the memory of Labour’s most successful ever leader, Sir Keir simply draws more attention to his own shortcomings than he otherwise would have had he tried to emulate Blair, not in terms of style, but in attempting to mount a strategically original, full-spectrum assault on the Tories.
Starmer is a robotic orator. He doesn’t have a particularly talented team around him.
And there is no sense that the task of leading the Labour Party at this precise moment in history has fallen to him for any reason other than the fact nobody better is currently available.
Starmer currently has the aura of a steward, whose job is to prepare the ground for the arrival of a more polished political performer in the mould of an Andy Burnham or David Miliband.
Indeed, it’s precisely because Starmer has no guiding, over-arching political philosophy that he’s been able to mutate from his previous form as a Corbyn frontbencher into what increasingly appears to be Peter Mandelson glove-puppet.
This is not to say that Sir Keir is not a man of principle or talent, but whether his skillset meets the requirements of this political moment remains to be seen.
While Blair’s legacy remains one of the most divisive of any British prime minister – and rightly so – nobody can say anyone was pulling Tony’s strings.
Labour’s electoral prospects will largely hinge on whether people in Scotland warm to Starmer the way they did, albeit temporarily, to Corbyn in 2017.
Central to this dilemma is the matter of Scottish independence, where the average undecided voter is always assessing this question.
It’s this slightly more pragmatic cross-section of the Scottish electorate Labour has to work its magic on to have any hope of getting Starmer into Downing Street.
While there is little chance of Scottish Labour making a dent in the SNP’s dominance of Holyrood, there has been a tendency, where UK elections are concerned, for left-leaning voters in Scotland to move between Labour and the SNP, based on the state-of-play down south.
With Sturgeon promising a referendum by 2023, we may well see a UK general election before then, which would place Anas Sarwar in a difficult position.
The harder he bangs on the unionist drum, the less likely he is to appeal to those open to independence, but the softer he sounds on it, the more support he’ll haemorrhage to the Tories.
Either way, Starmer stands to lose.
Might be time for Scottish Labour to cut its losses and take a different position on IndyRef2.
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