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Now is the time for Starmer to finally explain what he is in power to do

He needs to ditch his innate caution and gamble on displaying boldness

September 22, 2024 6:34 pm(Updated 6:35 pm)

Last year Rachel Reeves accepted a gift valued at £330 to attend a concert from the Betting and Gaming Council. This is not unusual: the organisation also gave one of her Labour colleagues tickets worth £1,100 to enjoy a Billy Joel concert, and many politicians accept such freebies. The Chancellor’s number two at the Treasury, for instance, was given four tickets recently by football chiefs to see Taylor Swift.

Such donations are not in breach of any rules. But ask yourself a simple question as a fresh wave of sleaze allegations washes over Westminster: why does a body representing the £14bn gambling industry want to dole out costly tickets to influential MPs for shows that ordinary folks fund from their own pockets?

These gifts come as the sector tries to fend off criticism and threats of new controls following a spate of bad publicity over gambling-related suicides. The problems this corrosive industry is causing are so severe that the National Health Service has had to set up specialist addiction clinics to help some of the 246,000 citizens whose lives are wrecked by the curse of gambling compulsion.

Their struggles – like the tragic fatalities and shattered families – are a direct consequence of foolish moves to rip up restrictions when Labour was last in office and unleashed online betting. So it is no surprise that this lobby group has appointed a former Labour MP, Michael Dugher, as its chair while fighting hard to thwart fresh restraints to its pernicious pursuit of profit.

This is the sort of petty greed enabling access to powerful people that smacks of corruption and leaves voters so frustrated, as does the inability of politicians to understand why such behaviour sparks public disenchantment. Such gifts may be legal – but are they ethical, let alone wise?

Sir Keir Starmer must try to right the ship at Labour’s party conference in Liverpool this week. He is right to stress the importance of transparency – but money buys influence in Britain, and he is leader of a party that won power on a platform pledging to purge such iniquities after torrents of Tory sleaze. Voters propelled Labour into office with little clear idea about its leader out of a sense of desperation to restore decency to our democracy, competence to our government and trust in our political system.

Starmer is a man who instinctively despises the cavalier selfishness and phoney boosterism epitomised by Boris Johnson. He understands the need to rebuild faith in politics to defeat the sort of populism seen on display in Birmingham with Nigel Farage. As Starmer said last month, his government will be judged by actions, not by its words.

Yet already he has toned down plans to reform the House of Lords, merely removing the absurdity of hereditary peers sitting in parliament, and thus continuing with a sordid system that allows rich individuals to buy a seat through party donations. Now his post-election honeymoon has crash-landed amid a daft furore over his spectacles and suits, plus internal squabbling over his chief of staff.

The feuding over Starmer’s key aide was stirred by revelations that Sue Gray was being paid more than the Prime Minister. This came from a BBC reporter earning almost £100,000 more than the pair of them, which surely raises issues for both politics and the state broadcaster. Meanwhile, the fuss over donations and perks was stoked by Labour’s foes on the right, although incomparable to their own side’s excesses.

Much of it is largely inconsequential. Yet it exposes political naivety and rifts in a regime that boasted of being ready to rule.

Instead Labour handed out bullets to its enemies. This was seen also with the inept way that it handled the rightful decision to terminate winter fuel allowances for pensioners, the constant carping over their economic inheritance that hit consumer confidence and all the pandering to public sector unions with generous no-strings pay deals and abandonment of Ofsted’s single-word ratings for schools.

It all makes a grim backdrop for Labour’s first conference in power for 15 years. Instead of celebrating their remarkable electoral triumph, the party has endured a corrosive drip of damaging stories that feeds the anti-politics mood of despair over Westminster while Starmer’s personal approval ratings have plunged. He faces the danger that he will become defined by his critics.

So he must seize the opportunity this week to explain his driving mission for being in politics before it is too late and an image is set in stone of him as an empty suit – one bought for him by Lord Alli.

This is a huge challenge given the intensity of concerns at home and abroad in this age of defeatist scepticism and divisive social media.

Many public services are in a desperate state. Boosting the housing supply, bolstering the NHS, salvaging social care, saving universities, sorting out the justice system and strengthening defence will take more than technocratic tinkering, while Scotland’s often better-funded but worsening services prove more cash is not the sole solution to such problems.

Yet as Tony Blair wrote in his biography, the early days of a government offer not just the disadvantages of making mistakes through inexperience, but what he called “the extraordinary sense of possibility” due to the innocence and absence of cynicism that comes from “perpetual immersion in government’s plague-infested waters”.

These have been a dispiriting few days for the Government with own goals caused by feuding and freeloading, culminating in the Prime Minister having to insist that he is “completely in control” after less than three months in office. Back in July, Starmer stood on the steps of Downing Street and promised to lead a “mission of national renewal” that would restore “respect to politics”. This is a noble intent.

Now he needs to ditch his innate caution and gamble on displaying boldness in Liverpool this week to dispel gloom and growing doubts over his premiership, showing that he possesses a sense of purpose to lift the mood of his party and his country in these tumultuous times.

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