Keir Starmer’s claim to be a man of the people isn’t going to fool anyone. He was at it again on Thursday, in a major speech attacking Reform leader Nigel Farage. According to the Prime Minister, he knows what it’s like “when your family can’t pay the bills”.
It was Sir Keir’s response to Nigel’s own big speech earlier in the week, when Mr Farage set out plans to spend restore winter fuel payments for all pensioners, end a two-child limit that reduces benefits for some claimants and allow some married couples to pay less tax, particularly when only one of them works full-time.
The Reform leader also wants to raise the income tax threshold to £20,000. It’s a generous package, and it does raise questions about how a Reform government will actually pay for it all. But in his response, Sir Keir chose to play the man, not the ball.
The Prime Minister argued: “Unlike Nigel Farage, I know what it’s like growing up in a cost-of-living crisis.”
He said he knows what it’s like “when you fear the postman, the bills that may be brought”.
In other words, Sir Keir is one of us. But you can’t trust Mr Farage, because Nigel came from a family with money.
So what? Yes, it’s great that Sir Keir did well for himself if he came from modest beginnings, but that’s got nothing to do with whether he was right to take winter fuel payments away from nine million pensioners.
And Mr Farage should be judged on what he says, not what sort of house he lived in as a child.
The Prime Minister also compared Reform’s leader to Liz Truss, Labour’s favourite bogeyman, saying Mr Farage would be “exactly the same”.
There’s the glimmer of a sensible argument there, which is that cutting taxes or raising spending too much and too quickly can cause turmoil. But the huge rise in inflation that coincided with Liz Truss’s premiership was linked to the specific circumstances of the time, as the UK and the world in general emerged from the Covid pandemic. She made the nation’s economic problems far worse with her actions.
In some ways, Sir Keir did the Reform leader a huge favour. He took Mr Farage seriously – not just as a campaigner for Brexit or repository for protest votes, but as a potential future prime minister. The fact that he delivered a major speech attacking Reform’s tax and spending plans is in many ways a compliment.
Look at it this way – Sir Keir also disagrees with the Green Party’s policies, but he doesn’t dedicate big speeches to attacking them because nobody imagines the Green Party will ever win power.
This is exactly what Mr Farage wants. He hopes to convince voters that he, and not Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, is the real alternative to Sir Keir, and a vote for Reform is not a “wasted vote”.
Keir Starmer said pretty much the same thing at a recent meeting of Labour MPs, and is now reinforcing the message with this speech.
But is it just possible, perhaps, that Sir Keir wants to build up Reform as the “real” opposition because he believes that once the election comes, and voters think seriously about who they want in No 10, he’ll find it easier to defeat Mr Farage than Kemi Badenoch?
