What does Labour really think about the grooming gangs? Is even raising the subject deplorable, racist politics, as the Leader of the Commons suggested? Or is the scandal, as a Downing Street source told me, “one of the biggest injustices this country has ever seen… a whole-state failure to protect some of the most vulnerable people in Britain and the mass rape of children in a cold-hearted, systemic way. People need to be arrested, and people need to be deported.”
It is a crucial question because, in this new political landscape where Labour sees Reform as its great opponent, we must discover where the dividing line lies between the two parties.
It runs through policy, emphasis and tone, and at its heart is the question: what does social democracy mean now? Responses have so far centred on tax, immigration and net zero. Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary, says the threat to Labour from Reform is “existential” and demands an economic reset, “ripping up our self-imposed tax rules… [for] a serious programme of investment and reindustrialisation”.
From the Blue Labour corner, the MP Dan Carden warns the working class has now turned its back on Labour: “People feel abandoned – not just economically, but morally. They look at Westminster and see strangers in charge.” Jonathan Hinder, an MP from the same faction, accuses Labour of having morphed into a hyper-liberal party rather than a socialist one, and pleads for a tougher stance on immigration, which, he argues, “is fundamentally an economic issue as much as it is anything else, and working-class people are generally the losers”.
Picking up on calls for a clearer “pro-worker” strategy, others blame the energy costs faced by British industry because of the government’s net zero strategy. This goes far beyond Tony Blair: Ed Miliband’s most dangerous critics are coming from the working-class leaders of the Unite and GMB unions. The battle is being joined from all sides.
Keir Starmer’s trouble is that Labour needs to do two things at once. It needs urgently to respond to a real feeling that it has drifted away from ordinary people’s priorities, while at the same time coming up with policy answers and language that don’t mimic Reform. If you end up with the politics of “kick out the migrants” or “climate change is a hoax”, then why would anyone vote for Starmer rather than the real thing, Nigel Farage?
If there is any reassurance for Labour, it is that the leadership is fully aware of the dilemma. One person close to the Prime Minister agrees that the Reform surge was the result of the long-term inability of SW1 to understand ordinary lives: “Why should they give us the benefit of the doubt? This is not about reaching after people who have got extremist views; it is the people vs the elites.”
In policy terms, Labour needs to reach deep into its own history and come up with Labour solutions. That means, for one, progressive taxation. Haigh is right. Another very senior figure in the party argues that Starmer and Rachel Reeves should use the Trump earthquake to issue bonds for defence, and to target asset and unearned incomes for higher taxes. Taxing asset wealth would demonstrate a clear gap between Labour and Reform.
More painfully for the Chancellor, isn’t it time to listen to angry voters, to rethink choices they hate the most? Some ministers are putting pressure on Reeves for a U-turn on the winter fuel payment cut, which Reform found was still the most salient issue in the Runcorn by-election, possibly by taxing wealthier recipients. Others say “enough” to welfare cuts.
The other obvious dividing line, which can bring growth, is the European reset expected later this month. The Reform leadership will absolutely hate it. The Tory press will hate it. But ministers, if they dare at last frankly to explain the trade-offs, will have most voters on their side.
You never know what will happen with Donald Trump, but according to Capital Economics, Britain is facing a higher rate of US tariffs than the EU, Canada, Mexico and many other countries. So much for making nice. British voters are hostile to the Trump revolution and Starmer, doing well on the world stage, can lead them to a place Farage could never go.
Sticking with the big political choices, there is a subtly different story to be told about net zero that goes nowhere near the climate change denial or “can’t be helped” insouciance fashionable in Reform circles.
Starmer sees climate change as being like Vladimir Putin or AI: a huge external challenge that is real, imminent and can’t be wished away. As with prisons, the NHS or transport infrastructure, energy infrastructure was grotesquely ignored during the Tory years. The lack of nuclear investment, in particular, entrenched our reliance on imported oil and gas.
So Starmer, like Miliband, believes there is a big job of reindustrialisation to be done, involving carbon capture technology, a modernised grid, more solar and wind power. What Downing Street is nervous about is tone – the feeling that the government is ideological or messianic about green austerity, or committed to targets that will complicate ordinary lives for no clear benefit.
Remember, Starmer sees himself as an essentially pragmatic, anti-visionary man. For him the climate crisis is also about resilience. As the Climate Change Committee recommends, there needs to be greater emphasis on shielding people from extreme heat, protection from flooding, and planning for agricultural droughts. The more down to Earth the conversation around climate, the harder it is to twist it into a culture war.
Immigration is a similarly hard problem. A lot is going on. Yvette Cooper’s long-awaited white paper to crack down on holders of student visas claiming asylum will come out this month. Britain and France are in talks about a migrants’ return deal. The Home Office is crunching the maximum time for asylum appeals down to 24 weeks to get people out of expensive hotels, and the plan, approved by the UN high commissioner for refugees, to transfer failed asylum seekers to the Balkans is making progress. Will any of this lead to fewer boat crossings? Further ahead, some Europe-wide rewriting of international law to limit asylum is not impossible.
All of this is hard graft: none of it has the simplistic punch of “kick them all out” or “use the Royal Navy to turn back the boats”, and there is a bigger political argument still to be opened up. It is about the vast difference between expelling criminals and trying to deport millions of long-settled people, with the mayhem and violence that would involve. It’s about the difference between being tough and being brutal, and it can be won.
To sum up: on tax, Europe, net zero and immigration there are ways for Labour to take on, rather than merely mimic, Reform. In each case, this may be difficult for the ministers involved, although none of it needs a widespread or particularly brutal cabinet reshuffle – much of the recent briefing about which is badly informed.
But hovering over everything is the tone problem, that almost instinctive liberal “them and us”. So we must end where we started, with calls for a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. It may seem cruel to repeat her words because she is reportedly mortified about them, but here is what the Commons Leader, Lucy Powell, said to the Reform commentator Tim Montgomerie when he raised this on the radio. She could have talked about rape victims and state failure. What she actually said was: “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Let’s get that dog whistle out, shall we?” And it’s that airy tone – this is something only “deplorables” would raise in public – that remains, right now, Labour’s biggest problem of all.
[See more: The fight for Labour’s future]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 07 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Peace Delusion