This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
Good morning. Sir Keir Starmer says he makes “no apologies” for the release of
a series of close-to-the-knuckle graphics attacking Rishi Sunak and suggesting that he personally wills more lenient sentences for child sex offenders. A photo of a smiling prime minister was cast alongside the words: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.”
Speaking to the Mail, the Labour leader doubled down on the ad, saying he will make no bones about the blunt approach, which is more than he can say for his time as Director of Public Prosecutions. In 2012, Labour’s own Emily Thornberry wrote to Starmer demanding “an urgent rethink of the CPS’s decision to weaken guidelines that specialist barristers must deal with every stage of a rape prosecution”. In a letter she let rip, saying: “Rape campaigners have denounced this as backsliding”, an accusation Sir Keir denied.
Senior Labour figures including former home secretary Lord David Blunkett have called for the latest ‘attack ads’ to be withdrawn, saying Labour is better than “gutter” politics. Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell accused Starmer of reverting to “personal smears” and “Daily Mail style distortions”, while Andrew Marr called them “disgraceful”, saying Labour has lost the moral high ground over their publication.
But there is a more sinister reality cloaking all of this. As Stephen Bush pointed out in the FT, over the last decade or so, a pattern has emerged: a political party or referendum campaign reveals a new line of attack, a poster or a criticism. Westminster goes on and on about how excessive it is, then the party in question wins. In 2010, the Conservatives put a smiling photo of Gordon Brown next to the words: “I let 80,000 criminals out early – vote for me”. In 2016, Vote Leave ran ads claiming Turkey was about to join the EU and in 2019 the Tories published fake Labour manifestos, labelled themselves as a fact-checking account during televised debates and then flat-out refused to put Boris Johnson up for interviews with Andrew Neil and Good Morning Britain among others.
What they knew then is what Starmer knows now, which is that the gutter is actually a pretty popular place to be in the current environment. It is certainly preferable to the moral high ground, where those advocating for progressive policies get dubbed ‘woke’, out of touch with the electorate or as being part of the “new elite” by commentators like Matthew Goodwin. The middle ground has been weaponised in a bid to clamour for people’s attention with the most viral tweet or the most headline-grabbing political play. Swing voters have been armed with machetes as those with aspirations for a better, more equal society are cast into the political wilderness.
The sad thing about the Labour attack ads is that they’ll probably work. What that says about Britain as a society is another question for another (seemingly imminent) time.
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