Call for circuit-breaker lockdown could backfire on opportunist Starmer
In many ways today’s PMQs was very familiar: the subject occupying all six of Starmer’s questions was once again coronavirus. But in one important way, it was remarkable. For the first time since the beginning of the crisis, the two leaders differed substantially on a fundamental point on how to handle it. Keir Starmer now supports a two to three week national lockdown, while Boris Johnson continues to believe that increasing local restrictions will do the job.
This divide was summed up in the pair’s first exchange. “The government’s own scientific advisers, SAGE, gave very clear advice. They said a package of interventions, including a circuit-breaker (lockdown) will be needed to prevent an exponential rise in cases. Why did the Prime Minister reject that advice and abandon the science?”, asked Starmer, to which Johnson responded: “The advice that I have today… is that if we do the regional approach… we can bring down the R, and we can bring down the virus. So will he stick to his position of Monday and support that approach.”
Starmer had indeed suggested he would support a regionalised restrictions system on Monday morning, but shifted his position to backing a short-term full lockdown – to coincide with the school half-term – once the minutes of SAGE’s September meetings were released on Monday night. This shift in Labour’s position is one of Starmer’s most consequential and radical political moves since he became leader six months ago.
Yesterday, the move was hailed as a win-win for the Labour party. The theory goes that if the government ultimately adopts a short-term lockdown – as The Telegraph today suggests it may – then Starmer can claim to have been leading while Johnson dithered, and if the government does not impose a lockdown and cases continue to rise, then Starmer can claim to have warned everyone of impending doom.
This analysis may be overly-simplistic, however. Starmer’s approach pits him against some of Labour’s increasingly-powerful northern mayors, such as Manchester’s Andy Burnham, a figure who has expended a lot of his political capital in arguing against further restrictions on Manchester’s hospitality industry. Any indication of division within the party could make the relatively new Labour leader appear weak in the eyes of the public and even conjure up memories of the intra-party disarray of the Corbyn era.
Starmer has already come under pressure from Sir Vince Cable, a centre-left figure who would usually be sympathetic to the Labour approach. Referencing low Covid rates in the South West, Cable today tweeted: “Sorry to pour cold water on the progressive consensus but how does lockdown in Devon, Cornwall, Dorset etc help fight the upsurge in cities at the other end of the country. And without track and trace there will be endless circuit-breakers. Science says concentrate on clusters.”
Starmer, often praised by some for his “forensic” command of detail, has also got himself into a muddle over an apparent misstatement of the position of the Conservative leader of Bolton Council. He claimed during PMQs that David Greenhalgh, the Bolton council leader, had called for a circuit-breaker lockdown. But Greenhalgh had in fact been talking about the general mood among politicians in Manchester, not his personal position. “If cases continue to rise as predicted,” he said, then “a number of leaders in greater Manchester believe a national circuit break, with the required financial support, would be a preferable option.”
Greenhalgh is now said to be “fuming” and has called on Starmer to return to the Commons chamber and retract his statement. At this moment it is not clear that the new Labour position is the ingenious, Machiavellian political move that some commentators made it out to be yesterday.