When your rival, Boris Johnson's Conservative Party, has put fiscal discipline on hold and busted state coffers to tackle the pandemic, Labor's response can only be radical.
In the literal sense of the term, which is none other than tackling the root of the problem.
Keir Starmer yesterday presented the opposition's economic proposal to get out of the biggest crisis in the UK in recent times, and it has the scent of Tony Blair's New Labor.
Nothing to raise taxes, for now, and the search for an alliance with businessmen to get the country out of a situation of socioeconomic inequality that has multiplied deaths from covid-19.
"We can return to the same economy that has caused insecurity and injustice in the past, exposed by the virus in a particularly cruel way, or seize the moment and head to a future that is not going to resemble the past at all," he said. Starmer in an epic tone that was not helped by the coldness of the isolation of a videoconference.
A year after his election to the head of the party, which represented a rejection of the left-wing forms and messages of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer has anticipated his forced response to the budget project that the Johnson government will present in early March to try regain initiative in public debate.
The Minister of Economy, Rishi Sunak, feels on his shoulders the pressure of a conservative wing that demands the return to fiscal discipline, and the specter of new cuts can only be averted with higher taxes.
In search of the revulsion in the form of a headline, the opposition leader has expressed his rejection of this possibility: “This is not the time to raise taxes on companies or families.
We would waste the sacrifices made last year and stifle our recovery, ”said Starmer.
He has not elaborated on the details of his proposal, but Labor has tried to solidify his speech by relying on two reports of crucial importance in British history.
One is a glorious legend from the past.
The other, the stark denunciation of the secrecy that explains why the pandemic has been so excruciating in the United Kingdom.
Starmer has claimed the impetus of the "Beveridge report", the text developed by the liberal politician William Beveridge at the end of World War II that laid the foundations of the welfare state and involved the creation of the Social Security or the National Health Service ( NHS, in its acronym in English).
And it has used the study of epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot, director of the Institute for Health Equity.
Build Back Fairer: The Covid-19 Marmot Review
(For a more just reconstruction: Marmot report on covid-19) reviews a previous text that denounced the state of the country's health at the beginning of the last conservative period.
His conclusion serves to explain in part the UK's tragic distance from other European countries in fighting the pandemic.
Regional pockets of marginalization and poverty, obesity, diabetes, alcoholism, families crammed into slums and workers with no other option than to leave home to earn an income.
A stagnant life expectancy for a decade, which has dropped to five years in some areas.
Mostly racial and ethnic minorities who have been severely hit by the virus.
The north and the center of England, and at least a dozen neighborhoods in London, with contagion figures significantly higher than those in the south of the country.
Boris Johnson's Government is betting everything to speed up the first dose of the vaccine
"Covid-19 has slipped through the cracks and fissures of our society and has forced its opening, with tragic consequences," Starmer denounced.
"It is the inevitable result of a decade of decisions guided by the idea that the government cannot intervene in the markets (...) The pandemic has drawn the curtains to show us how things have been done so far."
Starmer's proposals have not pleased the party's internal critics, the powerful remnants of Corbynism who accuse the current leader of turning to the right and being soft in his attacks on Johnson.
They did not like his idea of "embracing businessmen and building, with them and with citizens, a new alliance."
The opposition leader proposes maintaining and expanding the tax cuts, direct aid and ERTE provisionally approved by the current conservative government.
And alleviate the burden of debt for many businesses, with debt delays similar to what college students now have: paying only when they start earning new income.
“His speech has shown no ambition, and it has little substance.
We cannot win in 2024 with the simple promise that we will better manage the same system, ”has responded the Labor internal stream of
Momentum
, Jeremy Corbyn's most faithful ally during his years of leadership.
The British business world, however, has welcomed the words of the opposition leader.
"It has been an incredibly difficult 12 months, and it is especially welcome that Starmer comes up with things like helping people start new businesses," said Mike Cherry, President of the UK Small Business Federation.
Starmer, careful in his ways and in his presence, is convinced that the Labor Party will only be able to return to government if the citizens believe that it is capable of seriously managing the economy.
Little by little, the polls have been bringing him closer to a Conservative Party that, despite Johnson, maintains the leadership.
“As long as I am in charge, Labor's priority will always be fiscal responsibility.
I take the effort with which people earn money very seriously, and I know they expect the government to take the same care.
To invest wisely and not spend what we cannot afford ”, he said.
Starmer recovered the phrase of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who said that "Labor can only be a moral crusade, or it will be nothing", to try to convince progressive voters in the United Kingdom that "you can not go back to what of always ”and the country needs a revulsive.
It faces, however, a discourse like Johnson's, which, in essence, offers the same promises of large investments and greater leveling of the regions.
It is a dilemma between the trust that one or another leader is capable of transmitting.
As Philip Collins, the author of some of Tony Blair's most memorable speeches, has pointed out on Twitter, “Labor has a hard time finding just criticism and taking action on a government that - simplifying a bit - is culturally and right-wing. left-wing economically ”.