THREAD

Many in Labour want more of the same, Keir Starmer wants a change – he wants to win. My piece for @LabourList on why now is the right time for Starmer to reshuffle his top team. https://labourlist.org/2021/02/starmer-has-the-right-strategy-now-he-needs-a-bold-and-ruthless-reshuffle/

Political strategy concerns itself with two things: mobilisation and persuasion. For the past ten years – arguably longer – the Labour Party leadership has concerned itself primarily and almost exclusively with mobilisation.

It is exactly because Keir Starmer is switching the party’s strategy from one that is exclusively about ‘mobilisation’ to one that is about ‘persuasion’ that some within the party have attacked the Starmer project in recent weeks.

For some, any use of the Union Jack or talk about controlling borders is ‘the politics of the right’. For the rest of us, you don’t need to be Sir John Curtice to know that our country’s flag is a symbol of national pride and closing borders is a must during a pandemic.

Starmer should double down and go much harder on his persuasion strategy. But for him to do that, he needs to have the support of a highly effective shadow cabinet team – something that he does not currently have. It is a strategic priority that must be rectified quickly.

Most voters cannot name a member of the shadow cabinet anyway. That has to change. In sport, when players on the pitch are not pulling their weight, winning managers waste no time in substituting them when it is necessary, not when it is convenient.

The political problem for Labour is not Starmer. He won a convincing mandate from across the party to become leader, and has made great strides in the polls on pretty much all strategic measures of electability – though there is so much more to do. But he cannot do it on his own.

He needs a team that combines the experience of delivery, bringing back some big hitters of years gone by, and the ambition and dynamism of some of the newer intakes to parliament – those who would become cabinet members in 2023/24.

A bold and ruthless reshuffle may be hard on some of his colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party, but it would send a signal to swing voters that ruthlessness is yet another strength in Starmer’s armoury - something that they will admire.

And it would enable him to double down on a persuasion strategy that is firing on all cylinders.