It’s Starmer’s turn to ‘Take Back Control’ – and the Tories should be afraid

The Conservatives have dismissed Sir Keir Starmer’s new year as “another vacuous relaunch” (which made me think back to the Bible and “Physician, heal thyself”).

He said that a Labour government will introduce a “Take Back Control” Bill to devolve power away from Westminster and spread prosperity across the United Kingdom.

Sir Keir promised a “new approach to politics and democracy” as part of a “decade of national renewal” as he attempted to take ownership of the famous Brexit slogan from the Vote Leave campaign at the EU referendum in 2016.

Sir Keir said it was “not unreasonable for us to recognise the desire for communities to stand on their own feet” and that is “what Take Back Control meant”.

The Tories might outwardly mock. But behind the scenes, they should be worried about this change in tack from Sir Keir.

I have been thinking for weeks now about how the Conservatives have allowed the political advantages of Brexit to slip through their fingers.

While ministers have doggedly carried on announcing small trade deals – whose limit in size just draws attention to their marginal gains – Britons have been battling a sense of perpetual crisis in our public services. They just want them to work.

I had lunch with a senior former Brexit adviser last month. We tried to work out what notable policies the Conservatives have enacted to reward their supporters since first elected in 2010.

We discussed how many of the “Tory” achievements from 2010 to 2015 were in fact Liberal Democrat wins – for example, lifting the income tax threshold. The best we could come up with from 12 years of Tory rule were Universal Credit and the expansion of academies – although, these school reforms were originally a Blairite project.

The Tories have failed to deliver for their supporters since 2016, as ministers have been buffeted domestically by the Brexit psychodrama (2017-20), the coronavirus pandemic (2020-22), the various Tory leadership dramas (2021-22) and the cost of living crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine (2022-present). All the while, public services feel as though they are deteriorating.

Britons voted in 2016 to transfer a huge amount of power from Brussels to London. The challenge for our political masters was to grasp this opportunity and no longer lazily hide behind Brussels’ apron when it came to making big decisions for the betterment of this country.

In his speech, Sir Keir has shown that he gets this idea. Rishi Sunak and his ministers apparently don’t – the most recent evidence being that Conservative ministers now feel that they cannot scrap thousands of redundant EU regulations by the end of the year because it might be too difficult.

Labour and Conservatives, of course, mean different things by the slogan “Take Back Control”. But it might just be that sooner rather than later voters prefer Labour’s version to the Tories’ one. 

And the Conservatives and Mr Sunak have only themselves to blame.

For more of this analysis, please click here to subscribe to the daily Chopper’s Politics Newsletter