Only a Burnham-Streeting alliance can save Labour

It comes and goes, but I can’t take it. I’m a white-skinned, east-coast Scot, and the broiling, foetid summer weather in London turns my brain to nerveless jelly and the rest of me… well… to jelly too. At Whit, I escaped to the South of France for some coolth. Imagine that! Yet it was almost as hot as in the UK. There, they are muttering about the possibility of temperatures reaching 50°C this summer. That would mean mass fatalities and the end of tourism, of much agriculture, and the destruction of what had been one of the most blessed places on Earth.

Perhaps it won’t come to that. The highest temperature recorded there so far was seven years ago, at 46°C. But whether it’s London or Marseille, global warming has arrived with a vengeance. So why, beyond a few campaigners, is this not a far bigger issue? How has Labour allowed “net stupid zero” (copyright Richard Tice) to become a political meme?

Since the Boris Johnson years, the climate debate has been a weird mixture of globalised “somewhere-else” catastrophism and abstract maths, apparently far from what we call the lived experience of voters. For a couple of years, I’ve been urging Labour politicians to recast the arguments around daily life: building cooling areas in cities for vulnerable people; designing canals or aqueducts to get water from the wetter west to the drier east; adapting planning rules to promote shutters on windows, banning building on flood plains and, yes, pushing air-conditioning. Meet people where they are, where they are suffering, and you get permission to make the bigger arguments. Lecture them when life is already hard enough and they close their ears.

Getting the message

All of which takes us back to the Labour leadership contest. A grand alliance between Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting is the best, and perhaps the only, way of Labour crawling out of this mess in a stronger position. They seem to be converging on policies from Europe to growth, and getting on: it’s at least possible.

The challenges are awesome. But as a commentator, I’m sometimes reminded of the famous Mitchell and Webb sketch of SS soldiers on the Eastern Front asking, “Are we the baddies?” Eagerly, we pile up evidence of the disastrous condition of the country, the impossibility of reform and the futility of politics – and then sit back, nodding pityingly, while mere politicians struggle on.

So here is my penny’s worth. A revived Labour government cannot do everything. Time is short. The public is impatient. But if it could deal with a few obvious and immediate problems, it could radically change the mood. That would be about speed and determination, for if the Starmer years had an epitaph, it might be: “Due process is not enough.”

Our street crime and shoplifting epidemic can be turned round, as it has been elsewhere, with more aggressive leadership. Russia remains an immediate danger: implementing stronger defences should be a priority. Thanks to Alan Milburn, the catastrophe of the million younger people out of work now provokes a response the whole party can get behind. Do that at pace – and talk about why, relentlessly – and then see whether Britain is really ungovernable or finished.

Our social fabric

Among the glories of France are the street markets: routine carnivals of colour and thrift. But they also ram home just how ludicrously cheap, by historical standards, clothes have become. I have been researching daily life in the mid-1960s; then, like almost every previous period, clothing was a clear and obvious social signifier.

Frayed cuffs, mended trousers, yellow collars, the weight and yarn of creased cloth – all these meant something. Now class is disappearing from apparel. The man in the jokey T-shirt and denim shorts could be unemployed or a holidaying venture capitalist. The woman in a Grecian dress could be wearing couture or something bought for €20 on a stall.

In one way, this is liberating: we are all in disguise. The big fashion houses try to resist the tide, but because of rip-offs, they’re losing. Me, I’m old enough to be repelled by throwaway culture. Eventually I’ll end up in sagging tweed and leather patches, like a 1920s geography teacher.

Plus ça change

France is mesmerising because it is so similar to Britain and yet so completely different. One small example: in my hotel in Aix, the reading matter left for us was a pile of Les Temps modernes, the theoretical journal which ran from 1945 to 2019, for its first few decades under the direction of Jean-Paul Sartre. These editions were from the 1970s and full of Maoism and anti-Americanism.

Going back to the commentariat, did Sartre actually change much? The answer is no – which, given his enthusiasm for paedophilia and political violence, must be a very good thing.

[Further reading: Peter Mandelson could not solve Labour’s woes]