The Observer View: face down Reform

Starmer and his chancellor have about two months to prepare the autumn budget. As important, they still need to persuade the country they know what they want to do in office. It can be done, but not by dancing to Reform’s tune.

The government could have held press conferences throughout the summer with updates on reform and investment in housing, health and education. In practice, Labour has handed the microphone to Nigel Farage, who has used it to focus the attention of a disgruntled public and a mesmerised press corps on small boats, asylum seekers, asylum hotels and a largely confected vision of a dystopian Britain.

Concern about immigration is high, but it is not a “national emergency”. Crime is not soaring. The country is not broken. But enough voters are convinced that it is for Labour to be swept from power if an election were held tomorrow.

The prime minister needs to change minds as if campaigning all over again. Sensible policies and incremental progress won’t do this by themselves. Technocratic language won’t cut through. Returning from holiday, Starmer needs to return to first principles. With four years before he needs to call an election, he has time and legislative muscle. But he also has a bully pulpit that needs to be put to better use.

First, Starmer and his cabinet should call out Reform rather than ape it. In any contest of hostility to migrants, Labour will – thankfully – lose. Instead it should condemn the dog-whistle language of Farage’s attack last week on young male migrants he assumed were “a risk to women and girls”; and make the case for the controlled immigration Britain needs and for the European Convention on Human Rights, which Churchill championed and British lawyers helped to write.

Second, Starmer needs to relaunch a project that should have been at the heart of his government from day one: framing his policies within an optimistic narrative of growth based on private as well as public investment and the closer relationship with Europe that 70% of voters now favour. Unlike Farage, Starmer is not a natural communicator, but like Barack Obama he believes in the better angels of our nature. He should appeal to them. He may be pleasantly surprised.

As things stand, Anna Netrebko, a Russian soprano, will star in a new production of Tosca at the Royal Opera House starting in 10 days’ time. By all accounts she is a talented singer. She is also a star of the Russian cultural scene – or was until leaving Russia and voicing her opposition to its war on Ukraine in a post on social media in 2022.

Before then, Netrebko was photographed receiving a bouquet from Putin and waving the flag of “Novorossiya”, a fictional territory that he claims belongs to Russia but in fact makes up large parts of modern Ukraine. Since then, her casting by the ROH has been condemned by Ukrainians for giving prominence to “a longtime symbol of cultural propaganda for a regime that is responsible for serious war crimes”.

The west is trying to isolate Russia. Cultural isolation must be part of that. The ROH is instead enabling Russia’s rehabilitation by stealth. It should think again.