‘Starmer is claiming the mantle of Bevan – but his priorities are very different’

Labour leaders love to claim ‘the mantle of Nye’, and Keir Starmer in his speech at the National Policy Forum (NPF) on 22 July was no exception:

“The ‘language of priorities’ is our religion, everyone remembers that quote from Nye Bevan. But they sometimes forget the rest of his argument in that speech. That ‘only by the possession of power can you get the priorities correct’.”

Starmer was right to emphasise Bevan’s prioritisation of power. But Bevan was a complex and nuanced politician and plucking aphorisms from his speeches is a risky game to play. As with George Orwell, his words have been appropriated right across the political spectrum, with little consideration for their context, and those who quote him are liable to find that he is quoted back at them. A closer look at Bevan’s 1949 conference speech reveals that ‘getting the priorities correct’ meant something very different for him than for Starmer. It includes the key claim that the 1945 government had prioritised the needs of children above all else:

‘“Suffer the little children to come unto me” is not now something which is said only from the pulpit. We have woven it into the warp and weft of our national life, and we have made the claims of the children come first. What is national planning but an insistence that human beings shall make ethical choices on a national scale?’

The claims of children are conspicuously absent from Starmer’s speech – and indeed from Labour’s five ‘missions’. These missions are, Starmer tells us, ‘a long-term plan for long-term prosperity’, with tackling child poverty ‘a massive part of it’. But without any specifics on tackling child poverty, how can we trust that the priorities are correct?

We cannot simply hope that children’s wellbeing will result organically from the five missions at some future point. Indeed, we cannot even expect to fulfil them all without a comprehensive strategy to end child poverty in place from the start. Only when children grow up in homes where there is always enough food on the table can they benefit from Labour ‘breaking down the barriers to opportunity’. Only when they – and their parents – do not have to bear the mental and physical burden of hunger and malnutrition can we fully ease the demands made on the NHS and social care.

The truth is that children living in poverty cannot afford to wait for the trickledown from a broader prosperity strategy; they need urgent measures to give them financial security from day one of a Labour government. This is easily achieved through the social security system at a relatively small cost. The estimated £1.3bn cost of abolishing the two-child limit on benefits, for example, will pay for itself by immediately lifting 250,000 children out of poverty. This will create a substantial reduction in the cost of child poverty to our economy, estimated to be over £39bn in 2023. 

Starmer has made it very clear that his priority is to avoid piling up unfunded spending commitments – and no one can deny the need for that. But when it comes to children, he has got this the wrong way round: his priority for them must instead be to find a way to fund the necessary spending commitments. Only then will he be speaking the language of priorities and, like Bevan, using power for a purpose.