‘The party of service: Is Starmer’s new rhetoric smart or empty?’

“Service” seems to be Keir Starmer’s word of the month. Earlier in December, the Labour leader praised Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair for acting “in service of the British people, rather than dictating to them“. More recently, he marked four years since defeat in 2019 by celebrating Labour’s return as “a party of service, not protest“.

The word ‘service’ can take on a variety of different meanings

The term can certainly do some heavy lifting, supplying a remarkable variety of different meanings. During that speech, Starmer used the word to invoke the honourable endeavour of public service, declaring: “Service. If there’s one word that captures everything I’ve fought for, it’s that.”

Servants are bound by a sense of responsibility to find credible solutions to concrete problems, and the former director of public prosecutions made clear that such is the ethos that the public demands of its leaders, not “vanity”, “self-interest” or “naked self-enrichment”.

Nodding towards Labour’s commitments on devolved power and House of Lords reform, he said Labour would “take power and control out of our hands and place them in yours”. Public service has nothing to do with ambitious visions cooked up by out-of-touch leaders, it’s about putting ‘the people’ and the ‘country first’.

The idea of ‘national service’ is among Starmer’s uses of the word

Starmer also used the term to conjure images of the Tories’ shoddy record on public services and the crumbling state of the police, schools and the National Health Service. Such failures to meet basic social needs reflect a lack of investment in the lives of the “nurses, teaching assistants, builders, drivers, shopworkers, carers” who make up the everyday economy – although Rachel Reeves’ growth and productivity route to investment means that, unlike the Conservatives, Labour won’t make any ‘gimmicky’ promises they can’t afford to keep.

But Starmer just as easily slipped into the register of national service, emphasising “the contribution of every citizen in this country” to the task of “national renewal”, as well as the more pertinent issue of securing borders, “removing people” and cracking down on smuggler gangs.

Louise Jones, Labour’s parliamentary candidate for North East Derbyshire, warmed up the crowd by contrasting her decision to join the British Army – “to serve my country to the best of my ability“ – with the Conservatives’ poor record on defence and national security. Reflecting on Labour’s plans to fix this mess, she said: “It’s going to take a lot of hard work to deliver this. A lot. But I know that that’s what service means. The leader of the Labour Party knows that’s what service means.”

The concept of service has a long history within Labour

Many will immediately recall Tony Blair’s “we are the servants” speech, but the concept of service has an even longer history within the party.

GDH Cole, Harold Laski and RH Tawney – Labour’s interwar radicals – believed that individual rights and personal liberties had to be combined with social duties and moral obligations towards the common good. The abandonment of a sense of responsibility in favour of a reckless and unbridled individualism was the chief cause of the exploitation, impoverishment and inequalities of modern capitalism.

Like Victorian philanthropists and Edwardian social reformers, they sought to enthuse a “spirit of service“ into the social fabric, to convince individuals to “renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue without any corresponding service“ and to organise industry so that “its function is to serve and assist the labour of human beings”.

Serving the nation was a central part of Attlee’s vision

The tradition exercised an unmistakable influence on Clement Attlee and the architects of the post-war ‘social service state’, as William Beveridge called it.

But the historian David Edgerton has shown that Labour’s welfare policies were as much about serving the ‘nation’ as they were the ‘working class’, picking up on the wartime sense of national effort and channelling it into the construction of the National Service as much as the National Health Service.

Starmer himself recently recognised that Attlee saw Labour as “a party of duty and patriotism, not abstract theory”. In the 1945 manifesto, Tawney’s ethical plea for industry to serve humanity was transformed into a powerful case for national efficiency: “Each industry must have applied to it the test of national service. If it serves the nation, well and good; if it is inefficient and falls down on its job, the nation must see that things are put right.”

Blair and Brown took a different approach to the idea of service

But service has also been used to argue for a very different approach to governing. Gordon Brown titled his 1992 proposal for a new constitutional settlement The Servant State, emphasising that the post-war dream of the state as ‘provider’ was a basic miscalculation. Like private industry, the government provided its clients with a ‘service’, and its needs were not to be placed above the interests of individuals, but beneath them.

In Blair’s victory speech, he promised his would “be a government that seeks to restore trust in politics in this country. That cleans it up, that decentralises it, that gives people hope once again that politics is and always should be about the service of the public”. But his insistence that “service will be driven not by the government or by the managers but by the user” spoke to a very different kind of service ethic to that of Tawney and Attlee, one rooted in a ‘private-sector-oriented’ and ‘consumer-focused’ mode of delivery.

Such rhetorical flexibility has multiple benefits

Starmer clearly understands that a word like service can simultaneously reflect the governing virtues of duty and responsibility, the social values of community support and welfare, the enterprising spirit of consumer choice and the patriotic sentiments of national pride, concern for border security and unease over increasing immigration.

Of course, the future of the Labour Party will not be determined by catchy slogans but by concrete policies. In the meantime, however, a self-conscious rhetorical flexibility will allow its leader access to multiple demographics, signal a wide range of commitments and leave the door open for as many policy options as possible.