Starmer Needs to Show Backbone at Home, Not Just Abroad

Three short words, “Crisis. What crisis?” still send a shiver down the spines of Labour ministers, five decades after the tabloid Sun newspaper plastered the plangent headline across its front page. In January 1979, a tanned Prime Minister James Callaghan returned from West Indies summit with the leaders of France, Germany and the US, to be confronted by a wave of strikes in shivering Britain. Callaghan downplayed the gravity of the situation compared with the importance of high level diplomacy. Popular anger exploded at his unpreparedness for the “Winter of Discontent” when even the dead were left unburied. Callaghan’s government soon descended into a death spiral, leading to the long rule of Margaret Thatcher’s Tories.

Grandstanding with foreign dignitaries is good for the cameras, but the worldly-wise always remember that most, if not all, politics is local.