UK Politics Thread

The public mood is different now. And while the Blair era is clearly an influence on Starmer – from his use of Gordon Brown and David Blunkett as advisers to his shadow ministers’ revival of Blairite strategies such as being “tough on crime” and “reforming” public services – Starmer’s policy proposals and rhetoric increasingly suggest that he would go further than New Labour in trying to change the country. He feels he has no choice. As he summed up today’s Britain at the last Labour conference: “We can’t go on like this.”

He still has a careful, hair-shirt side as a politician, warning almost with relish that a Starmer government would have to “make very difficult choices”. But the state of the country is simultaneously forcing him to be more expansive. This expansiveness is not just about winning the election. If a Starmer administration produces policies that are too small for the scale of the crisis – what he calls “sticking plaster politics” – his carefully acquired reputation for competence won’t last long.

It’s also possible that he is finding being bolder quite exciting – more so than the miserably tentative “constructive opposition” of his leadership’s first phase. That a typically cautious Labour leader could end up being a conduit for public dissatisfaction with the country the Tories have created, and an architect of whatever replaces it, still feels quite an unlikely outcome. But we live in strange times.

• Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist