THE Labour Party has a new leader. Sir Keir Starmer, former Director of Public Prosecutions and author of several books on human rights law, combines practical experience of decision-making in high office with intellectual credibility.

For all of us, regardless of our politics, this is good news. On a point of principle, the Westminster model of democracy, for all its subtle strengths and obvious weaknesses, works better with a capable leader of the opposition. We desperately need someone to challenge the Government’s narrative, to hold ministers to account – to press them in committees, poke them at the despatch box – and to offer a convincing alternative to the voters.

A leader of the opposition who does not pose a plausible electoral threat to the government is just shadow boxing. A leader of the opposition who can potentially win the next election and form the next government is able to land effective punches. One hesitates to use such pugilistic language, but sadly that’s the way of things in Westminster’s adversarial winner-takes-all political system. This isn’t the compromising, co-operative Netherlands, alas.

Starmer is portrayed as a centrist, but his actual policies on the issues that matter to people may not be far from what Labour promised under Corbyn.

With coronavirus showing the need for social solidarity mediated through an effective state, the window of opportunity for such policies is wider now than it was in 2019. Three months ago, a public unemployment insurance scheme that would guarantee 80% of previous income for several months and so give some economic security to the middle class was “utopian Scandinavian socialism”. Now even Conservatives are doing it. Corbyn was painted as a dangerous radical for wanting to renationalise the railways. The Tories have, more or less, in a round about way, done it.

Polling on policies suggests there’s a lot of support for what Labour offered in 2019. English people just like to be governed by well-spoken lawyers in good suits, not “geography teachers with allotments” – even if those geography teachers were right about the folly of the Iraq War.

Starmer has none of Corbyn’s hopelessly self-defeating “performative leftism”. You won’t catch him wearing a Lenin hat or hanging out with Hamas or saying nice things about Cuban communists.

He doesn’t scare a middle-aged female C2 floating voter in Wolverhampton. These are the people that must be won over if Labour wants to re-invest in an active industrial strategy, increase the number of ICU beds in Bolton and stop kids in Bradford going hungry.

During his leadership election campaign, Starmer made some good noises about constitutional reform, including commitments to a constitutional convention that will draw up plans for federalism, the replacement of the House of Lords with a senate of “nations and regions”, and electoral reform. It remains to be seen whether he really believes in it.

If he does, then Labour has the chance to embrace constitutional reform and to campaign strongly for a new constitutional settlement. In this they are aided by the return, in England, to two-party politics. The performance of the Liberal Democrats over the past three General Elections resembles that of their Liberal predecessors during the 1945-1979 era of two-party dominance. There is an opportunity for Labour to position itself as a big tent anti-Tory party spanning the ground once occupied by both Labour and the Liberals – not “centre-left” or “left-of-centre”, but “left-and-centre”. To win those votes, it has to offer real constitutional change.

That will be a hard task for a Labour leader. If Labour’s constitutional policy is to be more than a cynical electoral ploy, it demands a serious rethink of the party’s traditionally sceptical, if not actively hostile, approach to anything but cosmetic reform. Another round of piecemeal tinkering, of the sort offered during the Blair-Brown years, just will not do.

Even more difficult, but no less essential, is to break out of ordinary adversarial politics and to build a consensus for a new constitution that has both a sufficient degree of cross-party support and support in each of the four constituent parts of the UK. A deal cut in England that does not satisfy Scottish aspirations is dead the minute it crosses the Tweed.

I am not convinced that a federal union is a sustainable solution for Scotland, but as a medium-term compromise, it might at least offer a way out of the Section 30 order impasse. The SNP should have two main objectives in return for supporting Labour’s plans: firstly, to secure for Scotland as much autonomy within a federal union as possible, so long as the Union continues; secondly, to affirm “Claim of Right principles” in the new constitution, such that Scotland has a peaceful, democratic route to independence at the time of our own choosing.

This column welcomes questions from readers.

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