Oh, spare us.

The Labour Party has sent its election candidates what it is calling a “campaigning bible” full of meaningless slogans to distract us from the fact that Keir Starmer doesn’t want us to know what his policies really are.

(This is because they are warmed-over Tory policies; he wants to win, so he is wooing the right-wing press by showing that he holds the same beliefs as them. As far as This Writer can see, it is the only honesty he is showing.)

The brochure is intended to solidify Labour’s current poll lead – based on disillusionment with government by the Conservatives – by replacing that feeling with positive support for Labour that is based on the meaningless soundbites it suggests.

Apparently the plan, when “doorstepping” voters, is to ask them what they want, rather than trying to wow them with party policies. This is probably because Starmer wants to keep his policies hidden as long as possible – preferably until after the general election takes place.

But if canvassers are going to ask what voters are interested in, they’re going to have to do a lot of hard work. Most ordinary people don’t stop to think about politics long enough to work out what they want; after a hard day struggling to survive, it’s easier to define what they don’t.

This could make it easier for a skilled canvasser to fill their heads with the meaningless drivel in this new ‘bible’ – but it would also make it easier for an opposing canvasser to empty those heads again and fill them with different nonsense.

And it is drivel, concocted after research by a cabal of campaigning groups.

For example, the right-wingers of Labour Together have invented a character called ‘Stevenage Woman’: “hard-working but struggling to get by, she feels national politics makes little difference to her town”. So she’s also as thick as two short planks, because if she’s hard-working but struggling, she should know that is because of more than 13 years of Tory pay suppression that Starmer’s Labour will do nothing to change.

Stevenage was chosen as her location because it is a “swing” constituency, tending to support whoever gets into office at each election.

The message to be presented to ‘Stevenage Woman’ is that Labour intends to provide “secure work, safe streets, and a strong nation” with missions built on “strong, stable and secure foundations”.

Does nobody at Labour Together remember Theresa May’s “strong and stable” debacle? We can recycle our answer to that: “weak and wobbly”.

This is particularly true when we examine Labour Together’s other slogans, which say Starmer’s Labour is about “strong national defence” and “secure borders”. These are Tory distraction policies that Starmer is trying to adopt. The UK’s national defences have always been strong and its borders have only been weakened because the Tories wanted to create an “enemy” for people like ‘Stevenage Woman’ to hate, taking her mind off her own life of “struggling to get by”.

So Starmer is planning to trick people into voting for Labour with Tory distraction tactics.

The brochure is arranged in five sections which correspond with the five “missions” that Starmer announced last year – to replace all the policies on which he got himself elected as Labour leader and which he subsequently dropped like the proverbial hot potatoes.

But they have all had a makeover after the spin doctors decided the concepts he had described were not “landing with voters”.

So the “mission” to “improve the NHS” has been recast as “Getting the NHS back on its feet”. But it seems there is no mention of how a Labour government would do this. Is it because Wes Streeting’s plan for wholesale privatisation, with even more public money siphoned off as profits for fat businesspeople, won’t sit well with “struggling to get by” ‘Stevenage Woman’?

“Reforming the Justice System” has become “Taking Back Our Streets”. How aggressive! But there seems to be no information on how Labour is going to achieve this transformation or how it will improve the day-to-day life of ‘Stevenage Woman’.

“Raising Education Standards” is re-badged as “Breaking Down the Barriers to Opportunity”. But – again – there is no indication of how these barriers will be broken down or what opportunities will be offered to ‘Stevenage Woman’ as a result. Precious few, one would expect, considering that she is already “hard-working”, which implies she has a job and simply wants a raise.

Nothing seems to be said in the brochure about forcing businesses to share their profits in a more equitable way, or changing the tax system to redistribute wealth in a way that will create more opportunities and better-paid work, or ending the subsidy for employers that means working people must claim benefits to make ends meet.

The sub-headings in each section ram home the impression that this is a Labour Party with no message.

They are “It’s Time for a Change”, “‘The Tories Have Failed’, ‘Labour Has Changed” and “Labour has a Long Term Plan” – and they mean nothing.

It is time for a change – but if it’s just a change of the name of the party in government, rather than a meaningful change of policy, then it won’t help anybody.

The Tories have failed – but if Labour won’t show us any tangible evidence of how it is different, then we have no reason to believe that Starmer’s gang won’t fail us too.

Labour certainly has changed – but not for the better. Under Jeremy Corbyn, we were told exactly what the policies were and how they were intended to help us. Keir Starmer is deliberately hiding his plans by being – as described in the media a few days ago – “opaque”.

And if Labour has a long term plan, why won’t Starmer and his cronies lay it out for us, so we can judge whether we want to support them on the basis of what we think of it?

There can only be one answer – or so it seems to me.

Starmer and the others – including Peter Mandelson, the Blairite spin doctor whose name has been connected with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein – are afraid.

They fear that the UK’s voters will abandon Labour en masse if they see what Starmer is really planning, and realise that he is not planning to represent their interests in any way at all.

That’s why this “campaigning bible” is about ways to hide what Starmer’s Labour would do in government, and hoodwink you into thinking you’ve been told something real when you haven’t.

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