Keir Starmer has – please try and contain your excitement – announced his eleventh campaign slogan since 2022. A spoon-fed exclusive in The Guardian this morning sets out Labour’s local elections plan, including “new regional organisers, a bigger digital operation & slogan ‘Build a Better Britain'”. A cursory look into the history of this generic, focus-group-created tag reveals that Sir Keir has given up pretending he’s not playing word-for-word from the Tony Blair playbook.
Labour’s 1997 manifesto forward promised that saw Blair write, “I am confident about our future prosperity, even optimistic, if we have the courage to change and use it to build a better Britain.”
In 1998 Jack Straw’s Home Office published a ten-year strategy to tackle drug misuse, entitled “Tackling Drugs to Build a Better Britain”
Starmer himself has been floating the slogan since September 2021, having written a Guardian op-ed promising “Labour will build a better Britain for working people”.
For those of you wanting a reminder of all Starmer’s slogans so far, Guido’s happy to oblige…
Strong pub quiz round…