Found an interesting article by Kathleen Stock that might be relevant to this thread.
Keir Starmer’s moral vacuum Labour's ethical limits remain unclear
unherd.com/2024/06/keir-starmers-moral-vacuum/
'This week brought a new performance to pore over, in the form of a filmed walk-and-talk with Gary Neville in the Lake District, a location for Starmer family holidays when he was young ?…Here again, though, the video signalled as little information as a plain white T-shirt worn on matchday. Along with a few repeated manifesto pledges, we learnt that the Labour leader puts “country first, party second”, believes in “action not words”, wants to “return politics to public service”, and is aiming for a “decade of national renewal, fixing the fundamentals”. On “day one, sleeves rolled up”, he plans to “hit the ground running”.
In fact, this is Starmer playing the fictional character created during focus groups before the Labour leadership election, as described in Deborah Mattinson’s book Beyond The Red Wall…Mattison would eventually become Starmer’s Director of Strategy. Labour Together’s then-director, Morgan McSweeney, would become the party’s new campaign director and the mastermind of Starmerism. Four years later, a strong and purposeful Starmer entered stage right, jaw set and sleeves rolled-up, ready to hit the ground running on the NHS, housing, education, crime, tax avoidance, and immigration — as instructed.
Compared to the fantasised projections of some politicians upon the electorate, this doesn’t necessarily sound bad. Still, it has obvious weak points. One issue is that, without an accompanying positive and well-articulated vision of what human flourishing looks like, communitarianism is only as Left-wing as the community whose desires are currently being accommodated; that is, it will be contingently on the Left of the political spectrum rather than essentially so. And perhaps more seriously, a lack of accompanying discussion about ethical values will leave the electorate chaotically chasing its own tail.
…To take an obvious example: decreeing that people should be free to do what they want without harming others downgrades the importance of inherited social bonds.
…It would be good to have a concrete idea of what Labour’s moral limits are, expressed in plain terms.
…In the end, being vague about the party’s concrete ethical worldview, while deferring to the sensibleness of the British voter, just won’t be enough.'