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On today's episode of the New Statement Podcast, we discuss Keir Starmer's Year as Labour Leader, and you ask us about the violence in Northern Ireland.

We're now into over one year of Keir Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party, so we thought it would be a good time to discuss how we think he's doing.

We've all written about his various different leadership successes and failings over the year, but what's your gut feeling tell you? How do you feel the overall year has been for him, Alba?

You know, it's strange because we talk about this so much. I feel like every day I'm kind of thinking about how Keir Starmer is doing, but we so rarely get the chance to zoom out and talk about this.

I'm actually sort of unsure where to begin, but I actually think it would be boring for people if I said I think he's done okay or I don't think he's done brilliantly.

I'm not even sure what that sign bite would be. I think that the main thing that strikes you about Keir Starmer's leadership is that this has been leadership to state the obvious.

It has all taken place in a pandemic, and I think that my own top line is that he and the immediate team around him haven't sufficiently adjusted to pandemic politics.

I'm beginning with this because I don't think I've committed it to print yet, but around sort of November, December, January, when everyone within Labour was close to Keir Starmer,

I was briefing that the first year of Keir Starmer's leadership in 2020 was about establishing his difference from Jeremy Corbyn and sorting out the problem of anti-Semitism within the party, which he did, and that then 2021 would be about sort of setting out the future vision.

The thing that really struck me though is that in November and December and January, when Labour were talking about how this was going to happen, about different speeches that were going to be made, and so on, setting out this vision, there was a complete disconnect from the Labour party's own positions on the government's coronavirus strategy, and it's caused for, for example, a circuit break.

And the more you think about it, the less they coherent, because if on the one hand you have Keir Starmer saying, we urgently need a circuit break locked on, the government doesn't deliver that, and you're looking at another wave of coronavirus with all of the implications of that, it then makes no sense to have a political party planning around this idea that the pandemic will be broadly over, and that there will be appetite in the new year for these bigger vision speeches.

And then what we saw was all of these speeches that were kind of about other stuff and kind of about the pandemic, and Keir Starmer has asked lots of questions about the pandemic, and he didn't have terribly good answers to them.

And I think it just shows that there was quite a lot of opportunism in the policy calls that they made about the pandemic.

For example, the call for a circuit break was completely the right one to make it. I'll think anyone disputes that literally the sage minutes in which they had recommended it had been published.

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