SO WHAT is Keir Starmer’s big idea?

You’re thinking this is a trick question. Intellectual explorers have been trekking into the void signposted “Labour thinking” for some time without bringing anything home.

However, commentators are starting to express concern at the absence of any transformative plan coming from the moonlighting police officer leading Labour. What will a Starmer-led Britain look like? Silence echoes.

The Labour leader is grappling with the problem that has overwhelmed social democracy since the collapse of its mixed economy, tax-and-spend, full employment alternative to socialism of the post-war period.

It was shattered, with varying degrees of violence, across the first-wave capitalist world in the 1980s, and replaced by a deregulated, privatised, markets-first model entrenched and extended by globalisation thereafter.

New Labour addressed the problem by embracing it. Let the markets rip and tax the proceeds to fund public services was the Blair-era mantra.  

This was underpinned by a determined disavowal of Labour’s class roots and its reincarnation as a party of the whole people, in the counsels of which the richest had the loudest voices.

Let’s allow that this approach worked well enough for a time. It won elections, and it took a criminal and utterly avoidable war to bring discontent to critical mass. Enough appeared to improve to keep the New Labour show on the road until 2008.

The great bankers’ crash deflated the Blair-Brown balloon, economically and politically. Brown’s golden goose, the City, was in no position to lay any more eggs, a few of which had been whipped into a public service omelette.

The whole strategy imploded. New Labour’s inheritors could only follow the logic of their position and embrace austerity, since the alternative — a shift to the left — was unthinkable.

This is a familiar tale. What is extraordinary, however, is that 15 years on Labour’s right wing has not had a single new idea to replace Blair-Brown’s busted flush. Not one.

Instead, it sniped against Ed Miliband, sabotaged Jeremy Corbyn and substituted factional malice and manoeuvring for anything that might pass as a positive platform.

It abominates the only fresh thinking undertaken in the last decade, which was under Corbyn’s leadership, with its Green New Deal and focus on tackling inequality.

So if the Starmerite policy cupboard is bare, it is for a reason. Starmer is the cardboard front-man for a band without tunes or lyrics.

His vacuous attempts at self-explanation — remember the endless Fabian essay? Name the five missions?  Me neither — have hardly helped.

Still, vacuums, nature etc. Some set of ideas will perforce have to be pressed into service. They will certainly be drawn from the buffet of bourgeois thought, since any trace of socialism must be rigidly eschewed.

So, what’s on offer? My eye was caught by a conference taking place in London shortly. It concerns “national conservatism” and brings together leading figures from the culture war across the Anglo-American world.

Speakers include Home Secretary Suella Braverman, Michael Gove, straight-from-the-17th-century Jacob Rees-Mogg, writers Douglas Murray, Melanie Phillips and the egregious David Goodhart, erstwhile cosplay Trotskyist Frank Furedi and a Catholic priest but — surprise — no apparent Muslims.

This gabfest aims to contribute to “the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together.” 

Its enemies are declared to be “a rising China abroad and a powerful new Marxism at home.”

The themes of the conference will likely include opposition to immigration and anti-racism, indulgence of authoritarianism, an imperial-nationalist reading of Britain’s history and a return to Britain’s purported roots, which include capitalism, of course.

All well and good, you may say, but what has this to do with Keir Starmer’s ideas deficiency? Let me put this out there — there is little or nothing in the national conservatism agenda which Labour’s leader would find objectionable.

He has done everything he can to wrap his project in the Union Jack. Islamophobia has flourished in Labour on his watch. He dismissed Black Lives Matter.

Labour’s objections to the government’s racist refugee policy are cast in terms of practicalities rather than principle. Starmer’s own authoritarianism is beyond question as he tries to outbid the Tories on law and order. Challenging China and extirpating Marxism? Not a problem.

Under his leadership, Labour has focused on regaining the so-called “red wall” seats which were lost in 2019 largely because of its adoption of Starmer’s own strategy of obstructing Brexit.

Labour appears to work on the patronising assumption that voters in such seats are all like Lee Anderson, the hard-right neanderthal MP for Ashfield serving as Tory deputy chair.

That means offering a political mixture of sentimental patriotism, law-and-order tough talk and othering of migrants. It also means silence over Brexit, long after the damage was deliberately done.

It does not mean purposeful economic action to revive desolated communities. When Corbyn’s Labour offered that in 2017, alongside respect for the Brexit referendum decision, its vote rose sharply across the “red wall,” to the highest share this century in many cases.

But that is not on Starmer’s menu — City-first economic stewardship is in, transformative change out. In fact, his approach could be described as national conservatism.  

The latter differs from familiar trends like the nationalist Blue Labour only in eschewing economic interventionism and on that issue Starmer stands closer to the market liberals.

This is an argument, not a dogma. To say a Starmer government would be a pure exercise in national conservatism would risk straying towards the posturing of “social fascism.” 

And of course, Suella Braverman and Melanie Phillips are scarcely looking to any form of Labour government to advance their agenda.

But then New Labour wasn’t monolithically neoliberal either. That ideology, now discredited, framed a post-reformist social democracy without dictating its every move.

Perhaps national conservatism does not yet have the hegemonic power that neoliberalism acquired, but it is gathering steam in an age of Trump, Orban and Braverman.

A generation on from Blair, the barren wastes of Starmerism require ideological irrigation.  The acid rain of national conservatism could provide it.