Keir Starmer's Moral Test: Warm Homes or Empty Words?

“The Labour Party,” Harold Wilson famously declared, “is a moral crusade or it is nothing”.

The crisis is enormous. The state school Prime Minister was a breath of fresh air despite his pipe smoking in the second half of the 1960s, blowing away the cobwebs of 13 years of Conservative rule petering out in the staid stewardship of Alec Douglas-Home, an Old Etonian aristo who renounced a peerage to be installed undemocratically in Downing Street by an establishment magic circle.

And who in high office concurs with Wilson’s statement? Why cautious Keir Starmer. Labour’s seventh PM is a huge fan of the third, naming Wilson as the predecessor he most admired by picking him out as a high-mind figure who sought to modernise the country.

Indeed Starmer likes to be viewed in a similar mould, in 2021 quoting Wilson’s celebrated dictum. “Harold Wilson once said that the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing,” recalled Starmer. “He was right.”

So the test for Starmer is whether in Downing Street he’s able to rediscover that moral crusading, including giving everybody affordable heat and light. If he does, his and Labour’s chances of reversing plummeting polls and prospects dramatically improve.

Delivering warm homes for everybody should be as much a basic human right in a civilised world as free speech and protection against arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and torture – yet in 2025 millions of Britons are shivering in fuel poverty.

It’s a sin that at the same time vast profits are generated by bloated energy giants, some of them privatised, others corporate predators from abroad, a few with feet in both camps with the UK Labour Government allowing them to charge the earth by linking prices for cheaper renewables such as sun to dirty gas.

Muslim thirtysomething socialist Zohran Mamdani’s inspirational victory in New York, where he focused on the cost of living and living standards, highlighted an alternative in the home town of Wall Street’s turbo capitalists. Mamdani is a shining beacon for all those wondering how to beat Donald Trump – and the likes of Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick here in Britain.

Values matter – and campaigning to enhance living standards for those struggling is a gold-plated winner which is why Labour would score by removing VAT from bills in Rachel Reeves’ Budget instead of slashing funding for home insulation. The short-sightedness of leaving people in drafty properties, requiring them to spend more on heating in the long-run, would be another nail in the coffin of political satire.

The anti-Green lobby is as discredited as Brexit. These reactionaries initially denied climate change was happening. When people could see it was, the deniers switched to arguing higher global temperatures weren’t human-powered. Overwhelming scientific evidence knocked that one on the head, leaving even carbon industry propaganda tanks unable to pretend otherwise. The Alamo of Britain’s fossil fools is now screaming the birthplace of the industrial revolution is too small and irrelevant to bother reducing emissions.

Starmer can side with knuckleheads and corporates or be a PM preaching national renewal fully embracing renewable energy and lowering bills to fire up living standards.