 Keir Starmer's much anticipated 12,000 word essay was released on 11pm on Wednesday night. The pamphlet published with the Fabian Society pledged to repair the public finances and ended with the 10 principles that Keir Starmer said would guide his leadership and bring about what he calls a contribution society. The 10 principles are we will always put hardworking families and their priorities first. If you work hard and play by the rules you should be rewarded fairly. People and businesses are expected to contribute to society as well as receive. Your chances in life should not be defined by the circumstances of your birth, hard work and how you contribute should matter. Families, communities and the things that bring us together must once again be put above individualism. The economy should work for citizens and communities. It is not good enough to just surrender to market forces. The role of government is to be a partner to private enterprise not stifle it. The government should treat taxpayer money as if it were its own. The current levels of waste are unacceptable. The government must play its role in restoring honesty decency and transparency in public life. And finally we are proudly patriotic but we reject the divisiveness of nationalism. Those are the 10 principles that Keir Starmer say are going to guide his leadership and any government which he leads. There are a few principles there that are potentially worrying by focusing on playing by the rules are labour laying the ground for an attack on so-called benefit cheats or legal immigrants, people who don't play by the rules. And by speaking of government spending as if the state were a household is he opening the door to more austerity. It might be too early to say. These are all very vague ambiguous statements. What people from all sides of the political aisle have noticed though is a problem not with what the list of principles includes but what it leaves out. Namely anything to distinguish labour from the Tories. ITV's political editor Robert Peston tweeted. The striking thing about Keir Starmer's road ahead, his 12,000 word profession of fundamental beliefs is that it is not impossible to imagine Boris Johnson saying almost all of it apart from the sentence about giving more power to trade unions to recruit and organise which is not to argue that Starmer's labour and Johnson's Tories would do the same thing but it shows that words are not the dividing line in today's politics and that is more of a problem for an opposition for a government or for an opposition than for a government. Even more notable than the tweets from Peston was one from Gavin Barwell. Barwell is a former Tory MP, former Tory cabinet member and served as chief of staff to Theresa May. In response to the essay, he said, just read Keir Starmer's 10 principles. I agree with eight of them and partially agree with the other two. This even means I am in the wrong party or they are so bland that they don't tell us anything useful about what he would do if he became Prime Minister. Ash, some people might argue this is a strength of an essay. You know, even the opponents are forced to agree with what Keir Starmer has said. Other people might say that was only possible because the essay was so vacuous. Well, the essay is entirely vacuous. When you read it, all 14,000 words of it, it's been focused group to the extent that you have a kind of emotional story and images which kind of work as long as you don't think too hard about them. And then the minute you apply any kind of critical interrogation, the whole thing begins to fall apart because it's not so much an essay statement about Keir Starmer's theory of the world or his theory of change. It's really a set of images and vibes, right? It really is 14,000 words of vibes only, which might be appropriate in a kind of party political broadcast where it is just about kind of emotions and images and then the Labour Party logo slathered on top of it. But for an essay which is really articulating who you are, what you're about, what your view of the world is and how you're going to change it, it's completely and utterly inadequate. So I think that this idea of, well, you can imagine Boris Johnson saying any of this stuff. You've got Gavin Barwell saying, well, I agree with eight of the 10 principles and two I kind of agree with as well. I think that shows how vacuous Keir Starmer's so-called vision, his agenda-setting essay really is. I think there were some phrases in there which particularly stood out to me as one of those things which is very much a vibes-only kind of phrase. And for me, the one which kept coming back to me was this notion of the hard-working families. Whenever Keir Starmer's talking about family life, the defining feature of it is hard work. Now that is something which might pass an initial focus group test where you give a list of words to people and you go, what do you think about this? And it's like, oh yeah, families should work hard. They should work hard. But who actually in their heart of hearts thinks that the defining feature of family life is work, rather than love or quality time or affection or mutual support or whatever it might be. So there are these things which are very kind of flimsily held together by a kind of quite shallow sense of social conservatism, an appeal to an imagined English decency. But ultimately, I've got nothing of real substance to say to anybody, at least of all the voting public. The real danger there is because you could, I think, probably, I mean, I don't have actually that much conviction when I say this, but let's try this. I think you probably could make a sort of progressive prospectus around things like hard-working families, but you'd have to be very, very clear as to what you are opposing them to. What are you opposing hard-working families to? Are you opposing them to the rich and powerful and tax dodgers? Or are you opposing them to families that don't work hard, families on benefits, maybe families who have disabled members who aren't able to go to work? Right? If you don't do that work, if you don't be very clear and specify what you are contrasting these hard-working families to, then the Tories, the media, that's going to activate in people's minds these ideas which we have been primed with for years, which is that the big opponent of hard-working families is families who don't work hard. It's not the tax-dodging, wealth-extracting, wealthy, it's the benefit-cheats. And there is sort of very little in anything Keir Starmer has said in quite a long time actually, probably since the leadership election, to suggest that he is very averse to drawing upon a frame whereby you are pitching hard-working families against non-hard-working families. I mean, following the rules especially, I think, is, because I mean, that for me really just invokes Pretty Patel talking about migration. These people, they might have come over the channel and they might be desperate, but they haven't followed the rules. They should have done it in a way that followed the laws like the rest of us do. I do find it hard to see how that could be progressive and also getting the nation's public finances in order. I mean, it's just, it's a million miles away from even centre-left politicians elsewhere in the world. So on the same day that Keir Starmer published that essay, Joe Biden tweeted, I'm sick and tired of the super-wealthy and giant corporations not paying their fair share in taxes. It's time for it to change. Now, I saw some people sort of mock Joe Biden because they're saying, look, you're the president. You're the president. You're not just a sort of social commentator. Do something about it. At the same time, though, this does show to me how out of step Keir Starmer is with the times. It's like this, this essay could have been written in the early 90s and he hasn't woken up to the fact that the world has fundamentally changed since then. What would you have put in a 12,000-word essay, Ash? What would I have put in a 12,000-word essay? I'd be like, do absolutely anything else other than read this. There's a reason why like most undergrad and even master's dissertations are capped at eight to 10,000 words, nobody needs to read something 12,000 words long. But I think that this is kind of precisely the point about why there is such a lack of authenticity within this essay. It's because it's not actually about Keir Starmer communicating with the public. It's not even about Keir Starmer communicating with the Labour membership. What this is supposed to do is signal to political editors and lobby journalists that this guy is serious, he's sensible, and Labour aren't just a party of wrongans anymore. So one of the ways in which I'd described it for a piece that I wrote was that it is one half of a ventriloquist's act. And the other half of it is some new statesman columnist cooing about how serious and prime ministerial this guy really is. It's Labour, but not as you know it. The problem is, is that it's so boring and it's so verbose and bloviating and contentless that even people who'd really expect to rally behind this mid-90s view of the world are kind of turned off by it. Tony Blair didn't put out a 12,000 word essay. He passed out cards at conference which were like this big with like three pledges on it. That's why he was a more skillful communicator. Say what you like about Jeremy Corbyn when he was articulating himself, he wasn't necessarily the king of brevity. You'd ask him to give a speech and he'd always start somewhere around the chartists and then move forward to the present day. But it was very clear what he was about. It was taxing the wealthy, fund public services, don't bomb the Middle East. These things were very, very clear. Whereas Keir Starmer has taken 12,000 words to tell us absolutely nothing. It's a waste of everybody's time.