AT 12,000 words, The Road Ahead, Keir Starmer’s pamphlet for the Fabian Society, seems to be talking a lot but saying nothing.

Even Starmer fans found it hard to get excited about his “10 principles,” which were so bland any leader of any party could sign up to them.

Why would Boris Johnson, or even Margaret Thatcher, find it hard to embrace his third principle, which reads: “People and businesses are expected to contribute to society, as well as receive.”

With the content being so content-free, folk started looking to the form to see if that showed what is going on inside Starmer’s head.

The wording of his “first principle” stood out. It read: “We will always put hard-working families and their priorities first.”

That doesn’t sound like much fun. Isn’t the Labour Party meant to make working less hard? And should families actually “work hard” too?

It’s a bit of a grim vision, that seems to dismiss traditional labour causes of making workplace conditions better and improving home life.

A party that was built on ideas like the eight-hour day or better childcare or decent homes shouldn’t be saying your family and job are “hard work” — but Starmer uses the phrase twice.

Other commenters defended Starmer. They said that “hard-working families” is just a political cliche. It’s something politicians say and doesn’t mean anything bad.

But the historic record says that’s not true. “Hard-working families” is not an old cliche — it is a new phrase, more or less formulated by New Labour that quickly became associated with benefit cuts.

Searching through a digital database of the Times newspaper, the phrase “hard-working families” was only used eight times in the 164 years between 1831 and 1994. The idea of the “family” as being about “work” just wasn’t that common.

But the “hard-working families” phrase was used 192 times in the years 1995-2014. It was essentially a New Labour-invented phrase

The first “modern” usage is Gordon Brown talking about “ordinary decent hard-working families” being paid too little.

You can see this is a sort of “verbal triangulation,” an attempt to dress up left-wing ideas in “small-c conservative” values.

Fighting low pay is a radical idea, but “family values” sounds reassuringly conservative.

But the problem with this linguistic triangulation is it soon becomes policy triangulation.

There is always a danger you stop “dressing up” left-wing ideas in conservative-sounding clothes and start letting your new right-wing costume actually influence the way you “walk it” as well as the way you “talk it.”

Soon “hard-working families” becomes associated with slashing the welfare state. The “hard-working families” are contrasted with the lazy, good-for-nothing families.

The Tories themselves quickly picked up the “hard-working families” line, gifted to them by Labour, but pushing it towards benefit cuts.

William Hague said in 1998: “The British way is to be on the side of people who try to do the right thing. People who save, work hard, try to be independent of the state, who obey the law and pay their taxes, people who are good citizens.

“They’re the kind of people I grew up with in Rotherham. They’re hard-working families in which children are taught to respect values like self-discipline, honesty, self-reliance, good manners and respect for other people” — all of which, Hague argued, showed the need for  “welfare reform” and benefit cuts.

It’s worth noting how much Hague’s 1998 Tory benefit-cuts argument sounds like Starmer’s 2021 pamphlet.

Starmer says we “want to see a contribution society: one where people who work hard and play by the rules can expect to get something back.”

After Hague made “hard-working families” a slogan to call for  benefit cuts, the actual Labour government used the words to justify real benefit cuts.

So in 2006 Labour’s work and pensions secretary John Hutton gets a Times headline for what it calls his “threat to stop jobless benefits for ‘can’t work, won’t work’ refuseniks” plan.

Hutton said in a speech: “Our welfare reforms must confront the ‘can’t work, won’t work’ culture. We cannot reasonably ask hard-working families to pay for the unwillingness of some to take responsibility to engage in the labour market.”

Or similarly, in 2010, introducing a housing benefit cap, Yvette Cooper said: “Housing benefit is really important to help families on low income pay their rent.

“But it isn’t fair for the taxpayer to fund a very small minority of people to live in expensive houses which hard-working families could never afford.”

Instead of ensuring cheap rents, Cooper punished claimants in high-rent areas by eroding their benefits — and in the process created the blueprint for the Tories’ bedroom tax.

The record shows that when Labour starts celebrating “hard work” instead of trying to make work less hard, then the danger of  benefit cuts for the disabled, the unemployed and the vulnerable increases.