That Starmer fella...

One of the most significant policy announcements I thought was the supervised brushing in schools policy. It's basic common sense, it's strong, the economic arguments are behind it, the social arguments are behind it, and it tells us something about the kind of government Starmer's going to run - interventionist, unafraid of the 'nanny state' accusations, dedicated to ensuring some baseline level of standards for kids with parents who can't or won't do it for them. More stuff like this would backfill the narrative deficit (imo).

I'm surprised you mentioned this as fitting the narrative gap you're talking about. To me it's a very bizarre policy indeed, and one that I suspect voters will likely reject as government being too involved in their children's lives, rather than fixing the underlying issues. Either that, or they'll fucking love it because it's authoritarian and focused on poorer households.

That's not to say they're not trying to fix the underlying issues, but this stuff quoted in the article is way more important, and I suspect more resonant too:

Labour’s action plan includes a 9pm watershed for junk-food ads, banning vape adverts aimed at children, a free breakfast club in every primary school, better access to mental-health support, cutting waiting times for hospital care for children, and guaranteeing more dental appointments.

It feels like the moment has changed and space for a few big interventionist policies would go down really well — not on people, but on systems. The green investment fund and single worker status were those things.