a clear direction for Starmer

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

The Labour party will not have to apply for a renewal of its lease on power until eight months after the end of Donald Trump’s second term as US president. Or, to put it another way, enough time for South Korea to swing from democracy to martial law to rule by chastened president 1,719 times.

Assessing the measures in Keir Starmer’s new “plan for change” according to their electoral effectiveness is, therefore, pretty silly. Clearly, governments can do things to help their re-election prospects (such as ploughing more cash into the UK’s tattered public realm) and can also do economically harmful things (such as funding that spree by hiking taxes on businesses). But the decisions made by the British state in 2024 are a comparatively minor component in deciding whether British voters feel more prosperous, more secure and therefore more inclined to re-elect Labour in half a decade’s time.

All we can say with confidence is that Labour’s time in office will be constrained and made more difficult by two pre-election blunders on tax and personnel. The decision to match the Conservative party’s impossible pledges to hold down income tax, VAT and national insurance means both that they have less money to spend and that the money they do spend will be raised in ways that do no small amount of harm to UK growth prospects. Giving the role of chief of staff and orchestrator of Labour’s preparation for government to Sue Gray, a consummate Whitehall fixer but with no relevant experience in the position of chief, resulted in patchy plans and an uneasy Downing Street operation.

Starmer’s first term will, in part, be defined and constrained by those mistakes and by whether Labour can govern despite the negative effect of its own promises on tax.

Westminster prefers to use the electorate’s judgment as its yardstick for everything for two reasons. One is that the UK has, for one reason or another, enjoyed only 18 months of stable, drama-free government in total since the Brexit vote in 2016. Seeing everything as a series of theatrical set pieces between frequent electoral clashes has been a pretty good way to view politics for almost a decade.

But the second reason is that all ecosystems are shaped by their apex predator. And Starmer’s own political style leads everyone, from his inner circle down, to think and talk of politics as a series of diversions between elections. His plan for change is, essentially, a pledge that the UK’s new Labour government will deliver on the promises that Boris Johnson made but failed to keep in 2019: to invest more in public services while keeping income tax, national insurance and value added tax at current levels and reducing immigration.

In many ways, this is a good thing. Keeping at least some of those promises was an urgent necessity when Johnson made them five years ago; a half-decade of failure has not made it any less so. But there is no distinct logic in believing that Starmer will succeed where Johnson failed. It is not clear what incentives Starmer wants to change in Whitehall, and how he will run public services differently from the Conservatives. Without a clear steer as to why the same promises and same constraints won’t lead to the same outcome, everything is refracted through the prism of an election that is some way off.

Starmer has always shown a willingness to discard principles and people when he needs to, but the position he has kept the strongest hold on is institutionalism. He saw one of his first tasks as Labour leader as restoring the party’s institutional memory, which meant recruiting backroom operators with deep connections to New Labour’s election-winning past. In office, he has appointed ministers with institutional knowhow. His aides are drawn heavily from Tony Blair’s Downing Street. Chris Wormald, the new head of the civil service, is Whitehall’s longest serving permanent secretary and a protégé of former cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood.

Not all of them have the same politics. Starmer’s tent includes those whose institutional memory leads them to believe that all the machine needs is more money and more love, alongside those who believe that it needs hefty amounts of reform. The new-look Downing Street embodies both worlds: Morgan McSweeney as chief of staff brings deep knowledge of fighting and winning elections and oversees a team that combines Blair-era veterans with structural innovations that remain from Dominic Cummings’ stint as Johnson’s chief strategist.

But Starmer dislikes it when ministers ask him to weigh in on disputes. (One minister complains of being made to feel “like a naughty child” for dragging the prime minister into an interdepartmental battle). Ultimately his core role is to adjudicate on tricky divisions between departments and interests. His team of institutionalists might be well-placed to deliver on this week’s set of refined priorities but what is often missing is a clear political direction about what the boss really wants.

Without it, everything will still be assessed on whether or not it puts Labour in the best position to fight an election in 2029. Ironically, this is a poor way to win the next election, as well as a poor way to run the country. The start of a parliament should be when a government obsesses over precisely what a PM wants it to be about — not over the elections yet to come.

[email protected]

#clear #direction #Starmer