The first King’s Speech of a Labour government since Clement Attlee will produce a firework display of plans, ideas and consequent journalism. Whizz! Bang! Crack and… splutter. But there is a prior question, below the eye-catching activity on all sides, which is belief. What are the fundamental ideas – what’s the faith – linking the activity together? To use a famous Tony Blair phrase, what is the irreducible core? Indeed, in 2024, is there one; is there a faith?
This is such an obvious question – what in Scotland we’d call a “daft laddie” question – that it is striking the answer isn’t immediately clear. Ministers slide away from the word socialism and clutch for “social democratic” without explaining what it means. Ideological tags such as “old Labour”, or “technocratic centrism”, turn out to be only a lazy way of relabelling the confusion. Thinkers such as John Cruddas have tried to archaeologise their way back through the layers of Labour history – through the soil of community-focused “blue Labour”, Crosland and Tawney – but have struggled to find a clear connection to modern times.
If such discussions feel aloof from the work of policy itself, consider the values-based choices that lie around on every side. If economic growth is the priority, why impose new protections for workers? If you are determined to “save the NHS” by getting waiting lists down, why not buy the help of big US private technology companies? Indeed, why not part-privatise? If you are determined that a modernised democracy is your aim, why fiddle around with Lords modernisation – why not simply abolish the ridiculous place? These are all questions about values. And they go on in every direction: between net zero and the protection of valuable food production; between house building and irreplaceable ancient woodland. If you aren’t sure of your fundamental values, how can you make the choice?
An important part of the story of the next few years is likely to be community and religious strife, yet for more than any previous government, religion seems to be no part of the answer. Britain has just elected the most openly non-religious House of Commons in our history, with some 40% of MPs choosing to take a secular affirmation rather than a religious oath to God, a considerable jump from 24% in 2019. The non-religious include both Starmer and half of his cabinet although, interestingly, some of the most powerful voices are Christians. There’s Rachel Reeves, with her Salvation Army background; Wes Streeting, very open about his faith; David Lammy (“my faith has been with me my whole life”); and Jonathan Reynolds, who said his Christian faith was part of why he resigned from the Corbyn frontbench.
All these individuals would have been readily recognised by the Methodist Harold Wilson or the Baptist Jim Callaghan. But even that arch-moderniser Tony Crosland was brought up in the Exclusive Brethren sect, and Tawney was a Christian, while the Tony Blair of recent years has quite publicly “done God” and his predecessor John Smith, buried on Iona, was a member of the Church of Scotland.
Why, you might ask, does any of this matter – even in a country where Christianity, via the Pentecostalist black churches so popular with the English football team, is making a comeback? Simply because the “don’t pass by on the other side” instinct and the tilt towards the powerless and impoverished so rooted in radical Christianity is inextricable from the story of the 20th-century Labour Party. A Christian tilt would imply that, for instance, getting rid of the two-child benefit cap mattered more than fiscal rules; it would make the dilemma between growth-focus and better employment rules much less of a dilemma.
Of course, there are different sources of fundamental belief than religion. But one can find little trace of Marxism in the current cabinet despite the nightmares of the Tory press. Again, this is relatively modern: the Blair governments included former communists such as John Reid, while Alan Milburn, Peter Mandelson and Blair himself all flirted with Marxism as young men.
I read my Marx and rejected most of it. So did Starmer. Marxism, like Christianity in the current Parliament, fell away; and while there is much talk of “cultural Marxism” making its way through the universities into public life, there’s barely a trace of it in the new government. Perhaps they are too old for that, and too young for the original version.
But it seems to me there is an ideological core, touched by all of the above but different from it. It includes a belief in science, and hard evidence – as the appointment of Patrick Vallance, and the beefing up of the Office for Budget Responsibility makes clear, this will indeed be a government which has not had enough of experts. The drive towards net zero, which so infuriates the Tory press and worries voters concerned about their daily bills, is driven entirely by hard science. It isn’t “ideological” in the way its enemies suppose.
The second core theme is an instrumental liberal legalism, and that comes straight from the top. It is the belief that inequities must be always resolved by state power armed with legislation, going beyond a simple belief in the power of the state to keep people safe and regulate markets, to the reshaping of society itself. That’s fine as far as it goes, so long as it goes with the grain of excepted social change. But the minute it veers elsewhere it will create conflict; if it took us via “Islamophobia” to an effective blasphemy law, that would be oppressive. On trans rights versus women’s rights, there is no “going with the grain”. So this trait is something to watch carefully.
From the heart of the Starmer project, comes a more generous and optimistic assessment of the “animating idea”. It is that, first, the new government is heavily influenced by the impacts of the financial crash and believes that a genuine rebalancing towards working people must be at the core of what it does. As one Starmer advisor put it to me, “we must end the sense that people feel invisible in their own country – and everything he does he sees through that lens”.
Mission-focused government means a more active and catalytic state, going well beyond the regulation of markets and the provision of better welfare that marked the Blair years: “For new Labour it was about regulating markets and better social credits; but Keir believes more in respect and dignity – real jobs, prospects and ambition, not welfarism”. Indeed, the same thinker tells me in the most eloquent phrase about “Starmerism” I have yet heard, “for Keir, respect is his equivalent to equality. It goes very deep indeed”. Respect, beyond equality, is a touchstone that we are going to talk about a lot more in the years ahead.
For most of us, trying to find the ideological heart of this new government is a bit like playing “battleships”; sighting shots into the unknown, hoping to hit something concrete. This week will help us a bit. But it is only when the hard moral choices are actually made – with the two-child cap the obvious early example – and then explained by the new prime minister lucidly, that we will really begin to understand.
[See also: Starmer’s people are returning class to the centre of politics]
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