The Starmer government’s wild first summer has taught us much. These have been clarifying weeks: the battle Keir Starmer is waging is, essentially, a battle for the authority of the battered British state – its scale, reputation and even, perhaps, its relevance.
The stakes are high. If, in five years’ time, he has failed to convince us that he is building an effective, sustaining state delivering security and prosperity for voters – building, not built; it’s enough for this to be a work in progress – the UK will probably flip back to populist politics. Any sense of earnest, purposeful trajectory, of a path away from chaos, will vanish again.
Despite the impressive parliamentary majority, the odds are not brilliant. Starmer came in with a historically low popular vote. After Tory austerity, after Covid, the “social rot” he identified in his recent Downing Street rose garden speech is pungent and still spreading. The spending challenge is intense. Demography and Brexit are against him.
So already, as he must have noticed recently, is most of the media, both old and new. On the street, memories are short, patience shorter still. The Prime Minister hasn’t yet shown himself able to grab the nation’s attention in a helpful way. He has made one strong “here’s the bad news” speech but he needs to be a better storyteller, to convey his sense of purpose and hope.
That said, there are reasons for optimism. As the autumn political season starts with a flurry of activity from all departments, this is a good moment to assess the new government’s progress so far. I want to pick out four crucial areas: the economy, law and order, personal reputation, and polling or popularity. In each case, the key theme is authority.
Starmer has made much of being the authority figure many voters craved – experienced in the state, judgemental, steely, paternally serious. It’s his great card. How well is he playing it?
On the economy, the Labour message of a £22bn “black hole” and things being much worse than expected has been hammered home with such migraine-inducing relentlessness that it is (just) possible that normal people have noticed.
Communicating this point is vital – but the first problem is right there. Britain had the fastest growing economy in the G7 in the first half of the year; inflation is 2 per cent, leading to the Bank of England cutting interest rates at the beginning of August; unemployment is only marginally above the G7 average, and much lower than, say, in France. We have our economic problems, God knows, but it’s not exactly Desolation Island.
The truth is, to properly sell the story of its genuinely difficult inheritance and therefore its unpleasant decisions to come, Labour needs far more precision and explanation. Its problem is real. But fundamentally, it is a problem of expectation.
British voters still expect a full-fat, modern, generous welfare state; a National Health Service able to respond to an ageing population in a timely way; a modern and inclusive education system, geared to a rapidly changing economy; and a benefits system that keeps children out of destitution. All this, and we now want a modern national defence for dangerous times. Year upon year of governments’ heedless reductions of the state have brought us to a point everybody understands.
But we don’t want to pay for that stronger, more sustaining state with higher taxes or by working harder. For decades we’ve been told we don’t need to. It’s true that after Covid, and after the energy shock of the Ukraine war, we are close to the all-time 1948 height of tax revenue; but overall taxation here is average, coming between the higher-tax Europeans and the lower-taxed Americans.
Again, fair enough, if people are happy with public services. But they showed in the election they’re not, from the filthy water system to trains that don’t run, bursting prisons, agonising – literally agonising – health service waits and increasingly lawless streets.
Summer polling by Ipsos found that voters know full well you can’t get effective public services without paying for them. (It’s true, as Tony Blair insists in his new book, reviewed on page 40, that the AI revolution could short-circuit many problems, but that requires heavy initial investment.) Two in five backed increasing spending on public services even if they would pay more tax. So there is a buried advantage for Labour here: increasingly, looking around them, people “get it”.
It’s the musculature of the state, however, not the comparative performance of the British economy, that is the immediate source of Rachel Reeves’s problem. In other words (stupid), it isn’t “the economy”. It’s the brutal dashing of expectations about the material condition of daily life; the rubbishy, misfiring, unravelling fabric of society. The “black hole” is real. That social rot is vividly around us. We can see it, smell it. But it’s on the streets, not in the financial markets.
So, people understand why some taxes must go up, and they would back an emphasis on inheritance and capital gains. But the current political attack over Labour’s tax “lies” is dangerous because it’s about authority. After the Tory years, voters assume politicians lie and, with shrill and shameless self-righteousness, Tory England is already playing the old tunes. Just like Harold Wilson, the media wants to make Starmer a twister – grey, devious, slippery. Ahead of the Budget, he and Rachel Reeves need to be far more specific and sharper about where the real problem lies.
That does not mean walking away from controversies. When the right says that Starmer’s government has “bunged billions at their union paymasters”, the proper, unapologetic response is that working people have been shoved to the back of the queue in Britain for far too long. The need for a Great Reset is why Labour won. But the follow-through should have been a review of the “Spanish practices” still festering in the public sector. A state that commands general respect cannot have special friends.
There are two other economic posers. The first is represented by the two-child cap, and the winter fuel allowance rows. These are “who are we?” issues, and the Chancellor will have to give some ground on the former, perhaps on both.
The second is on the detail of the new workers’ rights legislation. An entitlement to ask for a four-day week is not the same thing as getting one, but in a country seemingly less enthusiastic about working, new measures will need to increase rather than decrease output after the pandemic. Labour needs international investment. If Reeves wants growth, she has to play clever.
The next obvious area to look at is law and order. The shocking summer anti-migrant rioting brought to life what could be called the order/border conundrum. Nothing undermines trust in the state more than a breakdown of orderliness, a general lack of control. Fast, effective punishment of the rioters and those who incited them was essential.
Now Labour needs to sharpen its political messaging about the real agenda of the extreme right, which is to end multi-racial Britain, presumably through repatriation. This is an ancient dark fantasy which can only result in widespread violence, a horror that needs to be called out. But one way or another, through effective detention and returns, or eventually ID cards to stifle our thriving shadow economy, Yvette Cooper has no choice but to assert the state by cutting the migrant flow across the Channel.
Beyond that, there is a bigger question about the new government’s instinct to legislate to make us virtuous. The health case behind the proposed new ban on outdoor smoking is obvious, although it’s more about driving tobacco out of society than protecting non-smokers in the open air. But it should be a clear understanding that you don’t introduce new laws unless you can enforce them.
And can they? Really? At a time when the police are unable to deal with the shoplifting epidemic, or answer burglary calls, or stop open drug dealing and use – the unmistakeable scent of dope has been hanging over urban England all summer – then it seems premature to bring in new laws to criminalise previously law-abiding people.
It’s a matter of effectiveness, not policy principle. Laws that will in practice be flagrantly disobeyed bring the state into disrepute. Unenforceable, performative legislation makes both police and the ministers who instructed them ridiculous.
This takes us to a third area: political reputation. The shine’s off already, and this government will get no breaks. Driven by overseas moguls like Elon Musk, the so-called new media will be no friendlier or fairer to “socialists” than the old media is.
There is muscle memory about how to deal with Labour governments. You portray them as control freaks who are also hypocrites. Knowing this, and the widespread popular contempt for politics after the Tory years, it is frankly incomprehensible that Team Starmer allowed there to be early “crony” scoops about civil service appointments. Compared to what went on under Boris Johnson, these were pimple-stories. But that doesn’t matter. There needed to be a demonstration that, in hiring and access, Starmerism isn’t politics as usual.
Already there is a barrelling army of lobbyists and big-money fixers worming their way into Whitehall. Is Labour properly aware of what’s happening? A new “sleaze” row may not be far away.
Add it all together, and it’s not surprising that the new government is already unpopular. According to a recent YouGov survey, the proportion of voters who have a negative view of Starmer’s administration has risen in just a month by 20 points to 51 per cent, a narrow majority.
Shock news: with the Budget still to come, these numbers are going to get worse. A lot worse. An ideologically hostile media will be trying to prise open splits on the two-child cap and winter fuel benefits, and they won’t find it hard. They will be going for Sue Gray, desperate to make her the Marcia Williams of the 2020s to Starmer’s Harold Wilson – muscle memory again, familiar tropes – and looking for cabinet splits to generate a sense of crisis.
Much of this, I’m afraid, Keir Starmer and his leading ministers must simply ignore. Their entire case is that they are engaged on a long project of patient rebuilding; that enough of the public understands this to stay the course; and that therefore, they cannot allow themselves to be distracted or demoralised by any second-order issues.
What they need is perspective. Recent essays and books about the chaos of Britain in the 1970s reminds us how much worse things were then. In driving a change of national direction against the odds, Starmer can sound more Thatcher (whose portrait he has banished from Downing Street) than Wilson or Callaghan. But also, having been lucky in his opponents, lucky in the timing of the election and lucky in the quality of his lieutenants, Starmer may turn out to be lucky in the changing world around him: early days, deep breath, fingers crossed and all that, but a Harris Washington would be so much easier for a Labour Britain than a Trump one.
Yet the old warnings about this being another government dominated by foreign affairs are, in these first months, borne out. The limited reduction in arm sales to Israel provoked fury from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and here among its supporters; and also on the regrouping hard left. It was a moderate response to an extreme situation and, of course, won David Lammy no new friends. Welcome to the world in 2024.
It’s always light and shade. But on the economy and on law and order, this has been a more brutal blooding than even Starmer, who had to cancel his holiday, can have expected. It’s going to get stormier, and to get through, he needs more persuasive storytelling and more precision around his first Budget; clearer messages for the party about spending priorities; wise caution on legislative radicalism, at least until the criminal justice system is functioning; and, always, a steely concentration on the big picture, rather than passing turbulence.
He got the job because so many millions of Britons feel the state is decaying, incompetent, drifting towards irrelevance. Restoring its authority, internally and internationally, is a noble and difficult task. We know about the social rot. What we don’t know, yet, is how sound, how strong, the Labour state itself will turn out to be.
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This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire