This was a speech about definition. As the Prime Minister took to the podium at the iconic Pinewood Studios just outside London, the stakes felt more like those of a government two thirds into its term rather than close to the start. Five months after Labour won a historic election victory with a one-word slogan of “change”, there remains confusion and disappointment about what exactly the government stands for.
There have been several attempts by Keir Starmer to set a clearer message – his gloomy speech in the Downing Street garden in August, his more hopeful, passionate address at Labour Party conference in Liverpool in September – but the slumping polls suggest these have been insufficient. The government has struggled to outline a coherent vision. And some standalone decisions – such as the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance for most pensioners and the inheritance tax changes to farms – have given the impression the party is targeting certain groups instead of taking sweeping action to fix the country.
Did Starmer repair the damage today, in what Downing Street insiders have been suggesting is his last big chance to define his government this parliament?
It all hinged on the missions – which, as was reported in the run-up to the speech, have been fleshed out with six “tangible milestones”. The most significant change is a shift in focus from the lofty goal of the highest growth in the G7 to rising living standards, which voters are more likely to feel personally by the next election. There were also promises on hiring 13,000 new neighbourhood police officers, treating 92 per cent of NHS patients within 18 weeks of referral, ensuring more children start school “ready to learn”, and transitioning to clean power by 2030 (although the target for that has been watered down from 100 per cent in the manifesto to 95 per cent today). Finally, there was a reiteration of the pledge to build 1.5 million homes this parliament, to be turbocharged with an additional 150 major infrastructure projects.
The purpose of outlining these specific objections is two-fold. First, it gives Labour a concrete answer when voters demand to know what the government is doing to improve their lives. The idea is that, if ministers stay relentlessly on message over the next four years, by the time the next election comes around the public will have heard enough to associate progress in these areas with the Labour government. What has Labour ever done for you? Well, look at how quickly you were referred to a specialist when you saw our GP about that health concern, look at the local police officer who turned up when you reported a burglary, look at the newbuild home your child has been able to buy nearby. Labour is laying the groundwork for how it hopes voters will feel by 2029.
All of this, obviously, assumes that such progress is made – which is a fairly dramatic assumption given the state of the country right now and how impossible it seems for the government to get anything done. And that is the second purpose of the Prime Minister laying out missions in this way. As Peter Hyman, former adviser to Tony Blair and more recently Starmer himself, wrote for the New Statesman last week, the missions should “serve as a battering ram for a more agile and urgent state”. The hope is that setting clear priorities with unarguable metrics will focus minds in Whitehall, force departments to work together and get the creaking government machine functioning properly.
Starmer is often accused of being woolly, of speaking in dull technocratic platitudes that fail to resonate. Not today. When it came to the need to rewire the state, the Prime Minister seemed to have soaked up some of the flair and vividness for which his backdrop of Pinewood, the internationally acclaimed British television and film studio, is famous. With a rare intensity he spoke of the need to “change the nature of governing itself”, comparing trying to make progress with the current structures to using a hairdryer to deal with damp in a wall: “Unless we first change how we try to change the country, then the hairdryer is all we’ve got.”
Later, he returned to the theme of fixing the country’s foundations like one would renovate a dilapidated house, by finding “new tools for the job”. He had strong words too for civil servants, co-opting an image from across the Atlantic: “I don’t think there’s a swamp to be drained here, but I do think too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.” There was a stern warning that “we have long freeloaded off the British genius of the past”, and a scathing indictment of the planning system, which Starmer called “a blockage in our economy that is so big it obscures an entire future”.
The question is: what’s the solution? Repeated attempts by successive prime ministers and their top aides to reform Whitehall have ending in costly disappointment. If fixing the planning system so we didn’t end up with a £100m bat tunnel blocking critical national infrastructure was easy, the Conservatives would have done it.
The risk of having such clearly defined missions is that it gives the public a marks scheme on which to score the government. If the government fails, voters will notice. What then?
Starmer is concerned about the risk of populism and the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform party. The Prime Minister spoke of populism at the New Statesman summer reception just after the election; it’s a theme he came back to during the riots in August, and again in his conference speech. Starmer and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, understand that people don’t turn to extremist parties because they hold extremist views, but because they want ordinary things – financial security, a stable home, aspiration for their children – yet do not believe mainstream politics will deliver for them. (See the correlation between constituencies that elected Reform candidates and poor roads and transport links.) Today’s speech made clear the link between fraying trust in politics and support for something more radical. “Everyone can see there’s a growing impatience with traditional politics,” Starmer warned. “Populism isn’t the answer to Britain’s challenges. ‘Easy answers’ won’t make our country strong. But nobody can deny that this kind of politics feeds off real concerns.”
Labour’s desperate hope is that by focusing relentlessly on the missions the party can make enough progress to restore at least a bit of faith in traditional politics and ward off the spectre of populism. Starmer did a good job today of laying that out, and demonstrating how his priorities align with the things that really matter in people’s lives. No one can argue that his government lacks definition or purpose. Whether he can actually take a spanner to the mechanics of government to realise its purpose is another matter. If he can’t – if he identifies the damp but in the end can do nothing about it but wave around a hairdryer – there will be nowhere to hide.
[See also: Labour must beware Reform, the British wing of Trumpism]
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