What a difference an ocean makes. The United Centre in Chicago, which was home of the Democratic National Convention, was heavy on saccharine bromides, especially towards the nearly-departed president Joe Biden, treated like an elderly veteran on his last parade. But no one could say it lacked energy or vim. Returning to British politics – and Keir Starmer’s first major speech as Prime Minister – is to feel the clouds appear overhead quite suddenly, and douse you to the bones.
Starmer’s Downing Street rose garden address was self-evidently and nakedly political: an attempt to frame the contours of the debate for the new political term to come. He warned the electorate that things would “get worse before they get better”, that the foundations of the British state required fixing after years of neglect and that the condition of the public finances and public services was worse than feared.
Much of this is understandable, and reasonable politics, as far as it goes. The condition of the British state and its financial position is parlous, though the extent to which this was not known is overstated. As with so much else, Labour’s political map is shaped by its own scars, which run deep.
The party is charting the same political course as George Osborne did in 2010: do bad stuff, do it early, blame the previous lot and win re-election. More concerningly, the policy appears thoroughly Osbornite too, haunted by austere fiscal assumptions. Curiously, there appears to be no Labour attempt to defend the economically sound principle of borrowing to invest, despite Britain’s creaking and increasingly second-rate infrastructure, and widespread appetite for state-led investment from the private sector.
Ernest Bevin used to joke that he would be at the Ministry of Labour from 1940 until 1990; that he would so define the consensus on industrial relations that he would be there in spirit if not in body. Sometimes it feels as if Osborne will still be at the Treasury in 2050, no matter how many times his view of political economy fails.
Worse, the version of Osbornism which continues to dazzle Westminster is the early iteration, stripped of the later emphasis on regional rebalancing and greater infrastructure spending. Frontloading fiscal pain and blaming the last government may well be an effective short-term political strategy – as it was for Osborne – but for Labour there’s every reason to suppose it won’t last.
Firstly, Starmer and Rachel Reeves must try to prosecute it without the support of the right-wing press. Secondly and most importantly, for Osborne, austerity was not just a means but an end. He believed it was necessary but also inherently desirable. Although painful, he argued, it would make the economy leaner, fitter, better. It was his theory of Britain’s route to prosperity.
Labour under Starmer lacks any such story, any theory of change. Much of this reflects a problem which long predates the Prime Minister’s speech: there is a profound mismatch between the party’s diagnosis and prescription. Starmer has long argued that Britain’s economic and social woes necessitate fundamental change. But despite Labour’s vast parliamentary majority, there isn’t any consistent sense of radicalism to provide that jolt.
The Prime Minister talked of the changes already underway after seven weeks of the new government – a national wealth fund, planning reform, the creation of GB Energy – all fine, as far as they go. But these are small to medium-sized ideas: they’re not going to transform the UK’s economic model, nor shift how public services operate, nor rebalance an economy which remains smaller than it would have been without the 2008 crash (the origin of Britain’s economic woes).
The Starmer paradox, then, is that he’s arguing we need expansion while often practising the politics and policy of contraction. Of talking big but thinking small. Of recognising the scale of British decline while merely offering to be a better manager. Being sensible, less populist and better custodians of the state will help, but it does not amount to a transformation. Starmer too often resembles an uncommunicative doctor, telling their patient they are gravely unwell while offering little more than an aspirin or two, without so much as an optimistic word.
To return to the bright lights of Chicago and the DNC, the gap between Labour and its US sister party could hardly be more glaring. Whatever the Democrats’ demerits, the Harris campaign is betting that, in a cynical age, optimism and hope can still win out.
Britain has a different political culture and Labour is governing, not campaigning. But you have to wonder after 14 years of gruel, how far the politics of neither jam today, nor tomorrow, nor could possibly ever sustain a governing project. In other words, Labour will soon need an account as to how things are going to get better – not just a story as to why they’re about to get worse.
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