In Westminster, parliament is slowly coming back to life after a long election campaign. The bars are filling up, MPs are finding their offices, and new ministers are becoming acquainted with their civil servants. The King’s Speech on Wednesday 17 July will see a return to normal.
Labour’s strategy is to ensure the Tories get the blame for the failures that Labour will now have to fix. Ministers are walking around each department, declaring their shock at how bad the situation is. Wes Streeting has called the NHS “broken”. Keir Starmer has said the prisons are worse than he thought.
But Labour’s plans will unfurl slowly. Their caution during the campaign meant that the details of structural reforms to public services were delayed until a “review” took place in government. The argument was that they needed to understand the system before changing it. Take the NHS. A review by Lord Ara Darzi has been announced, which will take a few months. Expect the government then to take another few months before laying out a strategy.
Ditto defence. George Robertson, a defence secretary under New Labour and former Nato secretary-general, has been commissioned to investigate the state of the armed forces. (You can read my recent interview with him here.) We probably won’t get big decisions on procurement, strategy, soldiers’ pay and overall spending until that review is complete.
Or take the letter from the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, sent on 16 July to council heads urging them to embrace devolution. This is merely a precursor to the expected Take Back Control Bill, which will streamline the Tories’ devolution process and is expected to be included in the King’s Speech. It is a letter about a bill which is about a devolution process that can take years. Policy by increments, in other words.
The point is that it will take time for the government even to decide how it will fix the public realm, let alone do it. Much of Labour’s platform in the campaign – such as taxing private schools or scrapping non-dom tax status – was about signalling to voters who they were for (state-schoolers and NHS users) and against (tax avoiders and the rich). It was not intended as a serious plan to reform the public realm. What’s becoming clear is that formulating the plan will take time.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here.
[See also: Why Labour is dropping “levelling up”]
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