According to Keir Starmer’s critics, the Prime Minister has spent his first six months in office re-enacting Henry VIII’s plunder of the monasteries, Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks and Herod’s slaughter of the firstborn. But while there may be good grounds to oppose the imposition of VAT on private school fees, the extension of inheritance tax to farmland and means testing of pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, revolutionary acts of Marxist Leninism they are not. The hyperbolic reporting of these modest adjustments to a few taxes and benefits affecting the better off has hidden a more surprising truth about the UK’s first Labour government for fourteen years: the soft left human rights lawyer from north London is proving to be a distinctly conservative Prime Minister.
There has been some lefty nonsense, of course
Starmer’s first big test came in July with the riots that followed the heinous murder of young children at a dance class in Southport. His response was as tough as anything Michael Howard might have imposed when Home Secretary. Swift arrests, accelerated court hearings and tough sentences to punish, incarcerate and deter the thugs terrorising our streets. Public order was quickly restored.
Then came Rachel Reeves’ budget in October. As the Tories had already maxed out the country’s credit card with unaffordable tax cuts, and the government needed money to tackle NHS waiting lists and looming crises in local government and the administration of justice, she did what most Conservative chancellors have done in their first budgets and put up taxes to balance the books. Reeves chose to raise most of the extra revenue by increasing employers’ national insurance, reflecting the fact that the UK has a very high rate of employment and some of the lowest “non-wage” social charges of any advanced economy. By doing so, she sidestepped leftwing demands for a wealth tax or higher taxes on corporate profits.
On the other side of the Atlantic, with a presidential election looming, Starmer resisted the temptation to cuddle up to fellow progressive Kamala Harris. Instead, he sought an early engagement with the once and future president over a private dinner in Trump Tower. Since then, Starmer has staked out a clear position as both a strong believer in the American alliance and a forthright advocate of Britain’s interests and values, whether in upholding free trade or supporting Ukraine in its fight against the Russian despot. He has also found time to make common cause on migration controls with Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing prime minister of Italy, welcome the hereditary ruler of Qatar on a state visit to London and make his own trip to Riyadh to drum up investment from the Saudis.
Back on the home front, the Prime Minister has attacked the last Conservative administration for running an undeclared open borders policy that led to the net migration of 1.7 million people between 2022 and 2024. Meanwhile, his Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has focused on increasing the number of deportations of failed asylum seekers.
In early December, at the launch of the government’s Plan for Change, Starmer trained his sights on the biggest brake on the UK’s economic growth: the bindweed-like spread of rules and regulations that make building anything in this country stupendously slow and ruinously expensive. If Meryl Streep was asked to reprise Starmer’s speech criticising the “alliance of naysayers” and throwing down the gauntlet to civil servants “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”, you could easily believe it was lifted straight out of her Oscar-winning performance as the Iron Lady. We will have to see whether Sir Keir will match Margaret Thatcher’s follow through. But his determination to take on “the bureaucrats and the blockers” has left more than one FTSE chief executive deeply impressed.
There has been some lefty nonsense, of course: the appeasement of militant railway unions and the complete failure to secure any productivity improvements in exchange for train drivers’ substantial pay increases was especially infuriating. And does football, one of our most successful industries, really need a state regulator?
But these are minor missteps. As morning breaks on 1 January, sleepy Spectator readers can look forward to a new year in which Britain is led by a tough, patriotic, pro-business Prime Minister. In short what until recently most people called a conservative.
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