Clement Attlee, in the words of Winston Churchill, was a modest man with much to be modest about. Labour’s postwar premier has been invoked as a role model by Keir Starmer recently, in the context of Attlee’s support for Nato and robustness on defence. Starmer’s allies also argue that, like Attlee, he is an unshowy middle-England moderate who prefers quiet efficiency to ideological flamboyance. His biographer, the always perceptive Tom Baldwin, has declared: ‘There is no such thing as Starmerism.’ Nor, we are told, will there ever be. Which is exactly how, why and where this government is going wrong.
A Tory government benefits from a sense of purpose; a Labour one cannot survive without one
Movements – and Labour is nothing if not a movement – need direction. Administrations need definition. Governments need a mission or they descend into reactive incoherence. Margaret Thatcher had such a purpose. John Major did not. He offered post-ideological government – and then found that without an ideology he couldn’t run a government. He was overwhelmed by events. He became boxed in by powerful institutions whose incentives were not aligned with his interests. And he allowed media figures who were not his allies to bully him into faux-macho positions – fighting a ‘beef war’ over Mad Cow Disease, for instance – which his old friends found inauthentic and unconvincing.
Starmer should attend to the lessons of Major’s locust years. His government needs a philosophy, a set of principles, an ideology. Indeed Starmer’s need is greater than Major’s was. A Conservative administration benefits from a sense of purpose; a Labour government cannot survive without one. Progressive politics needs a galvanising, uniting, liberating, crusading temper – the arc of history may be long, but if you are on the left, unless you are bending it towards justice, it will eventually smack you in the face.
That is what happened last week. The failure of this government to make social justice its mission, indeed the absence of any shared understanding among ministers of what a mission might look like, led to a Spring Statement that was at once hurried, incoherent and cruel – a fiscal drive-by shooting. And the poorest in our society are the victims.
The government’s own figures show that the measures announced last week will drive 250,000 more Britons, 50,000 of them children, into poverty. More than three million families will lose an average of £1,720 a year. According to the Resolution Foundation, the thinktank which focuses on inequality in Britain, ‘poorer, disabled households are still set to take the biggest hit. More generally, a combined squeeze that reduces incomes by around 1.5 per cent in the lower-middle reaches of the spectrum declines to only 0.5 per cent at the very top’.
In other words – a Labour government is hitting the poor disproportionately hard compared with the rich, and targeting the very poorest most aggressively. If a Conservative government of which I was part had set out on such a course, I would have resigned. It would have been – it is – immoral to ask the biggest burden to be borne by the weakest in our society.
Yet Labour ministers seek to defend these moves on – of all grounds – their moral mission to help people into work. But how? By taking cash away from people who have difficulty washing, clothing and feeding themselves? Money allocated to ‘employment support’ to help individuals back into the labour market only comes on-stream later in the parliament, after the cuts have bitten. The nature of that support – its efficacy, targeting, delivery and proven value – is as yet unknown. This package is all sticks of the sharpest kind and the distant promise of a carrot in instalments.
Why has Labour found itself in this position? Why does the Treasury minister Torsten Bell, a bright and by all accounts kindly man, maintain that income reductions for the poor make sense but that he deserves a pay rise this month because he has a mortgage? This is the same Torsten Bell who argued just ten months ago, when he was chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, that ‘child poverty is where the focus must be in the 2020s’. Well, it certainly is now, but not quite in the way I presume he meant.
The reason Labour finds itself in this abject and indefensible position is because it failed to develop a coherent political economy in opposition. It had no theory of change for the state, no industrial strategy worth the name, no philosophy of public service reform and no account of why the Conservatives failed other than that they were, well, Tories.
Starmer’s government did assemble a Potemkin policy agenda: five missions, designed by an adviser, Peter Hyman, who has gone. The missions appear to have survived only as the names of Cabinet Office committees. I have been a Cabinet Office minister and I know that it performs the same function for irresolute prime ministers that the attic did for Mr Rochester. It hides any commitment which is painful and embarrassing to recall.
In the absence of its own coherent and developed progressive agenda, Labour has found that those institutions with their own ready-made and honed theory of how government should operate have driven policy. None is more ready, and powerful, than the Treasury, which for novice chancellors serves the same purpose as Viagra does for gigolos. It offers the impression of potency but doesn’t address the underlying reasons for poor performance.
From the vantage point of the Treasury, any chancellor can set, boost and cut ministerial budgets, effectively dictating the operation of each government department. But left to its own devices, the Treasury does not seek to foster reform, free-thinking or innovation in any department. It is explicitly against anything considered ‘novel and contentious’. Its overriding aim is to limit expenditure, bring budgets overall back into balance, meet fiscal rules and thus, it hopes, calm the markets.
Suggesting the Treasury might address the deep reasons for weak productivity in the UK economy takes it outside its comfort zone. Being asked to consider how to tackle entrenched economic inequality makes it positively queasy. Propose that we implement a coherent industrial strategy and it grips the side of the chair with whitening knuckles and a sense of profound disorientation. Ask it to make social justice the lodestar for policy and you provoke a systems overload which takes it dangerously close to nervous breakdown. I know. I tried. And I was bundled out of the room and told that if I ever wanted to see another delegated budget limit again in my lifetime I had to apologise for my heresies.
Without any governing philosophy from No. 10, the Treasury’s short-termism prevails
The fingerprints of the Treasury are all over the package of welfare ‘reform’ announced last month. A series of cuts were demanded to fit a spreadsheet-generated target. An obliging Department for Work and Pensions found the savings and tried to gussy them up as a carefully calibrated intervention to incentivise work while protecting those most in need. When the savings didn’t hit the target, more money was lopped off hitherto sacrosanct programmes to make the figures fit. What was supposed to be keyhole surgery to make the labour market healthier turned into the extraction of a pound of flesh, with the first incision so wanting that more last-minute butchery was required.
The sadness in this story doesn’t end there, though. There are those on the progressive left and right who have thoughtful plans for long-term welfare reform, with appropriate piloting and devolution of budgets. But without any governing philosophy from No. 10 to capture and shape such thinking, the Treasury’s short-termism prevails.
And this incoherence afflicts almost every government department, with cruel consequences across the board. In Defra, the opportunity for this government to make a lasting difference on the environment has been put at risk by the Treasury’s demand that support for sustainable farming initiatives be halted. With no lead from the centre on how important nature is, our wildlife, rivers and food production suffer.
In the Ministry of Justice, they know that rehabilitation depends on attracting the very best talent into the prison service, but the scheme which does just that, Unlocked Graduates, is to be axed.
In education, Bridget Phillipson is pursuing one model of public service ‘reform’ – with a curtailment of autonomy at the front line and hazier accountability – in line with union demands. Meanwhile, at health, Wes Streeting is pursuing another – a drive towards greater operational autonomy accompanied by sharper accountability – to the unions’ regret. Either model might be right. But both can’t be.
And there is no way at the moment of knowing which the Prime Minister prefers, or why. He has offered no philosophical justification for the changes at education – no explanation of what problem he wishes to address and why these policies will resolve them. He gives us only reheated rhetoric about breakfast clubs. Meaningful education reform is toast.
On energy policy, Ed Miliband pursues a drive towards net zero that runs counter to the needs of manufacturing and risks hobbling AI growth, and which the Tony Blair Institute laments as misguided while other ministers can scarcely bring themselves to defend it. But Starmer neither champions nor disowns what happens in his name. Like the Edstone, the PM’s real feelings on the matter are impossible to locate.
Even on the area of policy which is closest to the Prime Minister’s heart – the law – incoherence reigns. His Attorney-General requires ministers to defer to judges. His Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has this week told judges they must defer to ministers – she will finish their sentences for them.
The Prime Minister may not want to define what Starmerism is. But from his actions, and inaction, a picture emerges. Weakness in the face of the US President; wokeness when a TV drama demands it; a willingness to see solar farms replace real ones for the sake of the environment, but scornful of the newts, bats and habitats that are our living environmental inheritance. Starmerism is asking the disabled to forgo state support even as tax rises elsewhere make it more difficult for businesses to employ them. This is not the artful synthesis of the Third Way, but a jarring atonal cacophony which leaves Labour’s supporters disoriented and the public bewildered.
What’s holding Starmer back? Michael discusses with John McTernan, former private secretary to Tony Blair, on the latest Edition podcast from The Spectator:
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