It used to be axiomatic of British politics that the Conservative party held a reputational advantage when it came to defence and security, and that Labour always had to make a greater effort to reassure the electorate. Opinion polls suggest that’s no longer true, but atavistic political instincts are resilient, and even now Sir Keir Starmer and his shadow cabinet colleagues feel a degree of pressure. Hence the deployment of Yvette Cooper.
The Labour party should know what its foreign and security policy goals are, beyond nebulous ambitions of ‘keeping Britain safe’
The shadow home secretary, who is only 55 but one of the veterans of the modern Labour party, has told the Times that an incoming government would conduct a 100-day review of the threats facing the United Kingdom to produce a comprehensive assessment of the national security landscape. Cooper is a reassuringly dour figure: she has been shadow home secretary for two and a half years, previously held the role from 2011 to 2015 under Ed Miliband and for the intervening five years was chair of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. She is also one of only three of Starmer’s top team with cabinet experience.
This being the ‘changed’ Labour party, however, there must be a pseudo-innovative spin on the policy. Rather than a traditional civil service review, what Cooper proposes is a ‘security sprint’, a concept borrowed from the private sector which brings together specialists from various disciplines to produce urgent solutions within a tight deadline. (It is not wholly novel in Whitehall: in January, the science, innovation and technology secretary, Michelle Donelan, announced a ‘policy sprint’ to support the scaling-up of UK tech companies.)
The review is needed, according to Labour, because there is a growing threat of radicalisation which uses artificial intelligence: Jaswant Singh Chail, last year convicted of treason for planning to assassinate the late Queen Elizabeth II in 2021, was in part spurred on by an AI-powered chatbot he had created through the generative app Replika. It proclaims that it is ‘Always here to listen and talk. Always on your side.’ Cooper also points to the conflict in Gaza as providing a breeding ground for radicalisation at extraordinary pace.
There is an element of conflation here. Labour’s messaging does not draw a clear distinction between threat assessment and mitigation; is the ‘security sprint’ designed to identify where the threats to the UK’s national security are coming from, who our most immediate or most dangerous adversaries are, or to develop policies to address specific threats? Is this strategy or tactics? It may be designed to encompass both, which would be an ambitious agenda for a three-month process involving several government departments, the security service and police forces across the country.
In government, nothing happens in isolation. So Cooper’s pledge has to be taken alongside the fact that the shadow defence secretary, John Healey, has already committed Labour to a strategic defence review within the first year of government, which will ‘assess the state of our armed forces, the nature of threats and the capabilities needed’. Equally, David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, has set out a policy of ‘progressive realism’, a recalibration of doctrine which will address ‘the worsening global security situation facing the United Kingdom’ by producing a ‘sharper and more hopeful vision for the country’s role in the world’.
Stripped to its essentials, government comprises two principal elements: knowing what you want to do, and knowing how to do it. After 14 years in opposition, and more than four years of Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership, the first element should not really be in doubt. The Labour party should know what its foreign and security policy goals are, beyond nebulous ambitions of ‘keeping Britain safe’ and ‘defending our national interests’. It should know what it regards as our primary threats and strategic competitors, and have some notion of a hierarchy of risks.
Applying private sector disciplines to Whitehall can bring valuable rigour, creativity and urgency, qualities which the civil service sometimes struggles to exhibit. But this kind of ‘sprint’, the hothousing of policy in the spirit of Mark Zuckerberg’s long-time motto of ‘move fast and break things’, needs clear parameters. Bringing together personnel from across the public sector, with different cultures, expectations and working methods, can produce innovative policy but equally can drift into uncertainty and inaction. If this is to work, the prime minister will need to set a very clearly defined agenda for what the review is to do.
As we have seen with Rishi Sunak’s unexpected proposal for a scheme of national service, election campaigns can provoke politicians into putting forward ideas that are not fully formed or sufficiently detailed. Cooper’s ‘security sprint’ has more than a whiff of that, of a suggestion thrown into the front line to address an immediate political need, to reassure voters that Labour is serious and can be trusted on national security. It is not a bad idea, in principle, though it feels like it is jostling with others in a crowded and potentially confused policy space. If Labour does form the next government, though, its attempted implementation could be important – positively or negatively.
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