In Silicon Valley there is a simple mantra that drives innovation: You Can Just Do Things. Wait for permission from the system, the bureaucrats or, worst of all, your lawyers, and nothing ever happens. Incumbents want inertia not challenge. Progress depends on movement.
Nowhere does the PM seem so adrift than in the area he claimed to have made his own: law and order
It is a lesson that seems lost on this government and this Prime Minister. They are a model of inactivity, none of it masterly. They proclaimed they would be a ‘mission-led’ government. In December last year, Keir Starmer promised that these missions ‘must be felt tangibly in the health, wealth and security of working people and our country’.
His ‘missions’ have been all but abandoned. The Education Secretary has halted the creation of new free schools to raise performance, stymied Ofsted’s efforts to challenge educational failure and presides over a rate of persistent absence that leaves tens of thousands of children abandoned to the streets. Mayors flounder in the regions with no direction or impetus for growth. Farmer have had their support payments for sustainable agriculture stopped while new taxes are to be levied on their businesses. A target of 1.5 million new homes seems as unapproachably distant as Neptune’s moons. Keir Starmer is not so much First Lord of the Treasury as the Emperor of Inertia.
Nowhere does the Prime Minister seem so adrift as in the area he claimed to have made his own as director of public prosecutions: law and order. Those accused of spying for China within Parliament, answering to murderers in Beijing, go unprosecuted. Grooming gang victims are still waiting for an inquiry the government never wanted to set up. While they cry for justice, the ironically titled minister for safeguarding, Jess Phillips, claims victim status for herself.
Nowhere has the Prime Minister’s impotence more graphically, and tragically, been displayed than in his inability to protect Jewish lives. He was elected to lead Labour, at least in part, to expunge the stain of anti-Semitism which had spread through the party during the Jeremy Corbyn years. His sincere revulsion at such prejudice is not in doubt. But nor is his total inability to grasp what is required to fight this hate.
Islamist sectarian politicians mounted a campaign to stop the Jewish football fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv travelling to Birmingham to watch their team play. Unelected officials acquiesced in that ban. The West Midlands Police welcomed the edict and stated that if the Israeli fans came to Britain, their safety could not be guaranteed. Our country’s second city was being declared effectively Judenfrei and the Prime Minister could only meekly protest, as though social media were the last tool available to him to establish his authority. Who controls the streets of Birmingham? Islamist extremists who decree that freedom of association exists only on their terms? Certainly not the elected government, which seems to think that the operational independence of the constabulary extends to enforcing fatwas.
The Prime Minister does not even have the excuse of powerlessness. Under the last government, measures were being introduced to deprive extremist groups of finance and freedom of manoeuvre. This government abandoned them.
Before Starmer even came to power, the former Labour MP John Woodcock, now Lord Walney, had delivered a series of recommendations to government that would have dealt with extremism on our streets. It was ignored. And as we report on pages 10 and 11, just after the election Lord Walney provided the government with new, urgent and deliverable measures to tackle the extremist threat – but these have, so far, been left to moulder in an inbox.
Inaction in the face of illegitimate incursion has been the hallmark of this Prime Minister. Illegal migration could hit a new record within weeks, and not a single people-smuggling gang appears to have been even gently discommoded, never mind ‘smashed’. Under Labour’s one-in, one-out migrant return scheme with France, we have faced an influx the size of a small town. Meanwhile, we have sent back a number that would fit comfortably in the corner of a saloon bar.
In a shameless exercise in blame-shifting worthy of a witness in a mafia trial, the Prime Minister is trying to pin the lack of progress on the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Chris Wormald. But who appointed Sir Chris? He was not foisted on Sir Keir by the Chinese, the Tories, West Midlands Police, a people-smuggling gang or any of the other people he impotently blames for his plight. This was Sir Keir’s own choice. And now, like so many aides – such as Sue Gray, Paul Ovenden, Nin Pandit, Liz Lloyd and others – the person who was hired to make up for Keir Starmer’s deficiencies has to pay the price for them.
Who will be next? Chancellor Rachel Reeves, whose inevitable tax rises at next month’s Budget will not deliver the growth requested and who may find herself the sacrifice required? The chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, who has sought to bring purpose to the Prime Minister’s Office but has faced the impossible task of stiffening the spine of an invertebrate?
While ministers like Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting demonstrate clarity and agency in their work, there is still some hope. But they are isolated actors operating without the central leadership that effective government requires. Until that changes, Labour will have only a Potemkin majority– impressive at a distance yet useless for anything but show.
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