Today the Prime Minister is attempting to get back on the front foot with the publication of an employment white paper, aimed at reducing unemployment in light of the soaring number of Britons out of work since the pandemic. Starmer has declared that his government inherited a country that ‘isn’t working’. However, the question many are asking this week is a slightly different one: is his government working? Keir Starmer has had to bat off questions over a petition – now signed by over two million – calling for an election.
The petition says there ought to be an election as Labour have ‘gone back on their promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election’. Starmer said he was ‘not surprised’ that people who didn’t vote for Labour at the last election ‘want a rerun’, before pointing out this ‘isn’t how our system works’. Starmer has a point. It’s striking how some of the figures publicly promoting the petition as significant are the same people who in the past dismissed online petitions from the left, such as revoking Brexit as undemocratic.
The petition is almost certain to fail in its aim of sparking a snap poll. Yet it would be wrong for the Prime Minister to dismiss it as a complete irrelevance, even if some of the names listed (celebrities and politicians) have been questioned for reliability. As the Spectator data team has highlighted, the number of signees is particularly high in a number of 2024 swing states where Labour made gains at the expense of the Conservatives– so it could rumble incumbent Labour MPs even if Starmer is calm. It’s worth noting there are a high number of participants in various Tory held seats – with some wondering whether Reform party backers are taking to the petition en masse.
But the bigger issue comes to the government’s political positioning. The petition makes a simple point: ‘I believe the current Labour Government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election.’ This could refer to a whole range of things but perhaps most notably the Budget and the economic decisions taken by Starmer and Rachel Reeves. There was no mention of cutting the winter fuel payment, the National Insurance employers’ tax rise or the changes to inheritance tax for farmers. As the pub landlord, Michael Westwood (who voted Conservative), has since explained in an interview, he was ‘fed up’ that ‘they were putting the fear of God into people that everything was so bad. They had also gone back on their manifesto promises. I was just frustrated at what I was seeing and hearing it all the time and it really annoyed me’.
The plan within government – part of the reason there was a long lead up to the Budget – was to land the narrative that Reeves and Starmer had no choice but to make hard decisions as a result of the shock Tory inheritance and the so-called fiscal blackhole. Pat McFadden – the Cabinet Office minister – ordered ministers to ‘bring out the dead’ and find the horrors left in their departments by the Tory predecessors. Aides looked to learn from the David Cameron / George Osborne playbook as to how to set a narrative blaming the last government to justify hard decisions now meaning the Tories were on the hook. In focus groups, however, it’s not clear this message has got through. This poll – and the enthusiasm for it – is another sign that the narrative has not landed in the way Starmer hoped.
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