IT HAS not been a Blairesque new dawn for Sir Keir Starmer. Instead, his arrival in Downing Street has been more like one of those miserable winter mornings when the sun never shines. Grimness and grind have dominated, with repeated warnings that righting the UK’s national finances will demand painful choices.
The pain has duly arrived — in the form of restrictions to pensioners, winter fuel allowance, inheritance tax on farmers, and National Insurance increases for employers — and those early choices have set the tone.
The trouble is, it’s hardly a reassuring tone for unhappy, even frightened, voters, who have endured years of stagnant or declining incomes, while the spectres of AI taking their jobs and mass immigration transforming their communities gibber in the night.
Voters want not just competence and integrity from their leaders, but also benevolence — a sense that their Government wants to help, and understands their needs. Spreadsheet-scanning is not enough (ask Rishi Sunak). So, does the Prime Minister exude that message? Given his stolid communications style, Sir Keir will have to let his government’s actions do the talking.
Its first actions have been unpopular, but all incoming governments try to do the tough stuff early, in the hope that, come the next election, the voters will have forgotten or will have been pacified by economic progress.
Labour knows that, while its parliamentary majority is a mile wide (411 MPs in a 650-seat House of Commons), its electoral support is an inch deep (33.7 per cent of the national vote last July). No previous British government has taken office on so minimal a mandate.
And, if the Johnson landslide of 2019 could dissolve into electoral rout in 2024, the same could happen to Labour. To be sure, the Conservatives had to burn through three prime ministers, catastrophic scandals, and economic débâcle to drive their 2019 voters away; but Labour can hardly feel secure after its stuttering start.
THE upshot is that Sir Keir must tread very carefully, but do so in an environment in which “Steady as she goes” caution will simply not answer the daunting challenges piling up in his Downing Street in-tray.
Some of those challenges were clearly not expected. Take the emotive and attention-grabbing question of assisted dying, and the Private Member’s Bill proposed by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater. Late last month, MPs approved the principle (News, 6 December), but much of the detail remains highly contentious.
Is the “six months to live” criterion realistic and robust? Will it, in practice, become steadily wider? Is the proposed combination of medical and judicial oversight enough to prevent abuse and coercion?
Several MPs who voted “Aye” to the Bill on 29 November have warned that they could change their minds if their concerns about the detail are not met, and it is the Government that will have to provide, or at least endorse, the answers.
So, the Government’s official neutrality is bound to fray, not least because, if the Bill does progress, it looks likely to hit procedural obstacles and require extra debating time. Sir Keir may have to decide whether to provide it, or whether to stand back and let the Bill fall. Either way, he will make enemies.
Of course, to become law, assisted dying will have to clear the House of Lords, where strong opposition will doubtless come from the Bishops’ Bench. But many in Parliament are a lot less willing to respect their views on moral questions after the John Smyth scandal, which terminated the career of Archbishop Welby (News, 15 November).
Quite suddenly, there’s a whiff of disestablishment in the air. The former Tory Chief Whip Gavin Williamson tried to add the bishops to the Government’s Bill to remove the last hereditary peers from the Lords (News, 15 November), and others may repeat the attempt, although most assume that the Government will block it.
LOOMING over everything is the dire state of the national finances. Any responsible Chancellor coming into office in 2024 was going to have to raise taxes somehow. Liz Truss’s ill-starred 50 days in office was a painful reminder of the punishment the money markets exact for a reckless borrowing spree; but ministers also know that taxation is at the upper limit of what the voters can tolerate.
So, expect no vast spending splurges. Ministers probably used up what financial margin there was on the pay deals that ended corrosive strikes in the NHS and on the railways. Now, they’re hunting cash savings and efficiency gains. Hence the Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s ominous rhetoric about the need for reform to raise productivity in his domain.
But, amid the gloom, ministers are not powerless. The UK Government expects to spend about £45,000 per household this year. There is scope within that gargantuan total to move money around: spend less on X, to allow for more to be spent on Y.
Targets are already emerging. Cut the £48 billion bill for people who are not working because of long-term illness or disability? But remember the row over the last Labour Government’s work-capability assessments, which were criticised as heavy- handed, even cruel.
Boost growth with a housebuilding and infrastructure construction boom? But then become embroiled in endless local planning battles. . .
And the Government will need to ensure that it gets its new developments right. Archbishop Welby’s farewell speech to the House of Lords was noticed for other reasons; but he was surely right to say that, in the post-Grenfell era, the Government’s promise to build 1.5 million new homes must be underpinned by decent standards and affordability, and that they should be part of viable communities, with spaces for children to play and shared facilities, not least churches.
Economic growth is the magical elixir that could transform the picture, putting more money in voters’ pockets and government coffers. Some argue that it would be boosted by a partial reversal of Brexit, moving Britain into a closer economic orbit around the EU; but, so far, Labour seems set on trying to straddle the Atlantic, hoping for improved trade deals with both the EU and Trump’s America. This will be one of most fundamental debates of the coming year.
ALONGSIDE the economy, the most contentious issue is migration. This is a touchstone for key sections of the electorate, concerned at the vast scale of migration, legal as well as illegal. So it was no surprise to hear Labour hailing mass deportations of illegal migrants — they may even have been delighted to attract the wrath of liberal commentators.
But, in an increasingly unstable world, with millions fleeing war, poverty, and ecological collapse, there is little prospect that the migrants will stop coming. And there’s the uncomfortable fact that the British economy needs migrant labour. The issue is toxic, and actual rather than rhetorical solutions are elusive; but, as in the US, angry voters will punish their government if they believe that it is failing them.
The first big test of UK voters’ response will come on 1 May, with a major set of local elections, and everyone in politics will be watching closely for clues about the mood of an increasingly fragmented and fickle electorate.
Recent polling suggests that we now have three medium-sized parties — Labour, the Conservatives, and Reform — with the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the grouping of independents around Jeremy Corbyn, and the SNP and Plaid Cymru nipping at their heels.
Particular attention will focus on the performance of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. Can it compete on the ground with Labour and the Tories, and make sweeping gains? And could that attract more Reform-adjacent Conservatives to switch to them?
A side issue here is whether Reform will benefit from the largesse of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. He has (sort of) denied it; but if he donated a game-changing sum to Reform, a tidal wave of targeted online advertising might swamp the established parties.
The Musk millions helped to swing the US election to Donald Trump, and that has not gone unnoticed here. Some parliamentarians have been warning for years that the rules on political donations are too loose. Now, the two biggest parties have cause to listen to them.
ALL this matters because Sir Keir’s Government may be a kind of final experiment in normality by the electorate; suppose, after the turmoil of the Johnson-Truss era, we put sensible technocrats back in charge? But what if they fail? Suppose, come 2028, voters feel poorer and angrier? Plenty of commentators are predicting that the nation will turn its lonely eyes to Nigel.
Quite possibly. But the wild card here is what happens when the votes of that fragmented electorate are fed through the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system. In five-party contests, Commons seats could be won on one quarter of the total vote, which makes the election outcome completely unpredictable. Maybe a Tory-Reform government, or a Lab-Lib, or even a Lab-Lib-Green one? Perhaps some even more improbable combination?
Around the world, leaders closer to Sir Keir’s politics have been faltering. Trump beat Kamala Harris; Macron and Scholz are in retreat in Europe. So will he and Labour buck the global trend, or succumb to it? 2025 may be the year that decides whether the Starmer premiership marks the last gasp of old-fashioned British politics.
Mark D’Arcy is a presenter of the Hansard Society’s podcast Parliament Matters.