This is sadly the last of my regular politics columns for Prospect before moving on. This is always a good opportunity for self-reflection, so I spent a few hours reading through the 30 pieces I’ve written over the past three years.
Despite the noise and drama since I started—four prime ministers, five chancellors, a general election and all the rest—it’s striking how little has changed. It was clear from the summer of 2022 that the Tories were cooked. The party was visibly exhausted, out of ideas and trapped between its old voting coalition and the very different type of older working-class voters attracted by Brexit.
As I put it in July that year, in a column on the potential for a Nigel Farage comeback: “having swallowed the Ukip vote… the Tories have since struggled to digest it”. Well now they’ve thrown it up again, right into Farage’s lap.
Given the very high likelihood of a big Labour win in the general election, my main concern, from the start, was Keir Starmer’s willingness to put forward a bold programme for government commensurate with the level of challenge that Britain faces. As early as October 2022 I was fretting about the lack of substance from Labour: “Dull caution may suffice to win an election but it will not be enough to save the country from the state it has been left in. Managing decline and austerity more competently than the Tories is not going to cut it.”
Throughout 2023, there were plenty of small policy announcements and occasionally something more exciting. In June of that year, I was briefly buoyed by a series of Labour announcements on housing and infrastructure, which seemed like a great start to setting out a bigger agenda, given that this allowed “for bold pledges without big spending commitments”. It also caused mayhem in the increasingly nimbyish Conservative ranks.
But two years on it remains the only truly ambitious part of their agenda. It was, and is, domestic policy—schools, the NHS, policing—where the poverty of ideas has been most apparent.
With the election imminent, in June last year, I wrote a longer feature on whether Labour was ready for government, to which my answer was “no”, but in 3,000 words. There were, I argued, two big problems. First: “The refusal to engage with financial reality has… made it hard to come up with an alternative approach to public service reform, because almost anything likely to help would require upfront investment.”
Subsequently, Rachel Reeves did increase tax and spending in her first budget, but only by enough to negate the obvious impossibility of the plans she inherited. There was nothing left, given promises not to increase the main personal taxes, for anything new and further cuts are imminent.
Even the biggest Starmer fans would struggle to elucidate what his beliefs are
But perhaps the bigger problem has always been Starmer himself. His blunt refusal to think strategically, develop clear objectives and communicate them to his staff was always going to be a major liability: “The only way for prime ministers to cope in our system is for those around them to be so clear about their beliefs that they can act on their behalf knowing it will be in line with expectations… If Labour is to be a successful government, Keir Starmer and his top team need to decide—and communicate—what they really believe. There’s no amount of detailed planning that can compensate for that.”
Ten months on I think even the biggest Starmer fans would struggle to elucidate what his beliefs are.
Back in June, in a rare moment of undue optimism, I suggested that maybe Starmer’s first chief of staff, Sue Gray, given her experience of Whitehall, would help him negotiate the transition to government. Well, that didn’t happen. Instead, election campaign director Morgan McSweeney consolidated his power and took her job. Which has led to a more coordinated Number 10 machine but one that’s no closer to dealing with Labour’s problem of strategic drift.
To the extent there’s any plan, it seems to involve shifting to increasingly socially conservative positions on immigration and welfare in the hope of holding off Reform. This is, of course, exactly what the Tories tried to do. It will work no better for Labour, perhaps worse as it will alienate the base even faster. They are currently losing more of their 2024 vote to the Greens and Liberal Democrats than Reform. Both main parties have ended up marooned between the full-fat populism of Farage and the rest of an increasingly despairing population for whom public services and the economy are the priority.
With Trump’s tariffs reducing the chance of any economic brightening, a nasty spending review coming up and little to look forward to, the big question remains: how long will Labour MPs put up with the status quo?
If things continue as they are it can only be to the benefit of smaller parties, more out of voter desperation than enthusiasm. The Lib Dems will continue to thrive in the south as the only party willing to appeal to people who can’t stand Reform or Trump. And elsewhere, to finish as I started, Farage will continue to benefit from the main parties’ fear of him. I will continue to hope, as I have for the past three years, that Labour and the Conservatives find some courage, before it’s too late.
