Reset as usual

A reset can mean many things.

At its most basic level, it can simply mean adjusting course or reconfiguring a failing approach. More dramatically, it can signal a break from the past, a chance to start over, a moment of genuine change and rejuvenation. But Keir Starmer’s latest “reset speech” was neither a modest adjustment nor a bold reinvention. If anything, all it proved is that he intends to carry on with business as usual. His refusal to take questions on leadership at Cabinet, or meet with colleagues face-to-face afterwards, confirms this. Starmer trundles on.

Appearing before the faithful MPs and party members tieless and jacket-free in an attempt to project some degree of authenticity (all while reading off a teleprompter), the prime minister took responsibility for the local election losses Labour suffered last week and acknowledged the anger of voters who feel “frustrated” by the state of the country, politics and even himself.

He then went on to promise an end to incrementalism, the renationalisation of steel and even a closer relationship with the EU, all in the name of putting the interests of working people first. And while these policies won’t go about doing that, the framing is the fundamental problem in and of itself.

The government has harped on about standing up for hard-working people since they took office, but virtually every decision they have made has made life harder for the people they purport to represent. Businesses have been hammered with higher employer national insurance contributions, farmers have faced the threat of punitive inheritance tax changes and above all, the tax burden is hurtling towards the highest tax burden since the Second World War — 37.7 per cent by 2027-28. And yet despite raking in more from taxpayers and asking them to make a sacrifice for the good of the public finances, nothing seems to be improving.

This is where Starmer’s so-called “reset” falls apart. It is impossible to reset a government and a political party which refuses to confront the causes of Britain’s decline. You cannot, on the one hand, signal boldness while ducking every meaningful decision required to actually deliver it.

Take welfare as perhaps the clearest example of this government’s weakness. Britain now spends more on welfare (£333 billion) than it raises through income tax (£331 billion). Worse still, this bill is forecast to surge beyond £400 billion by the end of the decade, driven in large part by soaring claims for health and disability benefits. And by 2030, one in eight working-age people are expected to be claiming disability benefits, with mental health conditions increasingly driving the rise.

And yet despite the scale of the crisis staring ministers in the face, every attempt at reform collapses into panic and retreat. Even modest efforts to tighten eligibility or simply slow the growth of spending, such as last year’s welfare reform bill, are treated by Labour MPs as heresy, with some of them at the time going so far as to call the measures draconian and even Victorian.

The backlash from MPs was so effective that large sections of the bill, including stricter health capability criteria and freezing the higher-tier health-related component of universal credit, ended up being junked entirely. Add to this the reversal of the two-child benefit cap and the means testing of winter fuel payments, and the government had completely caved into their backbenchers.

That collapse told us something far more important than the fate of a single bill: it exposed the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Starmer’s government. The prime minister talks endlessly about being willing to make bold and difficult choices, but the political movement he leads has little appetite for any of it.

The prime minister talks endlessly about being willing to make bold and difficult choices, but the political movement he leads has little appetite for any of it

Labour’s parliamentary party is not composed of people elected to reduce welfare dependency or seriously confront Britain’s spending crisis. Quite the opposite: many instinctively believe the answer to almost every problem is more spending, more intervention and more government.

That leaves Starmer trapped. Every time he gestures towards restraint or reform, he immediately runs into a wall of resistance from his own MPs, activists and trade union allies. The result is a government permanently caught between rhetoric and reality: talking tough about difficult decisions while repeatedly backing away from them the moment political pressure mounts. It is why this so-called reset feels hollow. You cannot present yourself as the leader willing to make unpopular decisions when your government’s defining characteristic has been its inability to follow through on any of them.

Ultimately, whether Starmer survives politically is beside the point. The deeper issue is that neither he nor much of his parliamentary party appears capable of making the hard choices necessary to change Britain’s direction. Genuine reform requires confrontation with vested interests, with bloated bureaucracies, with failing institutions and sometimes with your own side and voter base.

being led by Starmer, Rayner, Burnham or Streeting makes no odds: until Labour is willing to confront those realities, Britain will remain stuck with the same failing model of higher taxes and rising welfare dependency overseen by a government that is too frightened of its own backbenchers and supporters to change course.