What has Labour learned?

George Eaton makes the interesting point that the Starmer Government, despite generally being written up as some flavour of centrist, has actually been extremely left-wing. Archie Hall of the Economist backs this up. Reading back through my own writing on it, another paradox emerges: that it was simultaneously replete with examples of you-can-just-do-things politics that the Prime Minister couldn’t fairly be accused of failing because he wasn’t trying anything. 

How to explain them? Honestly, a lot of the gulf between the media depiction of Sir Keir Starmer and his ministry and the policy reality of it will owe to the fact that political journalism is an extremely vibes-based business. Boris Johnson was, objectively, the most left-wing Tory prime minister in living memory, but it wasn’t sufficient to stop a section of the commentariat convincing itself the Conservatives had “lurched to the right” under his leadership. Likewise, Sir Keir was a slightly boring, technocratic centrist and so that’s how he was written up.

But harsh as I sometimes am on my trade, Starmer really was a boring technocrat, and I suspect that another reason his government never really got written about the way Eaton describes is because for all that it delivered a lot of left-wing policies, there was no animating vision at the centre of it — just a very weak prime minister who couldn’t restrain his backbenchers and let his party indulge its id on issue after issue.

Look at the things listed as evidence of how left-wing this government has been. The £66bn in tax rises? Apparently a nasty shock to Rachel Reeves, utterly unmentioned in the manifesto, and politically poisonous, resorted to only when growth didn’t magically resume once the Tories left office. Curbing academy school freedoms? A stillborn programme; Bridget Phillipson wanted to go a lot further before the weight of hostile responses to the Government’s consultation put her off. The increases in workers and renters rights? Both backfiring, and both directly at odds with Starmer’s stated objective of delivering economic growth at all costs.

Nobody is taking any responsibility for checking whether the objectives of various ministers are compatible

There is nothing resembling a real programme here. Nobody is taking any responsibility for checking whether the objectives of various ministers are compatible, or weighing the cost/benefit analyses and trade-offs involved, or making sure the sums add up. Indeed, ask Labour MPs to identify the failings that led to their loss of faith in Starmer, and most of them seem to point to his handful of efforts to control the public finances.

And of course, the fact that nobody really thinks of the Starmer Government as being especially left-wing means that its collapse is not going to be taken as evidence that this hard tack to the left has been tried and found wanting. The whole point of pinning Labour’s polling on Starmer’s alleged personal failings is that it holds out the hope that the government’s fortunes can be revived purely by dint of replacing him.

Overall, the Labour Party continues its retreat behind the walls of the mind. Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this is John McTernan: once a hard-headed New Labour veteran, he has been reduced now to claiming that the Starmer Government was, er, so “embarrassed by being successfully so left which is why they kept trying to increase poverty — until stopped by the PLP”. For a man who sells consultancy services to post that sort of thing on his main account suggests a real, peculiar level of belief.

And bless them, they will need it. Nothing in Labour’s self-indulgent programme is going to deliver overall economic growth, or more housing, or otherwise drive consistent improvements in the average standard of living. Unfavourable demographic trends would continue to heap pressure on the public finances even were Labour minded to try and control revenue expenditure to the slightest degree, which it isn’t. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, Labour MPs are going to find their government just as unpopular as it is now, with less time remaining until the next election and their stock of messiahs reduced by one. What will they do then?