This week will mark anniversaries for two Labour Prime Ministers. On Friday, Keir Starmer will have been in post for a year, and on Saturday, the Labour movement will celebrate 80 years since the election of Clement Attlee.
One will prove a happier occasion than the other. Not even the most centrist of dads could, in good faith, describe Starmer’s first year as Prime Minister as having gone well.
The recent fiasco over Labour’s flagship welfare bill has been unedifying in the extreme. Faced with a backbench rebellion, the Government was coerced into watering down its already poor legislation to a thin gruel. What was initially going to deliver £4.6 billion in annual savings is now projected to save us nothing at all by 2029-30. To plug this hole, tax rises will almost certainly be coming in the Autumn.
Starmer’s U-turns don’t stop at welfare reform – he is a veritable boomerang of a Prime Minister.
In an interview with Tom Baldwin, the Prime Minister not only doubled down on regretting having used the phrase ‘island of strangers’ to describe Britain, but also admitted that he had not read the speech properly before delivering it.
Then, of course, in an another about-turn which now feels like his early experimentation with administrative cowardice, Starmer reeled back the changes he promised to make to the Winter Fuel Allowance. This decision to hand pensioners their lunch money back will cost £1.25 billion and do nothing to appease the elderly voters they’ve managed to infuriate.
So what is it that links rudderless Starmer – besides a red rosette – to the WWI veteran who established the National Health Service? Our current Prime Minister, like Attlee, will go down in British history as an epoch-defining leader – albeit in two very different ways.
Attlee inherited Britain at its worst in 1945. Battered by conflict, our infrastructure was shot, the Empire was a shell, the billions spent on the war effort sent debt skyrocketing and British industry was at breaking point. Attlee’s Keynesian approach to national revival ushered in a new age of statism. The NHS was set up; a fifth of the British economy was brought under state control; and a comprehensive system of social security including benefits for unemployment, sickness and old age was put in place.
By 1979, the state forged by Attlee had reached peak corpulence. Trade unions held the British economy ransom, regularly bringing industries to a standstill through direct action; inflation was at double figures; and massive debt had led Jim Callaghan to go to the IMF for a loan in 1976. Enter Margaret Thatcher. Under her stewardship, Britain came to embrace transformational supply-side reforms. Inflation was slashed, union barons were neutered, stagnant nationalised industries were now subject to market forces and the City of London became a global financial hub.
Herein lies the difference between Attlee and Starmer: the former was the figurehead of a new age in British politics, the latter marks the death of a later one. Starmer is to the Blairite political settlement what Callaghan was to Attlee’s statist project – its final disorientated, wheezing torchbearer.
The political stakeholderism adopted by Tony Blair – outsourcing decisionmaking to quangos and legal matters to judges in Strasbourg – has allowed our major issues to spiral. Controlling migration and boosting economic growth have both been stymied by the institutional aversion to radical change set in motion by Blair’s reshaping of the British state.
In fairness, Starmer has made reformist noises and – quite rightly – consistently highlighted the Tories’ complicity in upholding this stagnant status quo. He patently recognises the need to get welfare spending to sustainable levels, to properly police our borders and trim the size of the state.
Yet he is entirely unprepared to divorce himself and his party from the institutions and political instincts that aid and abet our decline. Thus we have the cringing display of government by U-turn. Promises to slash the quangocracy are followed by the establishment of new quangos. An insistence on controlling migration is accompanied by a vow to never leave the ECHR. Strong rhetoric on growth is undone by a host of punitive taxes and regulations being exacted on British businesses. It should also be noted that his Government – despite its build, baby, build ethos – is unwilling to roll back Attlee’s calamitous 1947 Town and Country Planning Act.
For Britain to prosper, this arrangement is unsustainable. A race is now in full swing on the Right to do what Thatcher did to the post-war consensus once this Government is laid to rest.
The polls currently have Nigel Farage’s Reform UK as the frontrunners. Robust on migration and crime and with an increasingly left-wing approach to the economy: their political blend is a popular one. But how will Farage square the interests of his voter base with the need to bring down welfare spending? Will the party’s DOGE-style crackdown on local government waste extend beyond bringing down Pride flags outside of council buildings?
The possibility of a Tory revival cannot be discounted either. Kemi Badenoch’s vision for a muscularly liberal Britain, combined with Robert Jenrick’s flair for communication, could prove an enticing prospect. Yet our oldest political force still has some way to go in explaining to the electorate why, after 14 years of rule, it failed to take on the Blairite state and reform our economy and institutions.
We are still some way off the next election, but the writing is on the wall. If, as is certainly on the cards, Labour are ejected from power in 2029, the government that takes its place will be charged with a titanic political task. The last century of British political history has shown that tinkering will not do where demolition is required. To quote Attlee on the formation of his government: ‘You will be judged by what you succeed at gentlemen, not by what you attempt.’
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