The UK needs a visionary – but it’s stuck with Starmer

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Party conference can be a tricky thing for an incumbent Government. It offers a rare opportunity to play pure politics to teams of ministers who spend the majority of their time surrounded by civil servants and dealing with the boring and difficult reality of governing. Used well, a conference can lift the mood of your troops and reinvigorate an administration with a renewed sense of purpose – reminding MPs why they’re all there in the first place. But poorly managed, a party conference can accelerate what might be already falling.

Starmer and co will be wary, then, of showing up in Liverpool this weekend to face the party faithful. They will not be reassured to see King over the Water/In the North Andy Burnham’s major intervention land on the front page of the New Statesman and The Telegraph. Especially not as he asks the question on many people’s lips: where is Labour’s plan to turn the country around?

Since being elected, the Labour government has struggled to define and communicate what its guiding philosophy is. What is their vision for a better Britain and how do they intend to deliver it? Other than by not being the Tories.

Clearly this is the motivation behind the various attempts at government resets and phases that we have seen. Vast ‘Plan for Change’ documents and speeches in northern factories are all noble efforts to string a coherent narrative through a disparate set of managerial policy solutions. But it clearly isn’t working.

Isaiah Berlin famously drew a distinction between ‘foxes’ and ‘hedgehogs’, derived from the Greek poet Archilochus’ line ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’.

Hedgehogs ‘relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel’. Meanwhile foxes ‘pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way… related to no moral or aesthetic principle’.

Apply this dichotomy to our politics, and it is abundantly clear on which side our Prime Minister falls. ‘Pursuing many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory’ would make an apt slogan for Labour’s get-together on Merseyside. 

But how much of a problem is that? Doesn’t a nation with many challenges need many solutions, regardless of if they sometimes seem unrelated, or even contradictory? 

One key issue is, as Kristian Niemietz has pointed out, hedgehogs have a communications advantage: people like coherent narratives. Hence all the attempted resets, speeches, and communications directors tasked with trying to define ‘Starmerism’.

But one look at the polls and it’s clear that the voters can see the PM for what he is, a fox in hedgehog’s clothing.

This is a practical problem as much as a political one. The government has plenty of self-proclaimed priorities, but what happens when those priorities come into direct conflict with each other?

‘Getting more people into work’ is a noble aim, but it gets a bit trickier to achieve if you’re equally determined to deliver ‘the biggest upgrade in workers’ rights in a generation’. Having a clear guiding vision can help point the way when the road forks like this. 

The pragmatist’s way out, ‘doing what works’, isn’t always a solution either as Stephen Bush has pointed out. The evidence for ‘what works’ isn’t always as clear as we may wish. But decisions still need to be made every day – something needs to steer decisions in all of these instances.

In a world of complex and interlinked problems, being ‘ideological’ is a fatal flaw to many. But it can be extremely useful in unblocking impasses and stopping a government getting turned around in the choppy waters of day-to-day politics. A vision vacuum will quickly be filled with bad ideas – as the winter fuel debacle illustrated.

Starmer isn’t the first vulpine politician to struggle to set the agenda with his vision. His predecessor Sunak had similar issues, as anyone who can remember the 2023 party conference will recall (though in his defence, managing the tail end of fourteen years in power is extremely different to being at helm at the beginning of a new five-year stint). Hedgehogs can have their political problems too; Sunak’s own predecessor can attest to that.

Obviously just having an ideology isn’t enough, a government needs to have the right plan for the country as well. But it is something of a pre-requisite. Even when Starmer has had the right ideas, from tackling the planning system to reforming welfare, he has been buffeted off course by a vocal minority. Margaret Thatcher, slamming the ‘Constitution of Liberty’ down on the table declaring ‘this is what we believe’, had fewer such difficulties.

Another politician seemingly without such difficulties is Andy Burnham. Even to his skeptics, he is doing a better hedgehog impression than Starmer by offering a pretty clear vision for how he would fix things. A Burnham Labour Party would provide a consistent narrative and clear marching orders, and a platform to rally their voters. Unfortunately, it seems to involve a lot of nationalisation and something called ‘business-friendly socialism’, which sounds like something that will definitely not backfire at all.

We face a multitude of knotty, difficult challenges as a country. The tax burden, government debt and net migration numbers are all higher than they ever should be; while growth, home ownership and overall levels of opportunity are lower. The solutions to these problems are not easy, and few will be popular. Delivering them will require persuading voters why tough action is necessary, and what the light looks like at the end of the tunnel. Political leaders who fail to do this will quickly be usurped by those who can.

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