Is this the end of Labour?
I am led to a window on the second floor. There is no broken glass, despite the rumours, just a single cracked pane and scuffs on the white painted ledge. We peer down. Instantly recognisable in silhouette on the wet grass there is the outline of the outgoing prime minister. So it’s apparently true. Keir Starmer has been defenestrated.
Back inside Downing Street, there is celebration, albeit muted and respectful. By the sandwiches, folk on the left – Angela, Ed, Lucy – discuss why the removal of Starmer means a return to a “proper” Labour government. But in another corner, a clutch of ministers – Wes, Shabana, Peter – explain, equally convincingly, that this is a pivotal victory for the Blairites and will produce a refreshed administration focused on business and growth.
Those two paragraphs are, of course, a fantasy. I was not called earlier in the week by my Deep Throat No 10 source. I was not invited by him into the building; I can only say he is called Liam, sports an enormous grey moustache and a man-bun, which you wouldn’t expect at the heart of government, and particularly loathes… oh well, never mind.
Keir Starmer has not been sent flying from a window into the garden. But those central questions – what if? And what then? – are, this week, real and unfantastical. Behind the manoeuvring by would-be rivals are real divisions about politics: one day we may look back on this autumn as the beginning of the split that broke the Labour Party.
Starmer has been trying to hold the centre together, leaning towards soft left and Blairite right as need be. But neither he nor Rachel Reeves have been good enough at politics. The centre, it seems, cannot hold. And – here is Labour’s bigger problem – neither a lurch to the left nor right would work either.
A left takeover of the government would mean even higher taxes, continued growth in welfare, and a swift confrontation with the bond markets that would bring about the economic showdown Nigel Farage has predicted. Further, the left does not currently have an agreed leader: Ed Miliband insists it’s not him, Andy Burnham is in Manchester, and Angela Rayner remains, however fidgety, on the naughty step.
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A shift to Wes Streeting, with Shabana Mahmood alongside him, might seem more plausible. Mahmood’s assault on the asylum crisis and Streeting’s blunt words about the doctors’ strike give an indication of the sharper, crisper, harder tone of an alternative government. Both Middle England and the bond markets would be happier. The trouble is, this neo-Blairite version of Labour does not have a parliamentary majority – and without that, how can it be a government?
The conclusion might seem to be: for all his faults, stick with Starmer. If you want to avoid a full-blown political collapse, an uncontrollable parliamentary party, and an early general election leading to the near-wipeout of Labour, there is no alternative to – as David Lammy would say – “getting a grip”.
If only things were this simple. The truth is that Britain is experiencing a much deeper political upheaval that goes well beyond Labour. It affects not just one party but our entire political system; even what you could call our electoral civilisation.
There are now five – or, in Scotland and Wales, six – political parties desperately struggling for dominance atop a bicycle built for two. The trivial point is that no outcome is now predictable: any of them, including the Greens, could grab hold of the handlebars. The less trivial point is that we have a broken system, one it is hard to imagine any political leader presiding over successfully.
The politics we grew up with emerged from the Industrial Revolution. There was the party of capital, the Conservatives, and the party of the workers, Labour. Reaching this binary had been a long, angry journey, from the destruction of the Whigs to Robert Peel’s Victorian assault on old rural Toryism. A century ago, the emergence of Labour to replace the Liberals after the First World War was confusing, hard-fought, and never seemed inevitable.
In far more recent times, the emergence of the SDP was prevented from breaking Labour only by the coincidence of the Falklands War. Later still, Conservative Britain was divided first by Europe and then by Brexit, and it remains in pieces.
Our familiar politics is over. And perhaps good riddance, because it no longer fits. A long period of low growth and productivity; the self-expulsion of Britain from her natural nearby market; the rise of Donald Trump, national populism, and the confrontation with China; the vast revolution breaking all around us caused by AI… These forces have fragmented politics in ways we are still trying to get our heads around.
Political parties are supposed to represent major social forces. But really, who were the big interest groups represented by the Tories in recent years? What coherent force does Labour represent today? The questions confronting Westminster are more profound than the personal skill set of Sir Keir Rodney Starmer.
The fragmentation of politics around him does, however, reflect hard realities. The rise of Zack Polanski and the radical left Greens gives a voice to generations effectively cut out of the social contract – all those unable to get a decent place to rent, never thinking they will ever be able to buy a home, whose work options are radically limited, and who doubt that pensions or healthcare free at the point of use will be available to them in older age. Youth unemployment is now running at 15.3 per cent, the highest since the pandemic. If younger voters are angry, insurrectionary and looking for easy solutions in taxing the super-rich, it is hardly surprising.
On the other side, you could say that the rise of Reform represents another fat slice of the modern dispossessed – often older voters who see their communities disintegrating and their cultural memory disdained by the media elites, plus angrier young men. The Liberal Democrats stand for the bewildered but still employed, educated middle, and are clearly closer to the politics of Starmer’s Labour than the others.
Talking to one of the most senior and experienced Labour figures recently, I was told that this fragmentation made it harder for Labour to identify itself. It is ever more tempting, he said, to reach out to outside groups, trying to scoop up as many voters as possible. But this is terminally defensive.
Don’t offend this lot, don’t alienate that lot: eventually, you become a vaporous, borderless blur – a grey mush, impossible to understand or even defend. As the Labour veteran put it, with a wry smile: “You can call yourself New Labour, or Blue Labour, or soft left Labour… But you end up as Just Labour, which is a pretty good way of losing elections.”
Recent days of Westminster politics, consumed with briefing wars and personalities, reflect this bigger splintering. It is internal party turmoil, ultimately caused by huge unresolved national dilemmas. So, now what?
This doesn’t mean that the centre should just give up. The next politics will see a contest between end-of-my-tether voters ready for radical action, to left and right, and a nervously precautionary instinct.
The strains are becoming intolerable. Harold Wilson would not have been able to hold Labour together in today’s broken circumstances. For all his experience and wily politicking, he’d have lost the Bevanites by now to a rival party. We should be aware of nostalgia: the creased, nicotine-flavoured politicians of the 1960s were not necessarily greater people than today’s cadre. They may simply have been luckier.
A few thoughts about the immediate future.One: Rachel Reeves is right about regaining growth – without that, there is no hope of a more unified Labour politics. Everything that gets in the way, from her own tax on employers to those parts of the employment rights laws that inhibit businesses from hiring, should be jettisoned. Planning reform needs to be even more drastic.
Two: get real. The challengers of left and right understand something fundamental about modern Britain that the Starmer government doesn’t yet grasp: urgency. People are sick enough of the failing state to want radical answers and not to care much if they are warned about the downsides. It’s time to think big and take risks.
Given how damaging this Budget has already been to economic confidence in the weeks and months leading up to it – and yes, that is partly the fault of Treasury briefing –why not abolish the whole fandango, the self-important parliamentary pantomime, and limit fiscal legislation to individual tax rises? These would be announced and legislated for when needed; there would be an annual review of spending, carried out by each department parallel to, but outside, the Treasury. This would be far easier for the market to read and mark than our current hallowed but opaque traditions. It would save us interest payments and help boost growth.
While we are at it, we should bring in outsiders to run much of Whitehall, which is set in its ways and works slowly. Why should the best person to run a big department be an MP – a part-timer who needs to shepherd a seat and engage in Westminster manoeuvres?
Past outsiders, from Frank Cousins under Wilson to Lord Young in the Thatcher years and Lord Frost under Johnson, struggled and often failed in Whitehall. But if you analysed parliamentarians helicoptered into the state machine, you would see at least as high a failure rate – probably higher. The state machine matters. Shouldn’t we have some of the best people on the best salaries running it?
I can assemble a dozen arguments against both these propositions – on the Budget and the cabinet. You probably can too. Certainly, civil servants will be able to. But my point is that, as the state fails, we have reached a moment at which the country wants radicalism. And there is almost none. In March, Starmer promised a radical rewiring of the state (although he stopped short of taking on the legalism that blocks and slows so much). He said then: “At the moment the state employs more people than it has in decades. And yet – look around the country. Do you see good value everywhere? Because I don’t. I actually think it’s weaker than it’s ever been. Overstretched… Unfocused… Trying to do too much… Doing it badly…”
This seemed a moment of bracing radicalism. Since then, with the lonely and still unresolved exception of the abolition of NHS England, what has actually happened? I don’t mean reviews and committees – I mean what has actually happened? Who has lost their jobs? What is moving faster? Which parts of the machine does No 10 now have a real handle on? Where are the new data flows transforming decision-making?
Or take digital ID cards, one of the obvious ways of beginning to grip migration and the black economy, as well as making daily life easier. Announced in September, it didn’t make it into Starmer’s conference speech a couple of days later, and there has been a deafening silence since. Basic questions about it remain unanswered. Will it be compulsory to carry the card – and if not, what’s the point? – and if so, what about people without smartphones? When will it be compulsory to show the card on demand, and to whom? What will be the penalties for not doing so? As the long silence continues, opposition is growing fast – and remains unanswered.
Whatever you think of those initiatives, a government that tosses out the possibility of radical change and then forgets about it has absolutely no chance of grabbing the country’s attention. Other things matter as well, of course – relentless focus on social media communication, humour (one good joke can have more impact than 10,000 dull, erudite speeches) and internal discipline.
But there is a better way of governing available, even in a broken system and with so many parties circling around. A sharply radical turn may not save Labour, never mind Keir Starmer. Looking ahead, electoral reform is becoming inevitable. Then a split in today’s party between “real continuity Labour” on the left and an aggressive centre party could follow. What might seem to be purely personal, careerist manoeuvrings in the cabinet may, in fact, be the first small signs of far greater tumult on its way.
Reflecting on all of this, I walk back to the Downing Street window and look down. Starmer has vanished, leaving behind a mark on the grass. Has he nipped through the garden on his way back into the building, or has he, quite reasonably, headed back to his favourite pub in Kentish Town for a quieter life?
[Further reading: Reform uses Mahmood to recruit members]
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