Keir Starmer is governing as the prisoner of Labour’s Leftist factions
There can be no room for doubt now. Whatever this Starmer government is, it is certainly not Blair Mark II. It is not New Labour, or even New New Labour. It is New Old Labour.
This was presumably the intention all along but we had no way of knowing that because nobody bothered to ask. The country was so disgusted with the Conservatives that it was ready to give a blank cheque to any opponent who looked remotely palatable. Not that there was any great enthusiasm for this whatever-it-was that would replace the disarray and incompetence that had prevailed for so long. The result was bizarre: a landslide parliamentary majority on the basis of a third of the popular vote.
This phenomenon has been shaped by two significant misconceptions. During the campaign, there was a belief that being not-Jeremy Corbyn was sufficient to make Labour plausible as a moderate government which would not do anything very different from the Conservatives – they would just do it better, make everything work properly, have better relations with Whitehall and the public services, etc, etc. Then, after the election, it was assumed that the size of his Commons majority would ensure that Sir Keir Starmer could ignore the rump of far-Lefties on his backbenches. Neither of these things has turned out to be true.
We may never know whether the first of those beliefs – that Starmer’s Labour had no intention of undoing the reforms which had transformed the country’s economy and social attitudes over two generations – was ever well founded. There were clues of course which we can see, in retrospect, should not have been ignored. Remember Angela Rayner’s speech to the TUC conference in which she promised to roll back much of the 1980s legislation which had succeeded in controlling the anarchic strikes that had once all but destroyed British industry? No one believed that this was a serious threat. Surely she was just Starmer’s court jester– the John Prescott de nos jours – whose working class persona and goofy belligerence were there to humour the old-timers into believing that this was still their party.
Nope. It was for real. It is Ms Rayner who is dominating the actual business of government and she meant what she said. Strike ballots would once again be legitimate without a majority of members turning out to vote, and so could be determined by a minority of activists. There would even be scope for flying pickets to disrupt workplaces that were not their own. New employees would be entitled to full job security from their first day without any probation period.
And all of these regressive measures were geared to giving more power, not to workers themselves but to the union leaders who were once again installed as major players in the democratic process, with the power to hold the population hostage in any political struggle with the government.
Indeed, some of the supposed “protections” to be instituted would be positively detrimental to prospective workers. The right to job security from the first day would make employers much less likely to hire extra staff or to take the risk of hiring someone who might prove unsuitable. It was also up to Ms Rayner to announce that the most momentous Thatcher reform of all – the right to buy your council house, which did more to transform working class aspiration than any measure in living memory – was to be revoked. Is this what Sir Keir always had in mind? Who knows?
But maybe this startling ascendancy of Angela Rayner into chief government policy dictator should not be so surprising. There are some other things that did not go as expected when Sir Keir took power. Surely, it was thought, he could not keep David Lammy – who was, to put it kindly, not renowned for his diplomatic wisdom – in post as Foreign Secretary. Nor could he retain Ed Miliband, who was an uncompromising climate change zealot, in charge of environmental policy. But there they both are. And the consequences have become as clear as they were predictable.
Lammy has announced a gratuitous, utterly meaningless restriction on arms sales to Israel, whose only effect is to cast a slur on the Israeli government and, more pertinently, to appease the Corbynite wing of the Labour Party and the Muslim vote in some constituencies. Mr Miliband’s crusade against fossil fuels and petrol cars has turned his title, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, into a contradiction in terms. In order to achieve the latter, he has discovered, we will have to sacrifice the former – and this at a time of war and global uncertainty.
Couldn’t Sir Keir have seen this coming? Given the size of his majority, could he not have dealt with both these troublesome problems with ruthless efficiency right at the start? Perhaps this is the greatest mystery of all: why isn’t the most successful party leader of the current generation behaving with the confidence and courage that his electoral win would seem to justify?
When Tony Blair won his first electoral triumph, there was never any doubt that he would carry through the modernisations that he had pledged in the campaign: he would, as he famously said, “govern as New Labour”. There would be no going back: it was his way or the highway. Labour knew that the earth had moved beneath them during the Thatcher revolution and his parliamentary majority gave him the power to reconstruct his party’s identity without any backsliding.
This was effectively stage-managed – Blair’s ecstatic entrance into Downing Street, the photo shoots with his unprecedented contingent of women MPs. But Sir Keir has presented himself very differently – as the dour, humourless professional who accepts the great burden of the national plight with dogged determination and no showboating. Has there been a conscious decision to match the urgency of the times with a grim visage? Or is this just a reflection of his own lack of inspiration and inability to create enthusiasm?
Is this the future of governing: just sordid power struggles between sectarian interests and appeasement of activist factions? Is that what we thought we were getting?