Sir Kier Starmer is at a crossroads in his ascent to power both in the Labour party and in government. With a Tory party offering negligible threat this should have been a time to exploit his dominance of the House of Commons and press on with reform, but his growing mistakes are now catching up with him. He managed three U-turns in June. First, he needed Louise Casey to get him out of an embarrassing misreading of the national grooming gangs scandal. Then he reversed the bulk of the cut on winter fuel payments – a largely sensible decision that was arrogantly announced without party consultation.
Starmer is now unable to stem the MPs’ taste for blood with his welfare bill. Ministers have been trailing for months that the welfare budget is spiralling out of control. But he picked the wrong target with Personal Independence Payments as Labour MPs challenged the cut pushing 150,000 people with disabilities into poverty, as a decision fundamentally against Labour principles. The argument that those affected will be supported into work was badly thought through/
And there may be more to come as Labour MPs lobby Starmer to remove the two child benefit cap – another cost that needs funding. Overall, if Chancellor Reeves cannot make sufficient savings then this could undermine bigger planned reforms.
What may become his final undoing is the failure to symbolically lose the vote on the disability benefits bill. Behind this lies a prime minister increasingly looking out of his depth, strangulated by his own party and lacking resilience.
It is clear that he has been badly advised, arrogant about pushing through logical arguments with ill thought out plans. It has raised the question of how disconnected Starmer is from his own party. McSweeney has been invaluable to Starmer’s ascendancy but the former’s move into operations away from strategy may be part of the problem. The Left demanding McSweeney’s scalp is not the solution. Angela Rayner replacing Starmer may appease the Left but that would be a union win with no little risk the red wall electorate will turn to Farage instead. There is also the progressive Andy Burnham openly flirting with Labour Party – leadership – it now looks like his allies are dropping him.
Starmer bizarrely chose this difficult time to throw in his own U turn. His used his interview with his biographer Tom Baldwin, in The Observer to say he “deeply regretted” using the phrase about the UK becoming “an “island of strangers” without tough curbs on immigration. This was in reference to record numbers of uncontrolled immigration causing “incalculable damage.” He was regarded by some members of his own party as pandering to the Reform voter with echoes of Enoch Powell’s speech. Was his “regret” the noble thing to do or itself a public faux pas?
The Tories failed again and again on managing immigration, to the point that its own voters gave up on Sunak and have given Starmer a shot at it. Starmer’s “strangers” speech – appealing to the red wall, has collided with a large part of the Labour Party that fully believes in the post 1997 immigration, diversity and multicultural arrangements, who are furious with him.
His torrent of flip flopping is becoming laughable and if it continues then it could undermine his ability to govern, with Farage waiting in the wings. On the one hand it may be a sign of strength to admit to one’s mistakes and correct them, but in politics it smacks of weakness and a failure to hold onto one’s principles. A deeper question is what are Starmer’s ideological principles, if any?
Some will argue Starmer has form. There is his farcical backing of his second referendum policy. Then there was the ten pledges he promised to uphold and then just dropped. Followed by his bumbling suggestion that a woman can have a penis, a point of view since rejected by the Supreme Court. Starmer is probably no more than a managerialist like all prime ministers since the 90s. There is a lack of an ideological position and when things go South – like now – no coherent plan.
Starmer, with McSweeney, achieved a hard fought war within the Labour Party to take it into government, taking on the unions and Corbyn and won. And coming to power he then threw more money at unions with pay rises, to appease them. Maybe his advisors had thought he was now in a commanding position and had not reckoned with the new batch of MPs.
So, how to reconcile the two? Blair was a bit of a shapeshifter as nudged the party towards the right. Starmer is being pragmatic with his shifting positions but it looks incompetent. He is now heading for a collision in where he takes the party next. But as he back tracks on cuts the country may be heading for a Latin American style or Liz Truss collapse. He may have no choice but to hit the middle classes with more tax rises. He may not have many choices at all. This is what the Labour party is and how it democratically and politically operates. Starmer has his hands partly tied behind his back.
The recent Tory and the Labour governments cannot seem to eliminate a large deficit. If anything it’s growing, with debt over 100% GDP. With new pressures on the Defence budget room for manoeuvre is evaporating. Inflation looms again. As does forced spending cuts that the electorate will not tolerate from any party. As Truss found out the hard way, and also Trump, the global markets may have the final say on this.
