Keir Starmer: a technocrat without a plan The PM's vision is politically incoherent

Political incoherence, while damaging socially, can be rewarding individually. Indeed, it has stood Starmer in good stead. Possessed of a cynicism bordering on nihilism, our chameleon was happily reconciled to Osbornism in 2015 before taking a seat on Corbyn’s shadow cabinet only a year later. Two years on, by then already a darling of Islingtonian Europeanism, he led the anti-democratic putsch to reverse the result of the referendum, only to abandon the demand once its real objective — the displacement of the Left, of course, not re-entry into the EU — was achieved in 2019. His ascent to the party leadership followed shortly thereafter, on the strength of retaining the slate of reforms promised in the manifesto of old, including sweeping nationalisation and redistribution. Unsurprisingly, these pledges were swiftly jettisoned in a bid to refashion his party as a cut-price New Labour tribute act.

Adherents of a tradition less susceptible to spin-doctoring would no doubt have been left scratching their heads at Starmer’s seemingly endless capacity for reverse-ferreting. As it is, though, the mavens of self-respecting liberal opinion hardly batted an eyelid. The rare pleas for clarity voiced in the usual quarters of Labourist opinion — “Labour desperately needs to stand for something,” declared the New Statesman in 2021 — were drowned out by the plaudits of pundits praising such concessions to electability.

Much the same was said of Starmer’s bot-like proclamations to the press. We were led to believe that colourless Keir doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem, let alone a discerning literary taste. As a child, he had no fears, no phobias, the Guardian reported. “He doesn’t know what he dreamed last night — or ever: ‘I don’t dream.’” In the end, though, his carefully crafted conventionality counted for little. With fewer votes than Corbyn received in 2017 and 2019, Starmer was able to seize power only thanks to the distorting effect of the simple plurality system.

Having won, Starmer nevertheless finds himself at a loss. He has achieved power, but he has no idea what to do with it. There will be no more austerity, we are told, but we have every reason to believe otherwise. Committed, like Procrustes, to shortening the limbs of the state to fit the size of their budgetary bed, Starmer and Rachel Reeves have effectively set about outlawing growth. The first casualty, before the election, was the £28 billion “green prosperity” plan, scrapped in favour of a paltry £7 billion National Wealth Fund, literal peanuts compared to, say, Biden’s $369 billion climate package to reboot growth. Then, after the election, our austeritarian girlboss doubled down, doing for the £1.7 billion Stonehenge tunnel and slashing winter fuel payments for pensioners to the tune of £1.5 billion. All this, ostensibly, to help fill the £22 billion “black hole” that Reeves discovered on taking office — almost half of it in fact of her own making; Labour signed off on a £9.4 billion wage settlement with, among others, striking junior doctors and train drivers. Meanwhile, Labour has also committed to enforce additional spending cuts to the tune of £20 billion every year with the aim of shrinking public debt in year five of Starmer’s Labour.

Like a rope fetishist, then, Reeves has tightly bound the British economy. There can be no room for growth in such a circumscribed setup, the Financial Times and Institute for Fiscal Studies have independently warned. The figures speak volumes about the priorities of Starmer’s Labour. Capital investment, and therefore growth, have been sacrificed on the altar of wage expenditure for what has become a tiny aristocracy of Labour, while the Deliverooisation of the rest of the working class proceeds apace. On these benighted and un-unionised sections, austerity and casualisation can agreeably be imposed with no great loss to the carpetbagging Labour MPs of rentier, managerial and lobbyist backgrounds.

The upshot will be a return to Osbornite austerity after the brief one-nation Tory interlude of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Reeves denies this, even as she continues to subscribe to a heterodoxy no more dubious than extispicy, divination by means of inspecting animal entrails. “To my mum,” she says, “every penny mattered, and the basic test for whoever is Chancellor is to bring that attitude to our public finances.” Now, the cheese-paring mindset may have some value in the kitchen; but as every economist worth his salt has pointed out, it is of no use whatsoever in running the 6th-largest economy of the world. “Hard choices,” as she has it, in practice mean underinvestment in infrastructure, and accordingly low productivity and no growth, which in turns means less tax revenue and more spending cuts. It’s a vicious cycle. We know this not only through the sophistication of economic theory, but through historical experience.

Time was when Britain was the most productive nation in the world. These days, however, peer countries, even strike-ridden France, are on average 15% more productive. Post-communist Poland is set to overtake Britain on this metric by 2030. The contrast with our neighbours across the Channel, a recent policy paper persuasively argues, is painfully instructive. There, in France, massive investment in housing, infrastructure, and energy have sustained greater productivity even as French workers work fewer hours and take longer vacations, as anyone who has visited Paris in August knows. With roughly the same population, France has 38 million homes to Britain’s 30 million, with the result that the French enjoy lower rents and mortgages. Thanks to investments in clean energy, especially nuclear power, electricity is half as cheap as in Britain. France has opened 1,740 miles of high-speed rail since 1980; Britain, 67 miles. As with rail, so with roads: France has 12,000 kilometres of motorways; Britain, 4,000. Since 1945, metropolitan Paris has trebled in size; London is only a few % larger. Britain holds the dubious distinction of having Europe’s largest city without mass transit: Leeds. Chronic underinvestment, far below the OECD average, is to blame for all of this.

The upshot has been plain to see. When Starmer was sworn in, he took over a country in which 4 million households were in debt over utility bills, 7 million were forgoing food, heat, toiletries to make ends meet. The penny-pinchers at the Treasury could take pride in running the cheapest health service in the advanced capitalist world: the EU14 spent 21% more per capita on healthcare in the 2010s. The collateral damage, however, was world-leading cancer mortality rates, and the lowest number of MRI and CT scanners in the developed world. No doubt Starmer’s majority was augmented by the fact that 8% of Britons were awaiting an NHS procedure at the time of the election; or that real wages have flatlined, by some measures even fallen, since 2008.

Had there been no Osbornite austerity, and had capricious bureaucrats likewise not denied practically every investment proposal emanating from the private sector, it is likely — following the 1979-2008 trend line — that Britain would be some 25% more productive today. This, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows, would have translated into a GDP per capita of £41,800 instead of £33,500, producing tax revenues of £1.28 billion instead £1.03 billion, with the result that our annual deficit of £85 billion in these years would have instead been an annual surplus of £170 billion.

It follows that in fetishising the fiscal straitjacket, Osborne, and by extension Starmer and Reeves, have in fact got it backwards. It was tax-and-spend investment that deflated the debt from 250% to 20% of GDP from the late-Forties to the early-Nineties; and it was the imposition of austerity and effective banning of investment that has now inflated it to 100%.

There was a time when politicos understood this. In the post-war period, they could be sanguine about high debt, knowing that they were committed to growing the pie, and assured by Keynes’s maxim: “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” These days, Reeves and her ilk are more likely to pull gargoyle faces at the very thought: “If we can’t afford it, we can’t do it,” she has declared.

Somehow foreign policy is exempt from these strictures. Starmer has promised Zelensky £3 billion a year “for as long as it takes”, a strong disincentive, if any, to diplomatic settlement in Donbas. His foreign secretary, meanwhile, has outlined his grim vision of “progressive realism” in the pages of Foreign Affairs, essentially a return to military power projection and democracy promotion at taxpayers’ expense, topped up with an unswerving commitment to Nato expansion.

Starmer, furthermore, is unruffled by the prospect of creating a £13 billion hole in public finances by bringing down legal migration — bad news for Britons a touch long in the tooth, who depend on bright young things coming from abroad to pay into their pension pots. As we have seen, Starmer is coming after the elderly; after the winter fuel subsidy, the triple-locked pension might be next. More pressing for our ruler is the £3 billion spent on housing the 30,000-odd refugees (0.05% of the national population) arriving annually in small boats.

To save us from the indignity of having to facilitate the rapid assimilation of Syrian seamstresses and Afghan architects into the national populace, Starmer strolled about the Villa Doria Pamphili taking lessons from the Italian prime minister. No doubt reminding her that he is a figlio di un attrezzista, he praised at length the “remarkable progress” Giorgia Meloni had made in tackling refugees — which includes impounding vessels and curbing the funding of humanitarian groups who rescue migrants from drowning at sea, not to mention forging a deal with a Tunisian despot accused of torturing and dumping refugees on the Libyan border without food and shelter. Britain, Starmer says, has a lot to “learn” from Italy’s handling of refugees. One wonders if these are the practices he had in mind when he once declared that “the best of British values are also the best of Christian values”.

Then again, morality has never been at the heart of Starmer’s pitch. Fiscal prudence has. Truth be told, however, it’s really much ado about nothing. Based on the paltry figures I have already mentioned, unsuspecting readers might be forgiven for thinking that the Treasury has only a few billion lying about to toy with. The fact is that state spending exceeds £1 trillion. And a lot can be done with that sum, as Starmer himself sometimes recognises. Offsetting the doom and gloom that has been the core of his messaging, he has on occasion gestured towards ambition, as in his pledge to build 1.5 million homes over the course of his term. Good news, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. It will take a sea change in culture to combat council nimbyism and rentier interest. Michael Gove, that Whig interloper in the Tory party, discovered this the hard way when he attempted leasehold and eviction reforms. Today, 85 landlords sit in the Commons, 44 of them Labour’s, including Jas Athwal, the current parliament’s biggest slumlord with 15 mouldy and ant-infested rental properties to his name. It is likewise too early to tell what Labour’s sugar daddies like Lord Alli want from Starmer in return for indulging his penchant for paid-for pants.

At any event, reforming ambition doesn’t come naturally to self-respecting sensible centrists like Starmer. When it comes to fixing Britain, he declared at the Liverpool party conference, “there are no easy answers”. But there are. For one thing, a one-off, 1% wealth tax on millionaires, paid annually for five years, would raise a whopping £260 billion without punishing pensioners. For another, the Treasury could stop paying interest on the reserve balances of commercial banks, a scandalous subsidy to the tune of £35 billion a year. Labour would be saved from the unedifying spectacle of haggling over trifles like skint hippies in a Levantine flea market. Failing bold moves like these, it is hard not to come away with the impression that Starmer and his cronies are not serious people.

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Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

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