Labour’s politics of polite automatons Keir Starmer's reset is pointless tinkering

The foundations. The missions. The milestones. The targets. The earnest gestures and the hand-clasped, feigned intensity. In the end, none of it matters. Keir Starmer’s “plan for change” — resetting his government after months of drift — only proves one thing: the Prime Minister is incapable of speaking human. Delivering yesterday’s speech in the pained, desiccated tone of a corporate spokesperson, no amount of pre-briefed, stage-managed events will persuade the public that the former Director of Public Prosecutions is anything more than an effective bureaucrat.

This matters. National renewal requires a radical policy agenda, finally banishing the zombie economic model that failed in 2008 and only endures on life support. Yet it also needs a national narrative, an accessible story of decline and renaissance. This, of course, is a Sisyphean task even for the great political speakers of our time, such as they exist after a precipitous decline in the quality of our parliamentarians.

In an age of schizoid media, with the pillars of the national common culture giving way to takes, apps and newsfeeds, cutting through is hard. Rhetorical brilliance is rare even for skilled political orators, and Keir Starmer is not one of these. Yet at the root of his troubles is a policy agenda that’s almost as empty as his words, altogether speaking to a politician without any politics at all.

Perhaps the most obvious problem with Starmer’s reset was the language. In the place of inspiration, we were offered vague, laboured, soporific consultancy-jargon, and now the return of targets: sales floor KPIs transposed onto creaking hospitals and collapsing schools. “This plan will land on desks across Whitehall with the heavy thud of a gauntlet being thrown down,” the Prime Minister told his audience at Pinewood Studios, mixing his metaphors with Brent-like gusto. “Many people in Whitehall are comfortable with the tepid bath of managed decline.”

It’s not just that communication that’s lacking. If the form is grey then the substance is too. Compared to the gargantuan task of ending the longest-running dent in living standards since the Napoleonic Wars, Starmer’s vision is threadbare, painfully constrained by global economic slowdowns, geopolitical stand-offs, superpower rivalry, and bearish bond markets.

Rather than an epic mission of national renewal — or even a new growth model based on Reevian “securonomics” — we’ve instead seen a reversion to Labourite tax-and-spend and a return of Blairite micromanagement. More than 92% of NHS patients will be seen in under 18 weeks. Three quarters of children will start school “ready to learn”. Laudable aims, but hardly memorable, totemic policies that you would put on the side of a bus. Nor are these ideas the basis for a grand national project. Ultimately, all Starmer’s speech involved was tinkering with the symptoms of decline without addressing the systemic cause.

After Donald Trump’s resurgence, then, there’s no sense in promising to emulate a defeated Bidenism. Britain’s ability to enact expansive industrial policies was always limited by our more modest fiscal and economic heft, with the Federal government and the Federal Reserve together presiding over a continent-sized economy. And even there, the “modern supply-side” playbook of Democratic policymakers, all manufacturing subsidies and Rust Belt investment, failed to halt populist revival in America. Whatever echo bounces back across the Atlantic to Whitehall is unlikely to do much better. No wonder steelworks, oil refineries, and shipbuilders have all gone to the wall since July.

A green paper has promised that an Industrial Strategy Council will be formed on a statutory footing, but the strength of the prescription is again dwarfed by the scale of the sickness. The solution to decades of industrial decline? A “national wealth fund” capitalised with £8 billion in public money — or around two weeks of NHS spending. GB Energy will do little to remedy among the highest domestic and industrial energy prices on earth. A dramatic deconvergence between the productivity and disposable income across Britain and its peers is met with a vague promise to deliver “rising living standards” over the course of this Parliament. That, at least, would be an improvement: the last session was the first in peacetime history where living standards didn’t rise at all.

And then there’s migration. Though Starmer at least acknowledged its bewildering scale, with Britain welcoming nearly one million net arrivals in 2023, he made no definite commitment around how and when numbers would fall. If, moreover, the Government’s target of 300,000 new houses a year was actually achieved, that would only just be enough to keep our dwellings-per-head steady at current levels of migration. What it certainly wouldn’t do is spur on an expanded supply that dramatically lowers prices.

In lieu of any big ambitions, the Prime Minister instead fell back on Fabian technocracy, a formula surely repeated more in hope than expectation, especially without the buoyancy of a healthy world economy, and when state capacity is flatlining and migration soaring. Dovetailed with the Prime Minister’s congenital inability to frame an attractive story, and there’s no question that won’t be answered by a review, a consultation, a taskforce, a commission, an inquiry, or the formation of some gormless NPC committee.

In a sense, Starmer’s legalism is the inevitable upshot when skull-crushing rhetoric and policy mediocrity come together. Wallowing in process, viewing himself as an administrator-in-chief with the utmost respect for even our most plodding institutions, the Prime Minister never needs to actually change things — much less bring the public along with him. There are nods to anti-SW1 iconoclasm, to that “move fast and break things” energy briefly associated with the early Johnson premiership. Yet the real vibe with Starmer is ultimately much more cautious. Rather than driving his missions forward by any means necessary, we instead get yet another relaunch.

Nor do Starmer’s latest personnel decisions offer much either. The appointment of Chris Wormald as cabinet secretary is again indicative of the bifurcation between the mammoth task and the proposed solution: the “complete re-wiring of the British state” touted by Labour was followed by the appointment of a consummate establishment insider and famed grey bureaucrat in the most senior role of the sprawling Whitehall system.

With that in mind, Starmer’s claim at Pinewood that he’s dissatisfied by Whitehall sluggishness rings rather hollow, especially when the targets he announced actually add yet another layer of bureaucracy to public services already drowning in a maelstrom of directives, unintegrated systems, outside consultants, and the legacy of failed top-down reforms. Rather than a Leninist zeal to take on the inertia of the Blob, then, Starmer will instead fall victim to his over-identification with the institutional architecture of a state that has long since given up on transformational projects, and now seeks merely to administer stagnation according to strict HR overtures.

Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, once described her boss as “the least political person I know”. That is a highly unusual accolade for a resident of No. 10. It’s even more unusual for a man of his background. The young Keir, in the heady days of the late Eighties, sat on the editorial board of Socialist Alternatives: the in-house magazine of a Trotskyist micro-sect, followers of a Greek Marxist called Michel Pablo. The miners had been defeated, recalcitrant socialist council rebellions squashed, and the trendy New Left dominated progressive politics. Socialist Alternatives advocated a kind of deep entryism, what was called “entryism sui generis”: communist radicals would join mass parties like Labour and influence politics by embedding themselves in established institutions.

The kind of people that advocate such strategies are deeply political. They mix in closed, bizarre circles, and obsess over grand theories of history, political philosophy and strategies for power. Most of it is faintly ridiculous, fanciful, quixotic. But it does, at least, constitute a vision. If Starmer is still subscribing to Pabloism and entryism sui generis — as still postulated by Peter Hitchens — then it is the deepest, dullest form of covert political subterfuge in political history. In this reading, the Prime Minister isn’t hiding his real political radicalism under a more respectable veneer, but rather trying to convince the world he has no politics whatsoever.

The reality is far more disturbing. There’s no secret Marxism — there’s nothing. Starmer’s youthful idealism has been dumped. If it’s been replaced at all, it is by a cold desire for efficient administration and an instinctual aversion to bombast, radicalism, grand theories, narratives, gestures, or bold ideas. His dry, administrative approach to politics would suit the measured ordoliberalism of Germanic polities, with their traditions of consensus, Lutheranism and the Protestant work ethic. To be painfully measured is a virtue, in Starmer’s reading. The public disagrees. Britain is impatient, volatile, restless, tired of the politics of polite automatons. The party system is breaking apart.

And yet there’s one area of legislation that counts as an easy win for a cold utilitarian like Starmer. The passing of the Assisted Dying Bill portends the most significant change in social legislation since the Abortion Act. Starmer’s administration, like Harold Wilson’s, will likely fail in its attempts to re-make Britain or initiate a renaissance of our industrial base, no matter how many “relaunches” we get. A new economic model is difficult to build, particularly if you’re unwilling to challenge a status quo of broken middle managers. But the dawn of British assisted dying will be a morbid and lasting legacy that could define Starmer’s premiership, even as the country slides further in behind in economics and growth.

---