Given the various crises and scandals besetting Keir Starmer, it is easy to forget that less than two years ago he led his party to one of its largest ever parliamentary majorities. It’s therefore extraordinary that Labour is already showing signs of retreating to its comfort zone. The Government is reportedly planning additional layers of bureaucracy for the public sector in the form of a “socio-economic duty” — in other words, a requirement to improve the representation of people from different class backgrounds. Such schemes always sound innocuous, even beneficial, but they are a huge drain of time, money and resources away from the core purposes of organisations, and have a clear tendency to undermine meritocratic recruitment and promotion.

It’s not hard to see why the Cabinet might want to offer some crowd-pleasing proposals for true believers in egalitarianism. Labour’s 33.7% vote share in the general election was far from impressive, and the party had lost half of that support by the end of 2025. Starmer is threatened on the Left by the rise of the Greens, and his own backbenchers have already forced a Government climbdown on welfare reform.

But given the scale of the challenges facing the country, both material and existential — poor growth, huge energy costs, stagnant productivity, deteriorating public services, mass immigration and faltering national cohesion — the introduction of yet more social engineering schemes looks a lot like Nero fiddling while Rome burns. The Prime Minister is acting like an undergraduate so overwhelmed by essay deadlines that he decides to tidy his desk instead, as a displacement exercise.

It’s also possible that increased state micromanagement of the public sector backfires by further alienating the people who will have to endure it. White-collar public sector workers are a solid part of what remains of the Labour coalition, and are ideologically sympathetic to Equality Act-type legislation, but even they may have their limits if their professional lives are going to be subject to ever more box-ticking and second-guessing. Talk to teachers or NHS staff or other civil servants and the subject of incessant paperwork and repetitive training sessions will never be far away, however theoretically sympathetic they may be to the underlying worldview of those practices.

With over three years to go until a general election is required, time is already running out for Starmer. That’s because structural economic reforms take a while to work through the system and become visible to voters. Despite all the country’s problems, it is still possible that by early 2029, Britain could have healthy growth, reduced energy costs, and a sense of prosperity and hope for the average voter. But that will not happen if our rulers waste their limited time and energy trying to sustain the dying embers of the dogmatically egalitarian post-1997 settlement.

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Niall Gooch is a public sector worker and occasional writer who lives in Kent.

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