Thinking about Starmer's thinking
The Labour leader has proven both shrewd and lucky. But does he have the right brain to succeed in government?
It is now almost a given that Sir Keir Starmer will be the Prime Minister after the next election. The polls are coalescing, and the Tory rut is different from almost any electoral precedent – deeper and longer lasting than the usual decline of a governing party, especially ones that win it back. It would take a perplexing reversal of fortune to turn things around now. Starmer can practically start measuring up his furniture for Downing Street.
It still feels, however, like we know little of what our future PM intends. There is no real sense of what he stands for, what he holds close to his heart. The Tories try to paint him as a secret radical. Their attacks focus on his time supporting Corbyn and try to motivate the base by evoking images of an extreme and failing Labour government: profligate, weak, and woke. Within Labour, the opposite seems to be pressed. Starmer is the shrewd and cynical Tory-lite option who duped the left before betraying them. In truth, he’s hard to get a grasp on.
This isn’t helped by the cautious approach Labour is taking towards policy. While the platform is starting to be populated, details are scarce. Ideas are bounced around but not fleshed out. The party is trying not to scare the horses, hoping not to spill the chance of victory in the final run-in. Leftish friends find it frustrating, while those on the right are suspicious – the latter worrying that it means a radical turn in government, the former fretting that it won’t. All this perhaps shows his political shrewdness but disguises his values and his vision. Most of all what we’ve seen of Starmer raises questions of whether or not he can think in the right way to rise to the challenges he'll face in government.
Plenty of others have written about those issues. A new government will inherit serious challenges and is unlikely to enjoy a long honeymoon. The inflation crisis may have eased by the election, but its legacy will linger. Public services will still be suffering from under-investment and rising demand. The house crisis will still be there, as will the war in Ukraine and perhaps the conflict in Israel. Immigration will be unpopularly high, and the new government hemmed in by the same fiscal challenges as the current one.
Regardless of your party politics, you should hope he can rise to it. Speaking from the right, it would be preferable to have a right-wing government approaching these issues with right-wing solutions. But as a citizen and a patriot, one should want a Labour government to enjoy some success. While Starmer's rapid faltering might help the Tories shorten their exile, the good of the country comes before that – just as you’d hope Labour would regret the current crises that have opened the door to them turning around their electoral fortunes in one term. Nothing, however, from Starmer reassures me he is capable of that sort of thinking.
This isn’t to critique his intellect. It is easy and lazy to dismiss politicians you disagree with as “thick”. It is usually unfair. Starmer’s career and life show he is a smart and capable man. Yet there is little evidence of intellectual boldness on his part. He seems almost innately to shy away from big, bold plans. The broad impression of him is as a gradualist at heart, not just contented by but committed to incremental change.
Where he feels passion, it seems to be from small and individual cases. He is someone who abhors unfairness. That is to his credit. It rang out when he faced Johnson in the Commons, his disdain for rule-breaking and double standards almost palpable. You see similar flashes from him over things like the post office scandal. It also chimes with his background in human rights law. He wants to right wrongs and he wants to make things fair, but this largely shows his heart rather than his head.
Indeed, when it comes to policy, his thinking seems weak. One idea that seems most of all to come from him in the Labour milieu is around Lords’ reform. Again and again, proposals emanate from Labour circles. Yet not only does this seem like it should be a low priority, but the proposals themselves seem weak. Starmer and those around him see the status of the upper chamber as prima facie bad – but their thinking seems to go little further. Yet the proposals show little regard for the purpose, rather than the form, of a second chamber, or how it fits into the broader constitutional settlement.
This may seem minor, but it is indicative of a bigger worry about Starmer. His analysis of many issues feels lacking. There’s no sense that he looks at policy with a starting point of asking “What issue are we trying to solve for”, or how the proposed solution gets there and what the trade-offs are. It shows a paucity of strategy and real purpose, rooted in taking intellectual shortcuts. It’s a policy-generating mindset, rather than a problem-solving one.
This mindset is replicated elsewhere. Labour economic policy presently seems generated more by what will assuage public fears of their economic management than trying to achieve changes. On housing, they have promised some changes but failed to grapple with the scale and nature of the problems the planning system generates. The same seems true around public spending and the much-debated net zero policies of the party.
Some of this may be strategic ambiguity – neither wanting to have their policies spiked or stolen before the next election. Yet this seems to be a theme of Starmer’s trajectory. He has still failed to find a satisfactory answer to why he backed Corbyn in the 2019 General Election. If he so disagreed with the leader he was subsequently ready to strip him of the whip, what was his strategy back then? There is no sense of how he would have acted or what he would have been trying to achieve as a voice from within. What might he have done had PM Corbyn vacillated while paratroopers dropped into Kyiv? On the issue with the Rochdale candidate as well there is a lingering issue of why Starmer was slow to act and whether he did so because he thought Ali was wrong, or because he thought it was politically astute.
None of this may matter to the next election. It will, however, make a difference to the government which comes after it. Part of the predicament we are currently in is because of a series of governments which lacked rigour and embarked on policies unclear where they would end and indeed what they were trying to achieve. More of that would be not just a Labour failure, but a national one, and would do nothing to mitigate the bigger problems coming down the line from our sclerotic economy and ageing population.
Part of the success of the Blair government was grounded in the deep thinking he brought and encouraged. Even before he took on party leadership, his room with Gordon Brown was known for the intensity and depth of debate. Ideas were kicked around and opinions tested, laying the groundwork for their government operation. The current opposition frontbench lacks much evidence of the same approach. You can get somewhere on caring deeply and managing public opinion well. You can certainly get to Downing Street, but in a political world of increasing challenge, the ideas need to be there too.
Over the next six months or so, Starmer needs to address this. It's not just about putting flesh on the bones of policy proposals, but showing he has a team which thinks effectively about them. Coming into government many problems are already clear. Some will come from left field. You need to be adroit, focused, and strategic to deal with them well. So far it's hard to believe Starmer really has the approach for that.
"Yet there is little evidence of intellectual boldness on his part. He seems almost innately to shy away from big, bold plans. The broad impression of him is as a gradualist at heart, not just contented by but committed to incremental change."
A true conservative ought to see those as points in his favour.
He’s on record as being an admirer of Harold Wilson, and seems to be adopting a similar style (possibly tougher) in party management.
I think Labour have to be careful what they reveal before the election. The Tories will steal any good ideas, and the right wing papers will have them for breakfast with any policy mistakes.
Rachel Reeves should stop doing the hard fiscal yards for Jeremy Hunt (finding the billions at the back of the sofa) and say she will only detail their economic policy once the day of the election is announced.