4 days ago
Starmer has failed at the first political hurdle
Next week marks the first anniversary of Labour's 2024 election victory. At the time, many commentators called it 'historic'. Even if Labour's winning vote – both in numbers and percentage – was one of the lowest in modern times, the party's parliamentary majority of 174 was indeed among the largest ever.
A year on, however, and it is difficult to point to a single achievement for future historians to compare with those of the Attlee, Wilson or Blair administrations. In fact, the conviction is hardening, even among Sir Keir Starmer's loyalists, that the party's first year in office has been wasted.
Even worse, the Prime Minister gives the impression of a man who has lost his way. His policies, strategy and tactics swing about wildly, almost from day to day.
Last month he talked tough on migration, setting his face against allowing Britain to become 'an island of strangers'. Yesterday, he confessed in an interview that had no idea that his most memorable phrase was an echo of the jeremiads of Enoch Powell: ' I deeply regret using it.'
It has been a similar story across the board: a prime minister who appeals to the public one minute and then protests that he did not mean a word of it. Or who claims to be unshakeable until the polls persuade him to ditch his policy and his comrades.
Notoriously, he changed sides on transgender and other culture war issues. This month alone, he has U-turned on grooming gangs, by conceding a national inquiry, and on winter fuel payments.
At first he backed Israel, but only until it became inconvenient to do so. On Iran, his position is so muddled that his own ministers are reduced to speechlessness. His tergiversations on foreign affairs have prompted the US and other allies to leave us in the dark at a crucial time.
But the most obvious case in point is welfare. If a Labour prime minister with a large majority cannot reform welfare, what is the point of him? Having initially promised to get a grip on the ballooning cost of disability and sickness benefits, Sir Keir backed what was trumpeted as a 'welfare reform', though in truth it was merely a modest package of cuts.
Even this feeble attempt to slow the rate of increase, however, was enough to provoke cries of betrayal from the massed ranks of the Parliamentary Labour Party. After over 120 backbenchers had threatened to rebel when the Bill returns to the Commons next Tuesday, the Prime Minister lost his nerve.
After days of disarray, with briefings flying in all directions, he finally caved in, watered down the Bill and mortgaged his own political future to the rebels.
The net effect of Sir Keir's concessions is to reduce the promised savings by some estimates by more than half, from about £5 billion by 2030 to perhaps just £2 billion. The balance will have to be found from higher taxes, more borrowing or both.
But these numbers are merely a fraction of the sums that Rachel Reeves will have to find in her next Budget, just a few months from now.
At the Nato summit, the Prime Minister was bounced into a pledge to raise defence spending at a faster rate than at any time since the Cold War. Yet at present, we are spending more on sickness and disability benefits (£65 billion) than on defence (£57 billion).
Next week the 10 Year Health Plan will put the focus back on the NHS, on which spending has risen rapidly without reducing waiting lists significantly. Despite (or because of) inflation-busting deals to end the strikes, doctors are still demanding huge pay rises.
Meanwhile the economy is crippled by the effects of another Starmer U-turn: the hike in employers' National Insurance contributions, breaking a solemn manifesto promise.
Together with the extension of inheritance tax to farmers, family businesses and pensions, this is blighting the prospect of serious growth. The middle classes are squeezed by the effects of fiscal drag, with seven million people now paying higher rate income tax, and by VAT on school fees.
Not only has this been a wasted year, but Labour's legacy threatens to turn Britain into a wasteland. It was Sir Keir Starmer's duty to tackle welfare, as only a man of the Left could. He has failed. The rest is silence.
