Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
It’s become a commonplace to suggest — indeed I’ve written it myself — that Sir Keir Starmer’s problem is that he has no vision or ideology. It’s not quite true. Starmer does have an ideology and that ideology is convenientism.
It would be convenient, given that you need the votes of Labour-affiliated trade unions to pass changes to the Labour rule book and to expel Jeremy Corbyn, if conceding to them on policy could be reconciled with the government’s growth mission. So in comes the manifesto commitment to what is now the Employment Rights Act. It would be handy, given that the voters want public services to get better but their own tax rates to stay the same, if businesses and “the rich” could pay the bills. So in comes an increase in employers’ national insurance contributions and a “mansion tax”.
It would be useful if the hole in chancellor Rachel Reeves’ budget could be filled through savings on working-age welfare, and so, hey presto, a number is happily rustled up. And it would certainly be useful, given your chief of staff is keen on the appointment and you don’t like to be involved in this kind of thing, if Peter Mandelson’s empty assurances to you about the exact nature of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein weren’t a barrier to making him your ambassador to the US.
It’s a misreading to see Starmer’s ruthless ascent, in which he has discarded both principles and on occasion people (the latest, at the time of writing, being his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and Tim Allan, his fifth communications director since becoming party leader), as eased by a relaxed relationship with the truth. His real problem is wishful thinking and self-delusion. That is much harder to junk than a fondness for deceit.
During Starmer’s tenure as leader, whenever he has been given the choice between believing and sharing a convenient fiction or an unhelpful truth, the fiction has won out every time.
Convenientism has its uses in mathematics, but in politics it is a poor way to run a party, let alone a government, and the prime minister is now facing the consequences. The reason why his government has now entered its terminal phase is that, while in opposition, convenientism can be a winning strategy; in power, it never is.
Conceding to the trade unions on workers’ rights was a great move when it allowed the Labour leadership to micro-manage parliamentary selections like never before. Now, when it means adding to the pile of disincentives to hire, particularly at the bottom of the market, it is not working out so well. You cannot raise GDP per head or lower inflation simply because you have a majority on Labour’s ruling national executive committee.
Starmer’s outgoing chief of staff bears his own share of the blame too, of course: he was also an enthusiastic follower of convenientism. A curious feature of the past few days has been the number of McSweeney’s allies who are keen to talk up his influence over the government’s strategy and direction. Given that the government is polling at 19 per cent and its direction without change is “extinction”, one might wonder, with allies like this, who needs enemies? But it is, again, convenient for McSweeney’s circle to imagine a more successful government than the one they played a key role in, and so a hallucination is duly summoned up.
The bad news for Labour in general, and Starmer in particular, is that they are only just beginning to count the costs of a half-decade of wishful thinking. Optimistic assumptions about revenue-raising measures and efficiency savings in their budgets will begin to exert a political price. The full price of waving away concerns about Mandelson’s appointment and hoping it could be carried off without damaging the government is still not known and it may well wound Labour more broadly than just Starmer or Mandelson’s closest allies.
Starmer has written an awful lot of blank cheques, and his creditors are going to start sending round men with baseball bats and scary dogs pretty soon, electorally speaking. Given what an unattractive inheritance that is for any new prime minister, you can see why convenientism might, if not save Starmer, keep him in his post a little longer, for the simple reason that it is now convenient for his would-be replacements not to be in post when the bailiffs come knocking.
What Labour must now do, whether it is under a new-look Starmer or a new leader, is move away from believing things because they are helpful and start engaging with the world as it really is.
At the next election, they won’t be judged on whether what they say sounds plausible but on whether they have done enough in government to deserve a second go.