Starmer: the downfall

The Brown and Harman appointments are daring Labour MPs to pull him down

I sometimes feel that I have more faith in Keir Starmer than he ever had in himself. A lawyer-PM, elected at a time when legal overreach is immobilising politics - who better to cut down those legal weeds? A relative newcomer to politics, in No10 when the old ideologies are failing - who better to forge a new, evidenced-based path? What I started at The Times I found my columns often ending highlighting some opportunity or another facing Starmer. Specifically if he became the lawyer who reined in the lawyers; the progressive who fixed immigration. A PM who repaired the nation state model correcting errors of New Labour. And one whose march on parliament took massive intake of new Labour MPs ready to regenerate his party.

But who do we see as the new face of his post-May disaster regeneration? Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown as his new auxiliaries - perhaps shields. It’s hard to see the logic. He needs to be talking to his party, not his predecessors. The Labour MPs who just saw hundreds of activists put to the sword; they feel unloved and unled. And perhaps a bit regicidal. Angela Rayner is making insurrectional noise and they need to be reassured. Naming Brown and Harman, retreating into the past rather than face the future, is almost daring them to take him out. Showing a picture of Brown outside No10 is the political equivalent of showing an orange in The Godfather: a harbinger of death.

There is precedent. When Rishi Sunak exhumed David Cameron in Nov23, bringing him back as Foreign Secretary, it was a distress flare. Sunak had just given a conference speech about defining himself against a “30-year failed consensus” then invited back Cameron, who had been part of that consensus. It didn’t just undermine his message signalled a Tory party that was running out of talent after 13 years in power. Can Labour really have reached this stage not even two years after its landslide? Starmer has hundreds of MPs: are none of them promising?

And how sure are we that Gordon Brown is associated with success? He’s back as a ‘special envoy on global finance’, which is worrying. He ruled at a time when debt was the new gold; the age of leverage. His speciality is off-the-books debt: IFF and PFIs back then, war-bonds now. But Brown’s fiscal chicanery will be harder to pull off now the UK is on the verge of fiscal crisis. Brown’s undoubted passion for poverty reduction was tragically misdirected: his end-product was always chasing simplistic metrics in a way that created more problems than they solved. This blinded Labour to what could have been a full-spectrum view of poverty; an oversight that also afflicted the post-IDS Tories. This is the problem Pat McFadden now has to solve.

And now to Starmer’s next hire…

Harriet Harman, back as an adviser, was Equalities tsarina at a time when her definition of women included men and boys who identify as female (as JK Rowling has lost no time in pointing out). Brown and Harman are both 75 years old now. Younger than Donald Trump, to be sure, but both are creatures of their time. The debate has moved on; demographics pose new challenges. Westminster’s failure to recognise this, its gravitation pull back to the old comfort zones, creates the space for Reform. Brown and Harman suggest this gravity is in play.

I argue in my latest Times column that the Brexit dividing line reasserted itself in the local elections - mainly because the communities who felt undervalued and overlooked then feel doubly so now. I charted the relationship between the Brexit vote in the local authority area and Reform UK vote ten years later. Quite a correlation.

These voters have a broader political outlook. Starmer struggles to see it, and I’m not sure if Brown or Harman will be able to help him. The advice he really needs is from Shabana Mahmood, his Home Secretary. She understands that these voters want border control not for xenophobic reasons, but because immigration has led to a model that they believe stunts opportunities for them, their families and communities. As I say in my Times column

The Brexit vote was never just about the EU; it masked a cry for a better economic model. To dial back globalisation and move away from a new norm where employers will import workers rather than train locals. It was all really about the nation state: community cohesion, a sense of place. Labour’s problem is that the only button it knows how to press — more spending — doesn’t work. It boasts of free school breakfasts, lifting the two-child welfare cap. But such measures are nowhere near enough to change the trajectory of the places in open rebellion.

The irony is that Starmer has decent results. He’s trashing Brexit saying it led to more immigration - he should be saying that the Tories botched these border-control powers but Labour is now using them responsibly with striking results. Net immigration is now ~80pc below its Tory peak.

(By the way, I’ve separated this into a ‘type’ stacked area chart to show how much of the migration was always post-lockdown rush of students.)

Basic immigration is by now probably at a multi-year low. This is what Starmer should be talking about. Instead he’s in the Observer today with the opposite message: free movement for young people, etc. Ten tears of power for him. This is a Brown-era folly. If enacted free movement for the young would allow employers to keep importing workers rather than try harder (and pay more) to find local talent. Also, look at the asylum backlog, now at 64k. Shabana Mahmood is making serious progress.

I’m no Starmer fan but there is a success story here: of achievement in the first two years, as a promissory note for what can happen in the next two. Redefining progressive government for the late 2020s. But instead he’s exhuming figures from the past - and not terribly successful ones at that. By all means take advice from them. But to present them as post-election reset figures may tip his party into meltdown, standing against him with no proper plan - the same despair that Tories fell into after Boris Johnson with calamitous results.

Britain as a country cannot afford more leadership madness. Our finances are on the brink; our gilt yield - the interest we have to pay on our debt - are now the highest in the G7. We’re in a far more delicate position than we were during the Liz Truss madness.

A highly-indebted country that spits out Prime Ministers every couple of years will start to look like a basket case - and there is, now, a big price to pay for that. I’m no Labour supporter. But the biggest asset they had at the last election was to pose as the party of stability vs ‘Tory chaos’. Now they’re all set to torch that claim. It’s like the final scene in The Wicker Man - but they can’t see it’s the Labour party, not Keir Starmer, trapped in the effigy. If they come for him in this inchoate way, they’ll be singing at their own funeral.

If UK finances were secure and Labour had a brilliant alternative ready to go then they could - at a stretch - afford to engage in the Tory regicide game. What they’re talking about doing now isn’t renewal; it’s meltdown.

Most governments end up unable to see what they’re doing wrong. It would be tragic if Starmer’s government collapses from an inability to see what he’s doing right.