Has someone been slipping a magic potion into Sir Keir Starmer’s tea? Or has his mind been turned by too much fraternising with Donald Trump?
On Monday evening he delivered a remarkable speech to Labour MPs about welfare that would have been considered provocative if it had fallen from the lips of a Tory prime minister.
He told them that the benefits system is ‘unsustainable, indefensible and unfair’. There was no actual mention of scroungers but the clear message was that some people are taking the taxpayer for a ride.
The Government is reportedly proposing to abolish the highest level of incapacity benefit that offers claimants an extra £5,000 a year with no requirement to seek work. The plan is to save £5billion or £6billion annually.
All right, that’s not an enormous amount, given that working-age benefits (i.e. excluding pensions) amount to some £134billion a year. But it’s a start. If you had told me last July that after little more than six months in office Labour would be cutting the welfare bill, I wouldn’t have believed you.
And it’s not only when talking about welfare that Sir Keir increasingly sounds like a rather Right-wing Tory. On Tuesday he unleashed a war against quangos as part of the creation of a more ‘agile and active’ State – a theme he’ll develop in a speech today.
The PM announced only two weeks ago that defence spending will rise to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, which means an extra £6billion a year. It’s not a huge increase but it’s a move in the right direction, and there will be more to come.
Meanwhile, Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden has just announced that underperforming senior civil servants will be put out to grass. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has ordered NHS England to sack up to 7,000 NHS managers as part of his plan to shrink bureaucracy and divert resources to front-line care.
Sir Keir Starmer delivered a remarkable speech to Labour MPs about welfare on Monday, Stephen Glover writes
The Prime Minister will not venture into certain issues, allowing the likes of Cabinet members Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner free rein over their briefs
He has been strutting about the international stage with some conviction – including on the issue of Ukraine by showing support for president Volodymyr Zelensky
Is it possible that this Government is less hidebound than we had thought, as well as more decisive and more competent? Might Sir Keir – who has recently been strutting about the international stage with some conviction – not be the narrow-minded, politically inept North London Lefty we had assumed him to be?
While it is clear that something has changed, I think we should approach these questions with caution. After all, most of these announcements are just that. Announcements.
Nothing much has happened yet. No senior civil servants or NHS managers have been fired, and the proposed welfare reforms face vigorous opposition from trade unions and some backbench Labour MPs. The Tories plausibly argue that the Government has so far scrapped one quango and invented 27.
Nevertheless, we should give credit where credit is due, and acknowledge that at least Sir Keir’s language and some of his thinking are changing as he becomes more pragmatic and politically astute.
But the transformation is only partial. Sir Keir has a split personality. On the one hand, he is chummy with Trump, albeit in a way I find cringeworthy. He has come to see that the welfare budget is spiralling out of control and must be reduced, and he realises that the machinery of the State is bureaucratic, slow and inefficient.
That said, there are still many areas where he won’t venture, as he allows ideologues and zealots in the Cabinet to pursue policies that are bound to damage the economy and frustrate the growth on which he and the Chancellor have set their hearts and staked their futures.
Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband is permitted to spearhead the lunatic stampede towards net zero which will probably finish off what remains of the British car industry, besides laying waste great swathes of the countryside with solar farms and wind turbines.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is given free rein to wreak havoc with her reforms to workers’ rights. Before she recently added a few bells and whistles to her Bill to curry favour with the unions, the Government estimated the likely cost to businesses at £5billion. I daresay it’ll be much more.
You could say that there are two governments. One includes Starmer, Streeting, McFadden, Morgan McSweeney (the PM’s powerful chief of staff) and, for much of the time when she does not stray off piste, Rachel Reeves.
The other government comprises Rayner, Miliband, and Education Secretary and class-war warrior Bridget Phillipson. Plus, of course, activist lawyer and Attorney General Lord Hermer, whose overriding loyalty is to the strictures of human rights law rather than to Labour.
Starmer himself still has a foot in this alternative government – witness his continuing acquiescence in the madcap plan to give Mauritius the vast sum of £9billion for a lease over the Chagos islands (1,300 miles away) even though a previous Labour administration legally paid for them nearly 60 years ago.
Whether the Prime Minister will reveal himself as a pragmatist on this issue or on net zero or on workers’ rights may be doubted. The conversion of Sir Keir Starmer to a semblance of good sense is a work in progress, and no one can say how far it will go, still less whether it will ever be completed.
Nor do I think that Sir Keir has any solutions to a series of grave problems. He and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper haven’t the faintest prospect of stopping the boats crossing the Channel. There doesn’t seem much hope of the economy reviving. Failure on either front would be perilous, on both fatal.
But I do think that the PM is emerging as a more formidable figure than appeared likely only a couple of months ago, when he seemed unable to take a step forward without tripping over himself.
He also has this unlooked-for boon – that Reform, which has been drawing more support from Labour than from the Tories, appears to be committing political suicide. I doubt it will go the whole way, but Nigel Farage’s party may present less of an obstacle to Labour’s electoral chances than many pundits thought.
If I’m right, Labour won’t crash and disintegrate, as seemed only too likely a few months ago. It will at least plough on. This provokes two reflections.
One is that it is preferable for all of us to have a half competent government than a completely incompetent one. We should welcome even a partly reformed Sir Keir with relief. Of course it would be better to be ruled entirely by highly capable politicians, but that doesn’t seem to be a possibility.
My other thought is that it will be more challenging for the Tories and Reform to get rid of Starmer than they once thought. The prospect of Labour winning the next election no longer seems utterly incredible. Kemi Badenoch, or whoever succeeds her, has a fight on her hands. So does Nigel Farage.
Sir Keir Starmer used to be an almost solitary Left-wing leader. In an increasingly Right-wing world, he is partly moving to the Right, where he’s not going to be so easy to dislodge.
