Starmer will soon find out that he can’t keep piously contrasting himself with the previous government while snatching benefits from pensioners, promoting party donors and paying off his pals in the trade unions, says William Atkinson
The most important number for Keir Starmer’s government isn’t 411 seats he won, the £22bn black hole that Rachel Reeves has ‘discovered’ in the public finances or the 10m pensioners who will no longer receive their winter fuel payment. It’s 33.7 per cent. That’s the share of the vote Labour were elected on – a record low figure for a majority government.
Despite the scale of his landslide, Starmer cannot count on Tony Blair levels of enthusiasm. He entered No 10 unpopular and has only become more so. After a brief post-election bounce, his approval ratings have fallen 27 points to minus 16. Labour’s honeymoon is already over.
Things can only get worse, as the Prime Minister acknowledged on Tuesday. To an audience of hacks and hand-selected members of the public, Starmer levelled with voters about his worse-than-expected inheritance from the Conservatives of “a societal black hole” and promised to “tackle it at the root”. His government is about “fixing the foundations” of Britain’s malaise.
In Starmer’s framing, the cowboys have been in. Standing in the No 10 garden “once used for lockdown parties”, the Prime Minister listed the litany of Tory failures that had bound his hands. Prisons unbuilt, the public finances abused, and the country “infected by a spiral of populism” that has become “stuck in the rut of the politics of performance”, a Tory telenovela that descended into panto.
Nobody doubts that Starmer has been left batting on a sticky wicket. Every Conservative should feel shame over our failure to provide sufficient prison spaces and the abuse of public trust that Partygate represented. Yet it wasn’t all bad. Our growth led the G7 in this year’s first six months. Inflation is down to 2.2 per cent. Persisting with depressing the electorate will eventually become self-defeating.
Labour will learn that blaming everything on the Tories will only take them so far. When Rachel Reeves removes winter fuel payments, angry retirees will blame her, not the Tories – especially when the money is used to pay off her party’s union comrades. Figures from More in Common show that 63 per cent of voters think Starmer’s government is only interested in helping their allies.
Piously contrasting himself to the previous government won’t work while Starmer finds himself embroiled in a row about cronyism. Passes and promotions seem to have been handed out as liberally by Labour as public sector pay rises.
The Prime Minister argues that putting Labour-linked figures into civil service jobs is part of his desire to “move at pace” and get “the best people into the best jobs”, especially if they’ve given him £16,200 for work clothes. As innocent as Starmer believes these appointments were, a sleaze row within two months bodes ill for his hope of cleaning up politics.
It fits the saloon bar narrative – politicians are all the same, out of touch and out for themselves – and feeds the alienation behind the ‘populism’ that Starmer laments. Voters look from Labour to the Tories and conclude that there is no change. With Labour having no real plan for reducing immigration – voters’ number one issue – except scrapping the Rwanda scheme, Nigel Farage must be licking his lips.
Starmer understands that Labour will only win re-election by making a meaningful difference to voters’ lives. He promises growth, but it seems unlikely to come from a government considering hiking tax on capital gains, fears building more homes in London and prioritises appeasing union members over listening to businesses. Borrowing money to set up a ‘wealth fund’ doesn’t, by itself, produce wealth.
As Labour finds itself battered by the polls, as every “tough decision” they take annoys another slice of the electorate, ministers might look back more in sorrow than in anger at that 33.7 per cent, and wonder how it all went so wrong, so quickly.
William Atkinson is assistant editor of Conservativehome