By Jonathan Freedland – The Guardian:
From free school meals to the NHS, he believes his record of helping ordinary people is clear. But voters don’t quite view it that way
He doesn’t look like the innovative type, but Keir Starmer is staging a radical experiment. He is testing out a theory of politics a matter of months after it was seemingly – and spectacularly – disproved and, in the process, hoping to pull off a turnaround that would constitute a comeback so stunning it would be closer to a resurrection.
The theory in question is that if you deliver practical improvements to the lives of voters, they will reward you at the ballot box. Its guiding principle is “show, don’t tell”, with the emphasis on results rather than talk, pragmatism rather than ideology. He’s not the first to try it: this was also the animating creed of Joe Biden’s presidency – and we know how that worked out.
So far the approach seems to be bearing similarly sour fruit in Britain. As Starmer marks one year since his landslide victory, Labour has suffered the biggest post-election drop in public approval since the Conservatives were tanked by Black Wednesday in 1992. The prime minister’s personal numbers are the lowest ever recorded for a PM 12 months in: his net approval stands at -54 points. At the equivalent moment in October 2023, Rishi Sunak scored -37. No one has ever come back up from such depths.
The PM appears unfazed by all this. It’s not that he insists he knows how to climb out of the current hole; rather, he refuses to accept he or his government are in a hole at all. He has a list of first-year achievements he is proud of and, besides, he believes he was written off once before, early in his spell as leader of the opposition – only to plough on, methodically reaching each of the milestones he had set himself and, finally, to win.
By way of an anniversary gift, let’s assess Starmer as he wants to be assessed. Let’s put aside the various missteps of the past year as “noises off”, or as the mere teething pains of a new government. Let us look past both the fiasco of this week’s near-defeat on welfare, staved off only by a series of panicked concessions and U-turns, and last summer’s baffling determination to strangle at birth any feelgood factor that may have greeted the ejection of a despised Tory government, filling the air instead with gloom and the promise that things would get worse before they got better. Let’s not dwell on the one act of these past 12 months that cut through most to voters: the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance from millions of pensioners.
Let us instead judge Labour on its own terms: delivery. On that list of Starmer’s, there’s a decent range of items, from the three trade deals that had eluded the Conservatives – with the US, EU and India – to a fall in NHS waiting lists, down to their lowest level in two years; from the expansion of free school meals provision to increased wages. The trouble is, none of those achievements goes anywhere close to repairing the damage Labour itself says was done over the past decade and a half.
Inside Downing Street, they still profess their shock at the state they found the country in. Whether it’s overcrowded prisons or a dysfunctional water industry, so much is “busted”. It is a herculean task to turn all that around, and especially to do it fast – all the more so when there is so little money to spend. Starmer might be calm about the fact that a great change hasn’t happened within a year, but it requires a Panglossian optimism to believe it will come even within five, in time for the next election.
In whichever direction you look, delivery is maddeningly hard. To take just one example, the government has won plaudits for its first moves on housing, including a target of an additional 1.5m homes in England by 2029. That means building 300,000 each year. But for the most recent 12-month period, the tally stood at just over 200,000. If everything goes right, Labour’s planning reforms should eventually boost housebuilding by 25% – but that still won’t be enough to reach its goal.
Still, let’s be like Starmer and hope his various plans work and the government really does deliver. The lesson of Biden is that even that won’t be enough. In fairness, Labour’s high command does get that point, acknowledging mere “lines on a graph” or stats won’t cut it. The improvement has to be felt in people’s lives.
And yet, that too may not be sufficient. Voters don’t usually go in for gratitude; they are as likely to credit themselves as the government for a material advance in their circumstances. What’s needed, and Team Starmer swear they understand this too, is a story, a narrative of where the country has been and where it could go next, that the public can follow.
Land on the right one, and it gives you the time and space this government has been denied. Margaret Thatcher’s self-proclaimed mission to wean Britain off a sclerotic state was compelling enough to make a virtue even of economic hardship: the bitterness of her medicine was deemed proof that it was working. With no equivalent story, every setback of Starmer’s is taken in isolation, evidence that the government doesn’t know what it’s doing. The PM offers no persuasive explanation of what is happening or why it may take a while. That wrecks a party’s relationship with the electorate, obviously, but also with its own MPs, as the increasingly restive and frustrated parliamentary Labour party attests.
Most Labour folk admit this narrative weakness is their achilles heel, and that it stems from a deficiency in the leader himself. A lawyer, a technocrat, a manager: whatever word they use to describe the prime minister, no one ever accuses him of being a storyteller.
The man who seems least worried by this narrative void is Starmer himself. The formative experience of his (short) political career was his early tenure as Labour leader, half a decade ago. Trailing far behind his then opponent, he read commentaries daily telling him that Boris Johnson was going to dominate British politics for the next 10 years and that his destiny was to replicate Neil Kinnock as a transitional figure, preparing the ground for someone else more capable of winning. Those prognosticators got him wrong then and, he believes, they have got him wrong now.
Besides, in his mind, the narrative of his government is obvious. How could anyone look at all he has done so far and not see that the common thread is an earnest effort to improve the lives of ordinary working men and women? To him, it’s so clear it scarcely needs to be spelled out.
Unfortunately, as the last US president discovered, everything needs to be spelled out, a hundred times a day, on every conceivable platform and very loudly. The days of quiet, patient, unflashy achievement, eventually recognised by a grateful electorate, are long gone, if they ever existed. Starmer and those around him need to adapt to that reality soon. If he fails, there is a grinning master of the new politics, who revels in the primacy of talk over action, of grievance over solution, who is currently 10 points ahead – and waiting to pounce.
