Labour’s Biggest Problem Is Not a Lack of Leadership but a Lack of Ideas

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Keir Starmer is not a good Prime Minister. In the year and a half that he has been in Downing Street he has lost the trust of the public and his own party. A poor manager and an even poorer communicator, Starmer has proven to hold few of the political skills required to prosper in 21st century politics.

It is fair to say that many of his problems were not originally of his own making. For all the criticism of Starmer for endlessly blaming his predecessors, he did come into office with the worst inheritance of any Prime Minister in modern times. In every area from public services, to the public finances, it is hard to imagine a tougher set of circumstances for an incoming Government than that experienced by Starmer last year.

However, tough circumstances require tough leadership and so far the Prime Minister has shown himself incapable of delivering it. Indecisive and uncommunicative, Starmer has instead left Downing Street to be largely run by a group of competing aides operating out of their own fiefdoms, with little clear direction from above. The result has been a rapid turnover of senior staff and the sort of infighting that led to the botched briefings against Wes Streeting earlier this week.

Yet for all the talk of a potential challenge against Starmer in the coming months, the fact remains that the biggest problem facing this Labour Government is not just a lack of leadership, but a lack of ideas.

As today’s Budget U-turn on income tax today demonstrates, the real problem is not just that the Government is incapable of communicating its ideas from the top, but that it doesn’t really know what those ideas should be in the first place. 

Is this a Government willing to take unpopular decisions for the greater good, as they claim, or a chaotic administration flittering endlessly from one unpopular alternative policy to the next at the slightest bit of pushback, as recent events suggest? 

The fact that even they don’t appear to know the answer to this question tells you that the real problem with this Government is not just the lack of an effective communicator in No 10, but a lack of any clear ideas to communicate.

And while much has already been written about potential replacements for Starmer, it’s unclear that any of the available candidates have those ideas either.

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The Candidates

At the front of the pack to succeed Starmer is the Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Streeting’s chances have been boosted recently by a combination of his attempts to tack to the left and the recent bungled attacks on him by Starmer’s Downing Street aides. As this week has shown, whatever his flaws, Streeting is a better communicator and a more skillful politician than Starmer.

However, a Streeting leadership still remains a longshot for the obvious reason that his politics remain a long way from the politics of the average Labour member, even allowing for the recent exodus of left-wing members to the Greens. As disliked by many Labour members as he is liked by much of the British press, Streeting would struggle to win any contest to replace Starmer. Faced with a choice between the Health Secretary and a generic soft left rival, most Labour members would likely opt for the latter.

However, even if Streeting could somehow succeed in becoming Labour leader and Prime Minister, it remains unclear whether he has any real sense of what he would do differently to the current incumbent of Downing Street. Like David Cameron, who said he wanted to become Prime Minister “because I think I’d be good at it” Streeting has not shown any indication of having done the required legwork that Tony Blair did before entering No 10. Although a more interesting figure than some of his critics give him credit for, even fewer people really understand what ‘Streetingism’ would represent than they do understand what ‘Starmerism’ represents now.

Another name being put forward as a potential successor to Starmer is the new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. Yet Mahmood, who is apparently the preferred candidate of Starmer’s embattled chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, is the leading advocate in Government of the exact same Reform-mimicking anti-migrant strategy that helped get the Government into its current mess in the first place. 

Even today, as polls put Reform an average of 13 points ahead, Mahmood is announcing yet another batch of anti-migration measures, saying that the UK has been “excessively generous” to migrants. Why Starmer’s Government believes this latest migrant “clampdown” will be any more politically effective at countering Reform than the last dozen they tried, or the dozen previously tried by the Conservatives, is anyone’s guess. But it does not suggest that she has any clearer sense of what is required than Starmer has.

The other name frequently mentioned is Ed Miliband. In some ways Miliband is a more compelling prospect than any of the alternatives for the simple reason that we already have a very clear sense of what Milibandism represents. Unlike most other members of the Cabinet, he has proven himself to be an effective minister with a definite vision for what he is doing in the job. There is a reason why Miliband leads the polls of Labour members as the most effective member of the Government and it is not just that his politics most closely resemble the average Labour member.

Yet the fact remains that the main reason we have such a clear idea of what a Miliband premiership would look like is that he has already run once for the job and been rejected by the voting public as a result. Of course the circumstances in 2025 are very different from those in 2015 and it’s perfectly possible that Miliband would prove to be much more effective leading a Government than he ever was running the opposition, but it would be a massive risk for the Labour party to take.

For all these reasons I suspect that Miliband’s repeated assurances that he will never run for leader again are genuine. Whatever the potential merits of a Miliband premiership it is not one I believe we are likely to see.

Once you get beyond Miliband, the list of potential candidates gets rather thin. Angela Rayner, who was previously the frontrunner in any potential contest and does have a clear set of political ideas, has now effectively been ruled out due to the manner in which she left Government. While she may return as a potential candidate at some point, she is highly unlikely to make the cut this time. Similarly, while Andy Burnham has also set out some ideas about what he would do in Downing Street, the hurdles placed in the way of him returning to Westminster in advance of any likely leadership contest are so large and so plentiful that it is very unlikely he will be a contender this time around.

The Ideas

Of course it’s possible that there is some other brilliant candidate few people have ever thought of who could suddenly catapult themselves into contention to replace Starmer. However, whoever that person may be, the real problem facing the Labour party is not a lack of candidates, but a lack of ideas.

After 14 years in opposition the party really should have put themselves into a position where they had a clear and well-developed alternative agenda for the country. Instead what we got was a complacent general election campaign focusing entirely on the faults of the incumbents and a series of hostages to fortune on tax that have left the new government hobbled ever since. For all Starmer’s talk of having a plan for a “decade of national renewal” he has instead failed to even demonstrate such a plan for a mere year and a half. And while many of the problems he now faces are down to his own failings as a politician, the much more fundamental failure has been a refusal to hold onto one set of ideas for more than a week at a time.

Does Labour really want to relentlessly “go for growth” and reduce living costs, or do they instead want to restrict growth and increase inflation by raising barriers to immigration? Do they want to stand up to Reform and oppose political division on migration and race, or do they want to compete on the exact same ground? Do they want to restore Britain’s links with EU, or do they want to remain tied politically and economically to Trump’s America? Do they want to restore integrity in public life and end the chaos of the Conservatives or do they want to give contracts to cronies and engage in briefing wars with their own ministers?

The fact that they cannot credibly and decisively answer any of these questions tells you that the real problem for Labour is not just about who is in Downing Street, but what if anything they really stand for.

Until that changes, the question of which Labour politician happens to be No 10 at which particular time, will remain a largely hollow one