Keir Starmer’s Labour Government Is Much Better Than the Media Admits

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The most striking aspect of Keir Starmer’s Government has been the disconnect between its actions on policy and it’s standing in the polls.

The Government has received far too little credit for much of these. Both its child poverty strategy, a centrepiece of which is the scrapping of the two-child cap on universal credit, and its national youth strategy, including young futures hubs, signify its willingness to tackle inter-generational fairness. The same applies to rolling out Best Start family centres. Even its means-testing of winter fuel allowance can be justified on the same basis, albeit with a qualifying threshold that was initially drawn far too tightly.

Major changes to employment law begin a redress of the imbalance between capital and labour so entrenched since the 1980s. Likewise, advances in renters’ rights rebalance landlord-tenant relations. These reforms are complemented by increases in taxation on capital gains, inheritance, high-value properties and non-domiciled status. They are all significant redistributive measures, whether of power or wealth. 

Similarly, changes to the formulae used for local government funding geared to relative need, providing latitude too on how resources are deployed, a harbinger of whole place strategies as opposed to funding silos. A new violence against women and girls’ strategy also placed gender vulnerabilities at the heart of public policy, in circumstances where domestic and online abuse has reached epidemic proportions. 

Then there was the Government’s industrial strategy designed to enhance the competitiveness, resilience and security of the UK economy, with associated sectoral plans. Complementary is its upgrading of public infrastructure, including transition towards low-carbon energy, with fiscal rules adjusted accordingly.

Admittedly, not all these policy initiatives will be game-changers. Rachel Reeves’ tax reforms have been piecemeal rather than systematic in aligning levies on different revenue streams. Stretched funding for the most deprived areas and extent of deep poverty remain scourges on the country’s conscience. Nonetheless, the directions of travel is clear. So, why the poor popularity ratings?

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Polls Apart

The first thing to acknowledge is that the Government faces a deeply hostile media. This hostility is arguably worse than ever given the character of those owning and controlling legacy media, combined with the algorithmic biases built into the main digital platforms that so readily accommodate far-right disinformation and imagery.

The Government’s dire inheritance of a lethal cocktail of taxes at relatively high levels for the post-1945 era; deteriorating public services; depleted civic assets; atrophying high streets; and cumulatively high levels of public borrowing leaving the UK economy seriously exposed in international markets, have also contributed.

However, such a defence inevitably wears thin with the passing of time.

Another explanation for the lack of popularity centres on its failures of political leadership in developing a compelling over-arching narrative for how its policy will change the country for the better. This has led to calls for an overhaul of the Government’s whole communication strategy.

However, much of Starmer’s time and energy as Prime Minister has had to be devoted, in co-ordination with other European and Commonwealth leaders, to managing the security threats posed not only by Vladimir Putin’s state terrorism, but also from a rogue President in the White House susceptible to Russian propaganda and impulsive actions on the global stage.

A Populist Revolt

Political parties, especially incumbent ones, have the additional headache of a collapse in predictable voting patterns, as the electorate becomes segmented, disillusioned with established institutions and more biddable for populist insurgents. The meteoric rise of Reform UK is attributed by the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate to a ‘coalition of pessimism’, formed among those who feel repeatedly let down by the political system and despairing of their future.

As for Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party, other than fiscal conservatism, there is little to differentiate it from Reform. Committed to reversing much of the Starmer Government’s legislative programme, under her leadership the inequality that has marred the policy landscape since the Thatcherite era would merely resume. Left-wing populism, central to Zack Polanksi’s makeover of the Green Party, in advocating eventual withdrawal from an already shaken NATO alliance raises yet another spectre, just when European security is at its most precarious since the Second World War.  

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Intellectual Tides

All of this is against the backdrop of an intellectual search to make sense of political upheavals since the Reagan-Thatcher era. There was the ‘end of history’ following the fall of the Berlin Wall, celebrating the final triumph of liberal democracy and free markets. Faith in neo-liberal ideology then shattered following the 2007-08 great financial crash. 

Calls for ‘reinvention’ of government going back to the early 1990s reverberate to this day with on-going laments about bureaucratic inertia and urgency of re-wiring a sclerotic state. A recent variation is that ‘abundance’ awaits us, solving recurring dilemmas for progressive movements, if only opportunities to remove barriers to growth and innovation are grasped. Such propositions are not a million miles from the mindset of Starmer’s own Government.

We also have the fashionable contention that identarian tribal attachments have displaced rational discourse as drivers of political behaviour. On this basis, Starmerism is practising a form of technocratic politics out of kilter with the affective communication styles required of contemporary political leadership.

The ‘end of history’ narrative encapsulated what Timothy Snyder called the ‘politics of inevitability’. In his terms, an even more sinister form of historical determinism is the ‘politics of eternity’, a beguiling notion that there are abiding values waiting to be redeemed by national saviours freed of all constitutional restraint.

That is the essence not only of Putinism but a transatlantic far-right ethno-nationalist movement extending to Farage’s Reform UK. Rather than trapped in a path-dependent manner in some inevitable future or mystical past is the contrary belief that destinies are shaped through the agency of political choices.

When all is said and done it’s not that complicated, however. As at many other times in our history, inequality is at the centre of all of this. The key to solving the Government’s problems is the same as the country’s problems. A political economy that works in the interests of everyone, not just for the benefit of a few super-rich oligarchs is the key to confounding the Reform pessimists.