A YEAR ago tomorrow, Sir Keir Starmer stood in Downing Street to address the nation, having accepted the King’s invitation to form a new government. Labour’s landslide majority, albeit won with only 34 per cent of the national vote, gave the new Prime Minister confidence and a sense of purpose. “Our country has voted decisively for change, for national renewal, and a return of politics to public service,” he said. The Government would serve everyone, whether or not — indeed, especially if not — they had not voted Labour. “Politics can be a force for good — we will show that. And that is how we will govern: country first, party second.”
This newspaper was impressed, suggesting that the Church of England look to the new Government for inspiration: “not its majority, but its rhetoric about putting nation before party” (Leader comment, 12 July 2024). There was much for churchpeople to get behind: the speech used the word “serve” or “service” 11 times; it spoke of “the mission of national renewal”; it spoke compellingly of rebuilding trust.
Twelve months on, however, another phrase from the speech stands out: “You have a government unburdened by doctrine.” It was, perhaps, a subtle nod to the new PM’s professed atheism; or, at least, a sense that he would be governed by pragmatism, not ideology.
Yet, Sir Anthony Seldon, who last year described Sir Keir as “the best-qualified incomer for a long time” into No. 10 (Comment, 22 March 2024), is damning about the start that Sir Keir has made. “No Labour Prime Minister, certainly not since 1945, has begun so badly,” he told the BBC’s Newsnight last Friday. A fundamental problem, he said, was the lack of “a clear vision . . . a story about where he is taking the Labour Government and the country”. Had he laid out a clearer vision, unpopular policies such as welfare cuts might be more comprehensible; instead, “there have been so many flip-flops.”
This raises the question how Sir Keir can tell a story, or lay out a clear strategy, if he has no doctrine: that is, a set of beliefs to guide his actions and inform policies. Tony Blair’s was “Education, education, education”; Gordon Brown had “Prudence with a purpose”; Margaret Thatcher had “There is no such thing as society” and monetarism. Whether the public agreed with them, they at least had a sense of the core beliefs that drove their political leaders.
After Sir Keir insisted that the Government’s welfare reforms were a moral, as well as economic, necessity, the Government conceded to rebels on Tuesday and abandoned proposed changes to personal independence payments and other parts of the Welfare Bill. Such concessions are to be welcomed; but it leaves a sense that, without a clearly articulated set of beliefs of his own, Sir Keir’s pragmatism is in danger of being, in St Paul’s words, “tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine”.
