To grasp the real threat to Keir Starmer, ignore the chat about freebie specs or Sue Gray. Tune out the now shuttered party conference, with its secure zone of paid babblers. Listen instead to those in a group avowedly loyal to the new prime minister, because they can see the dangers in plain sight.
Labour Together gets called a Westminster thinktank, but that cap doesn’t quite fit. Rather than a policy shop, its expertise is polling and focus groups – the very tools relied upon by a previous boss, Morgan McSweeney, in his strategy to make Starmer Labour leader. Those same instruments are also at the heart of its latest investigation – called How Labour Won – into why and how the party just got into Downing Street.
You might imagine that a bunch of Starmeroids doing a debrief on their own historic landslide would simply puff out their chests and pat their own backs, but no. There’s the odd V-sign flicked in the direction of Jeremy Corbyn, inevitably, yet what’s most striking about their analysis is its tone of frank anxiety. Here is an organisation at the heart of the Starmer project, and it is already worried about how long it’s got left.
The election may have been won by Labour, note the authors, but it was primarily thrown away by the Tories through “their corruption and incompetence”. This goes way beyond gilt wallpaper and Downing Street parties. “Britain’s democracy is not delivering. A majority of voters for all parties have little faith in politicians’ desire to help ordinary people.”
Then comes the most telling line of all: “This Labour government has been cautiously hired, on a trial basis, liable to prompt dismissal if it deviates even slightly from its focus on voters’ priorities.”
So what are those priorities? Drawing on interviews with 10,000 voters, the report breaks them down by party allegiance. Staunch Labour supporters say their top concerns are the NHS, the need for change and the cost of living. Liberal Democrats choose the same three, and in the same order. Ditto for those who switched to Starmer after backing Boris Johnson in 2019. Whether red or yellow or faded blue, the agreement is striking.
For all the front pages and phone-ins, immigration comes way down the list for all voters apart from Tories and Faragists. Everyone else is going to judge this government by two things: whether they and their loved ones can see a doctor, and how far they’ll be protected from the rising cost of housing, food and fuel. What’s more, they want action fast: asked how long they will wait before there’s “a noticeable difference to the cost of living”, half of Britons give it till 2026.
Just two years. Forget “a decade of renewal”: Starmer is on borrowed time. Indeed, these findings make nonsense of many of the nostrums of conference week. The SW1 roadshow currently touring select provincial convention centres may demand Labour “get a grip” on the running of No 10, but voters may prefer ministers to get a grip on the markets that demand they pay so much for heating, eating and the roofs over their heads. Economists get excited about an accounting trick that could allow Rachel Reeves to build more infrastructure. A fund that gets crumbly concrete off our classrooms is a great idea, but it is no substitute for recruiting and paying the teachers to staff those classrooms – or indeed upping the universal credit and other benefits needed by parents of the kids.
Westminster analysts so often act as if politics is what politicians say and do, and then miss things like Brexit, or the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, or the return of the far right. Their excitement comes when the prime minister makes a speech in his new back garden, not when the watchdogs announce that the average annual heating bill will rise to more than £1,700. Meanwhile, voters in post-Brexit Britain look upon the great democratic paradox of prime ministers with bumper majorities, right and left, who protest they can’t deliver what they promised because of forces beyond their control. The Gullivers of SW1 play at being as helpless as us Lilliputians. Much more of this and the two-party system will collapse.
Starmer’s team can see some of this, which is why he talks about a “government of service” and the stage set in Liverpool blared “Change begins”. Yet it still places economic growth ahead of more money in pockets and public services.
As Labour Together and others point out, the public demand one thing: investment in their health service and in their households. Meanwhile, Downing Street offers something else. Its number one mission, as conference visitors were reminded, is to secure the highest sustained GDP growth of all the G7 countries. This is economic nonsense: short of physically controlling the economies of the US, Japan and the rest, the UK can’t guarantee to grow more than them.
It also sounds like nonsense to voters. Survey after survey shows that more than half the public don’t understand the very term GDP. As one study from 2020 showed, Britons often get it confused with GBP or GDPR.
However many speeches chancellors make, most of the gains from economic growth do not end up in the pockets of most people. Of all the growth in take-home pay between 1999 and 2020, the top 10% of earners made off with 25%, while the bottom 10% got only 3%. These figures come from the Foundational Economy collective of researchers, and they bear out the old dictum: the rich get richer, the poor get sod all. It’s why in the Brexit referendum the heckle began, “That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours.”
Starmer and his ministers should heed the hecklers. As Brexit illustrated, in that gulf between the governed and the governors can grow all manner of dangerous politics – dangerous not just to a few careers, but to the entire Westminster system. The observant can already spot the resentments or conspiracy theories: about an out-of-touch political class living it up in free holiday homes, or about how immigrants get handouts while Britons are given a cold shoulder.
The public are demanding the redistribution of resources into their everyday lives – and they want it now. The government should stop talking about GDP and start to listen.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
