The clue is in the name. The “mission-driven” government to which Keir Starmer is ostensibly committed is meant to be defined by its strategic objectives and the steps by which they will be achieved in his “decade of renewal”.
As an irritated parliamentary ally of the Prime Minister put it to me yesterday: “The whole row over the winter fuel allowance cut is completely explicable in terms of Keir’s missions.” Good to know, of course — with the minor caveat that nobody in government is publicly framing this message in such terms, or spelling out where these initially painful steps are leading.
The best that Starmer could do in his BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday was to compare the public spending cuts that he and Chancellor Rachel Reeves are planning to the necessary repairs to the foundations of a dilapidated house.
He had nothing to say about the prospective splendour of the restored house — which is to say, the country — or the radically improved living conditions towards which we, as citizens, should be looking forward. Indeed, when the PM insisted that “tough decisions are tough decisions”, I had Vietnam flashbacks to Theresa May’s “Brexit means Brexit”: the meaningless slogan as a supposed assertion of strength and intent.
What is missing is a road map from the grey days of political autumn to sunnier days of a restored nation
Presiding over a working Commons majority of 167, Starmer will comfortably win the parliamentary vote today on the winter fuel allowance cut. But the political outcome will be damaging to the Government’s credibility.
For the relatively small saving of £1.4 billion he is denying the benefit to all but the neediest pensioners — creating a cliff-edge for the elderly on modest incomes. Simultaneously, the Government is encouraging those who might be eligible to apply for pension credit, ensuring that they will indeed receive the winter fuel allowance.
This achieves the double whammy of being fiscally illogical (if more people become eligible for the allowance, the supposedly essential saving will be smaller) and dauntingly bureaucratic (the application for pension credit involves 243 questions).
Worse, the Government’s settlement of public sector pay deals has created the impression that Starmer is increasing the salaries of train drivers at the expense of freezing pensioners. Again, this reflects the PM’s spectacular inability to frame his government’s actions in an appealing way.
It is absolutely right that he and his Cabinet colleagues have acted to end the public sector industrial disputes — principally because we all depend upon public services and their employees deserve a decent wage. And this should be part of a greater story about where the country is heading in the years ahead, an optimistic narrative that emphasises the long-term gain that will, in principle, follow the short-term pain. But there is absolutely no sense of higher purpose to be detected in all this uninspiring work. The voters, promised “Change” on July 4, behold a series of unappealing trade-offs.
Realism is a fine quality in a political leader. Starmer is right to reject “the snake oil of the easy answer” beloved of the populist Right and to argue that “the answer to it is delivery in government”. What is conspicuously missing is a road map that makes sense of the sequence from the grey days of political autumn to the sunnier days of a restored nation.
Rhetoric may not be Starmer’s strongest suit. But there are times when his love of technocracy verges on priggishness: he issues a reminder that he ran the Crown Prosecution Service successfully (true) and then insinuates that governing the country is essentially a managerial task (not remotely true).
Precisely because they reject the gestural politics and gimmicks of the populist Right, serious progressives have to make clear at every stage what prospective benefits their measures will bring and how disciplined government will enhance the common good. That most ferrous of iron chancellors, Gordon Brown, always spoke of “prudence with a purpose”. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King Jr did not declare: “I have a series of tough decisions to announce.”
Little more than two months since he won a landslide majority, Starmer shows no sign of grasping the need to take the public with him.
At present, he can make mistakes with relative impunity. But the speed with which he brought Labour back from disaster in 2019 to office in 2024 shows that fortunes can change very rapidly indeed. This debacle should serve as a sharp warning of how precarious his mandate truly is.
