Keir Starmer knows that restoring the faith of voters in the British political system will be key to the success, or otherwise, of his Labour government. “The fight for trust is the battle that defines our political era,” he said in his introduction to his first king’s speech.
He knows from experience that trust is only won through competent delivery. During the election campaign Starmer recounted a story from Frank Dobson, the previous Holborn and St Pancras MP, about another predecessor.
“She’s out canvassing in Camden and gets to the top of a block of flats in the lift and starts to have a conversation on the doors about the need to de-escalate conflict across the world,” he said.
“And this woman says: ‘Did you go up in the lift?’ My predecessor said yes. ‘Did you smell piss in the lift? So what you’re going to do about that?’ You can come and talk to me about the big change, but you do need to get on with the immediate first steps.”
The prime minister is also aware that trust is only restored by doing what you say you will, and that overpromising and underdelivering would cause more harm. So it should probably have come as no surprise that his first king’s speech contained no surprises.
Instead, Labour’s first legislative programme for a decade and a half was cast as “determined, patient work and serious solutions”, with Starmer making a virtue of predictability and reliability as he set out familiar yet, in some cases, radical reforms.
He told the Commons he would focus on “fixing the foundations” of the country, “taking the brakes off” Britain with bills on planning reform, devolution, transport, energy and employment rights, all to help boost economic growth.
One of first of the bills to be published – enshrining a duty to consult the Office for Budget Responsibility before making big tax and spending changes – also served a political purpose: a reminder of Liz Truss’s decision not to conduct an OBR forecast before her disastrous mini-budget.
But at the same time it underlined the extent to which it will be Rachel Reeves’ first budget, rather than this king’s speech, that determines the country’s direction in the short term. How much money is there to tackle some of the biggest challenges? Will she put up taxes to pay for them?
If options are limited, as is likely to be the case, Starmer has already indicated who Labour would blame. “Each day that passes my government is finding new and unexpected marks of their chaos, scars of the last 14 years where politics was put above the national interest, decline deep in the marrow of our institutions,” he said.
Yet some policies were notable by their absence, including votes at 16 and raising the retirement age of the House of Lords to 80. Downing Street said both were still on the cards, but that neither was a priority for the first year.
More worrying was the lack of any detailed plan for adult social care. Aides said there was no “quick legislative fix” that could be adopted, instead pointing to plans for a fair pay agreement which, they argued, would help address the sector’s workforce crisis.
Nor was there any mention of child poverty, or lifting the two-child benefit cap, despite constant pressure from Labour MPs over the issue. It was no coincidence that the government chose today to launch their child poverty taskforce to start developing a strategy on the issue.
Starmer has promised a different type of politics, moving on from the chaos and division of the last few years under the Conservatives. “The era of politics as performance and self-interest above service is over,” he told MPs.
“No more wedge issues, no more gimmicks, no more party political strategy masquerading as policy,” he added. But that is easier said than done, especially when wedge issues – VAT on private school fees, for example – can be quite a helpful dividing line.
As well as the radical reforms set out in the king’s speech in planning, energy and transport, there were numerous bills that No 10 hopes will make a material difference to people’s day-to-day lives, sometimes in quite significant ways.
These include pay-as-you-go ticketing on the railways, breakfast clubs for all primary schoolchildren, phasing out smoking, banning no fault evictions, cracking down on antisocial behaviour and bringing in the right to sick pay and flexible working from day one in a job.
They are all the type of measures that Starmer’s team hope, taken together, will tackle the erosion of faith in politics that is in part behind the rise of the populist right. His chief political strategist, Morgan McSweeney, cut his teeth campaigning against the far-right British National party in Barking, in part by tackling fly-tipping.
“The challenges we face require determined, patient work, and serious solutions rather than the temptation of the easy answer,” Starmer said. “The snake oil charm of populism may sound seductive, but it drives us into the dead end of further division and greater disappointment.”
