The state opening of parliament colourfully illustrates the distinction between politics as performance and politics as delivery. The monarch advertises the government’s agenda as if passing a law is sufficient to bring about change. In reality, legislation is just a first enabling step before the real work bringing tangible improvement to people’s lives can begin. That is something the Conservatives forgot in government. They too often used bills in the Commons as tools of campaign communication, sending ideological signals instead of focusing on competent administration.
Sir Keir Starmer promises the opposite approach. The content of Wednesday’s king’s speech mostly reflects a new seriousness about practical administration. The focus is on the role that the government can play in fostering conditions for greater prosperity.
That simple premise marks a stark divergence from recent political orthodoxy. Not since the 1970s has Britain had such an interventionist government. There will be bills for engineering national economic renewal, financing new infrastructure, setting ambitious targets for housebuilding, rewriting planning rules to thwart nimby objections, nationalising railways, establishing a publicly owned energy company to accelerate the transition to renewable power. Labour also aims to diffuse power, though a question remains over English council funding. The state will also be more vigorous in protecting workers’ rights and regulating utilities.
In opposition, Sir Keir’s ruthless management of the Labour party and the compromising paths taken in navigating towards power caused disquiet and frustration – not least in accommodating the last government’s restrictive fiscal framework. But the legislative agenda announced on Wednesday goes some way to repudiating rightwing ideology. The Conservative reflex to continually shrink the state is reversed. Labour’s programme interweaves economic stimulus and carbon reduction together in a way that the Tory party, as currently constituted, could never countenance. Sir Keir has committed Britain to a model of government that, while not spectacularly revolutionary, is radical in its departure from what has come before.
Underlying Labour’s election manifesto was the idea that voters have been made cynical by previous governments making grandiose pledges and then failing to deliver. Profound voter scepticism means that the new government has less time to start making a difference to people’s lives than the size of its parliamentary majority might otherwise seem to afford. Labour’s mandate is assembled in part from votes on loan to the party that happened to be best placed to unseat a despised Tory administration. Reserves of public goodwill are not deep.
Sir Keir alludes to that limitation in a preface attached to the text of the king’s speech. He draws a contrast between the requirement for “serious solutions” and the “temptation of the easy answer”. This is a plea for patience in recognition that government, when it aims to be about more than mere performance, is hard and takes time to show results. The prime minister also warns that the failure to deliver will play into the hands of populists peddling “snake-oil charm” that leads to division and disappointment. He is not wrong.
The stakes are high. The conditions of frustration that have fuelled far-right insurgencies in many other democracies are not absent in Britain. To neutralise that threat, the prime minister is betting on state intervention to engineer conditions that will not only ease the cost of living crisis but restore public faith in politics in the process. There is no way to judge the feasibility of that plan before the hard work of implementation has begun. But as a statement of intent to apply a new ethos of government, the scale of Labour’s ambition is beyond doubt.
