Starmer’s fatal flaw? He believes in nothing – and is proud of it

For the PM, it’s a virtue that there’s no such thing as ‘Starmerism’, which begs the question a year into his premiership: how can we believe a man with no beliefs will get anything done? Isabel Hardman takes a closer look at what he needs to do as his position becomes increasingly precarious

I came in for one simple reason: that I wanted to change the lives of working people for the better. And I don’t believe in anything else.” Last week, as Keir Starmer tried his best to celebrate a year in government, he fell once again to boasting that he didn’t believe in anything. For the prime minister, it is a virtue that there is no such thing as “Starmierism”, as it means he’s not weighed down by dogma. He went on to say that he didn’t believe in performative politics or rhetorical speeches, because it was the change that mattered.

Of course, it is the change that mattered, but Sir Keir is still talking as vaguely as the cover of his manifesto about “change” without being able to flesh it out. Last week’s events suggested that he doesn’t really know. The government had to gut a bill that it had claimed was about welfare reform, but which was dominated by Treasury-driven cuts to benefits.

He was launching an NHS plan which, while difficult to disagree with in its broad brush principles, felt rather as if it had been taken out of the bottom of a chest freezer in a dusty garage owned by New Labour and reheated.

The plan offered little detail on how the government plans to implement something that reformers have discussed for decades: redirecting the NHS towards a more balanced focus on preventive and community medicine, rather than its current emphasis on acute care. Neither the welfare “reforms” nor the NHS plan contained big, stunning new ideas that no one had thought of before.

Given that the problem for the NHS is not a lack of an idea but a repeated failure to implement it over many years and dozens of governments, you’d think the focus might have been precisely on how to make this new plan different. We are told that the blueprint for actually changing things will come in the NHS planning guidance, to be published earlier than usual this year, so that the health service can get on with the changes it needs.

Yet the plan was also severely undermined by the long timetable for social care reform. Some medium-term recommendations are expected to arrive next year, but full-scale reform and funding overhauls will not come until the next parliament, if Labour remains in power.

Those who’ve spent the past few years working in both Starmer’s shadow cabinet and the current cabinet table say that the two things that really drive him are making things work properly and the importance of family. He has long been a stickler for meetings starting on time (more of an achievement than you’d expect in Westminster) and would get very energised in opposition when he had the opportunity to point out something else that the Tories were doing badly.

Starmer still gets very excited when talking about things that the last government did badly, forgetting that he now has a chance to shape public services to his vision, as well as just not being as incompetent as he feels the last government was.

The problem is that even a more efficient state run by people who believe that actions are more important than speeches (hardly an original insight in itself) won’t deal with the ballooning benefits bill or the creaking NHS. Taken together, the spending needs of the welfare state and the health service are equivalent to a small country.

The NHS’s problem isn’t due to a lack of ideas – it’s the repeated failure to implement any over many years (PA)

They are co-dependent systems: NHS waiting lists keep people on sickness benefits for longer, while staying out of work contributes to poor mental health and higher demand for treatment. So the longer they go without reform, the deeper each arm of the state pulls the other.

Starmer understands this. But his handling of the benefit cuts makes it much harder to tackle the root causes. By allowing the Treasury to dictate cuts instead of proper (and initially costly) reform of benefits, and by pretending that the former was the latter, Starmer has made the case for real reform harder. As with the damage that Theresa May’s botched proposals for social care in 2017 did to any attempts to change that system, now Starmer has made benefits even more toxic.

Backbenchers will be so paranoid about changes that they won’t be prepared to give ministers the benefit of the doubt that they are introducing them for moral rather than fiscal reasons, and aware that if they just push the prime minister for long enough, he will cave. As he boasted, he doesn’t believe in anything, really, other than a nebulous concept, and so he’ll happily drop detailed plans if they become inconvenient.

Starmer’s handling of benefit cuts has made it even harder to fix the NHS (PA)

Not believing in anything means that Starmer has allowed the Treasury to dominate in policy-making. Labour MPs shouldn’t blame Rachel Reeves for trying to do her job: they should blame Starmer for letting her brief in keeping the markets calm by pleasing the Office for Budget Responsibility become the overriding mission of the government.

Whatever was going on personally for the chancellor on Wednesday when, already clearly emotional, she was set off by her boss’s very public failure to back her at prime minister’s questions, there was something very telling in her reported remark just before the session that “I’m just under so much pressure”.

It was more than just someone having the sort of bad day we all have from time to time, but a comment that underlined how much the chancellor is trying to carry this government – even though that is very much not her job.

Politics today is also overwhelming, and not just because of the pace of the news agenda or the way in which social media heaps opprobrium on a group of people largely trying to do the right thing. The scale of government is now vast, and yet it is still run out of a terraced house. Ministers are finding it increasingly hard to work out just how much the government should be involved in, let alone how they could possibly row back from areas where it has overreached.

The PM gives a speech on NHS wait times in January as part of his ‘Plan for Change’ (Getty)

We often compare this new Labour government with the post-war Clement Attlee administration, but the truth is that politics today is groaning in a way that those governments were not. It is increasingly hard for prime ministers and chancellors to stay across a state this big and complicated, and the machinery of government or politics isn’t able to help them.

That’s not to say that you can’t do better than Starmer. He can’t blame a sprawling state for the lack of belief that he seems to think is a virtue. He doesn’t realise that one can be full of belief and vision while still refusing to be chained by dogma. He seems to think that there is a binary between believing in change and just relying on fancy speeches and “performative politics”.

Even that phrase “performative politics” reveals a lot about what Starmer thinks of the business of getting things done. He doesn’t like politics and thinks it silly, as opposed to the important art of bringing your party with you to bring about the change you want and the country needs. However, more critical than any of that is that he doesn’t know what the change is that he wants, even after a year of being able to bring it about.