To govern is to choose. Keir Starmer’s decision to raise defence spending and cut foreign aid was a politically defining one. It exemplified No 10’s willingness to demolish liberal-left shibboleths – on immigration and much else – as it adapts to a new era. Though Starmer announced the reduction in development spending from 0.5 per cent of GDP to 0.3 per cent with regret, this Downing Street knows that few voters will mourn it (64 per cent believe the UK spends too much on aid).
Starmer’s policy reflects contemporary factors: the darkening geopolitical landscape and Donald Trump’s second victory. But it has echoes in Labour history. Government aides recall Clement Attlee’s rearmament for the Korean War which prompted the introduction of NHS prescription charges (and the cabinet resignations of Harold Wilson and Aneurin Bevan).
Ernest Bevin, Attlee’s foreign secretary and the architect of Nato, has become something of a lodestar for Starmer and David Lammy. He was the pugnacious trade unionist who declared of the atomic bomb: “We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.”
There are parallels too with Denis Healey, who as defence secretary argued in 1969: “Once we cut defence expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders.” Healey was a titan of Labour’s “old right” – the pre-New Labour wing that triumphed over the hard left in the 1980s and whose figureheads have included Jim Callaghan, Tom Watson, Michael Dugher and John Spellar (a tribe centred around the West Midlands and Yorkshire).
Back in May 2015, during his deputy leadership campaign, Watson told me: “The expansionist aims of Vladimir Putin are a big threat to European stability. I think it’s inevitable that we will need a larger infantry and more naval capacity in years to come.” He also warned that free movement was “the biggest issue that undermines the authority and legitimacy of the European Union in the minds of voters”. A decade on, these contrarian old right positions have become the new common sense.
Starmer’s aversion to explicit ideology (“There is no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be”) has left commentators often struggling to locate his administration within Labour’s political universe. Some have seen the events of this week as further proof of the advance of Blue Labour, the group led by the peer Maurice Glasman (which I explored here), but there’s also an old-right flavour to this government. It is expanding workers’ rights, raising NHS spending and embracing hawkish stances on defence and immigration. This trajectory aligns it with the old right – which is both more economically interventionist and more socially conservative than New Labour (which often treated the unions as embarrassing relatives).
That’s the political space occupied by Rachel Reeves, whose workerist Budget resembled those of Callaghan and Healey and whose support for Heathrow expansion and the Rosebank oil field is cheered by the unions. It’s no accident that her political secretary is Matt Pound, one of the mainstays of Labour First, the old-right group, and a close ally of the No 10 chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney.
As MPs adjust to a changed political world, a succession of parliamentary groups have been launched, including the Labour Growth Group, the vanguard of the government’s war on Nimbyism, Blue Labour; chaired by the former Socialist Campaign Group member Dan Carden; and the Red Wall group, which has pushed for stronger policies on immigration.
To this list a fourth can be added: Labour First, which was founded in its current form in 1988, has established a parliamentary network led by MPs Luke Akehurst, another trusted McSweeney ally, and Gurinder Singh Josan, and Labour peers Spellar and Ruth Smeeth. “The left are still waiting in the wings to take advantage of any discord within the party,” it has warned, and to date more than 50 MPs have signed up. As well as hosting parliamentary meetings and debates, the group aims to shield MPs from the threat of deselection in advance of the next election. Reeves, Defence Secretary John Healey (who has addressed Labour First meetings) and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper are seen as key allies.
Don’t expect Labour First to seek headlines of the kind recently made by Blue Labour – it has always preferred to operate in the shadows and has no desire to act as a policy think tank. But the old right’s past and present help illuminate this government’s political character.
Starmer’s administration is populated by Blairites (or neo-Blairites): Pat McFadden, Wes Streeting, Peter Kyle, Liz Kendall, Jonathan Powell, Peter Mandelson and Liz Lloyd among them. But in a world transformed from that of 1997, it has charted a post-Blairite course.
Yet any expectation that Starmer would lead a liberal-left administration has been dispelled – he is tightening the borders, expanding Heathrow and cutting foreign aid – decisions that unsettle or enrage those progressives who thought the Prime Minister was one of them.
What to call a government that breaks with Blairism but that routinely disappoints the left? One in which the old right – playing a very long game – has won.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Where next for Blue Labour?]
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