The counter-revolution is here. The logical outcome of the project by Keir Starmer and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, to smash the Labour left, was always going to be a different, unfamiliar kind of government. It has arrived. During the election campaign, and for the six months after it, the differences with familiar Labour were fudged. But with a looming economic crunch, dire polling and the rolling tide of Trumpian reaction, that fudge is over.
How do we know? From the government-distributed videos of shackled migrants being deported. From the increasingly hard-edged demands for civil-service cuts and from early, urgent savings on health benefits. From the Rachel Reeves-led pushback against the net-zero agenda, via Heathrow’s environs and the Rosebank oil and gas field.
We know from Downing Street’s distaste for the education department’s rollback of academy-school freedoms; from the pausing of plans to make it easier to change gender legally; from Keir Starmer’s berating of “progressive liberals” and globalisers at the recent cabinet away day, and from the growing influence of the Blue Labour and Red Wall caucus groups on the Labour back benches.
Each one of these, taken individually, is an interesting news story. Taken together, they comprise a dramatic shift which raises big political questions about the future.
Given the influence of Reform UK – now leading Labour in some polls, and described by its leader, Nigel Farage, as “the last throw of the dice” against national decline – we could call this evidence of counter-revolution a Labour “Reformation”. Indeed, there is something steel-grey, purse-lipped and mildly puritanical about the mood in Downing Street which makes the pun appropriate. If you are searching for bubbling optimism, look somewhere else. This Reformation doesn’t want to buy a pint for Nigel; it wants to burn his local down.
However we name it, what we are seeing is unmistakable. This is a reactive programme aimed at white working-class voters who feel the world has been unfairly tilted against them. It is Labour populism. If you feel unsettled by this, consider soothing Hegel. The liberal and globalist thesis has met its anti-thesis in a reactionary turn, not just in the UK but across the world. The synthesis to follow is, perhaps, being forged in Westminster.
This is the critical moment in the long march led by Maurice Glasman, the socialist thinker and Blue Labour founder, and advocate for a more rooted, community-based, less metropolitan form of politics (he recently spoke to my colleague George Eaton). It is a turning point that must make Starmer pause. The Prime Minister is a child of progressive legalism and the north London left. He was never an empty vessel but is now taking his party in the direction the younger Starmer would have shrunk from. It is personal, too. Richard Hermer, his Attorney General and an old lawyer friend, is at the centre of the politically toxic Chagos Islands row. Ed Miliband, another political friend, looks increasingly isolated in his net-zero crusade.
Starmer achieved his first victory as a shape-shifter when Labour was in opposition and desperate for power. But today there is a liberal Labour establishment that thought it had achieved hegemony – the pro-migration, pro-diversity, pro-BBC friends of Starmer, who now look around and go “eek”. And they look at the polling and ask, “Keir, Keee-er, what’s it for?” That liberal contingent now feels profoundly unsettled by the party’s course. We must surely be close to ministerial resignations or a Commons rebellion.
Let’s take, instead, a step back. Starmer still has a huge majority and more than four years to play with. There is a reshuffle coming but both he and Reeves know that, though she has made some serious political mistakes, no Prime Minister can sack his Chancellor this early. He has largely purged his party of the left. He is also doing quite well in handling the unpredictable Trump, emphasising personal friendliness, avoiding confrontations. There is no single obvious alternative leader within Labour. The most active organisers on the back benches – the Blue Labour and Red Wall people – are essentially on Starmer’s side. So when we say, “It can’t go on like this,” the honest response is: but it probably will.
The other major, if unlikely, influence on Starmer’s Labour is Donald Trump. Trump uses trade to get noticed, and as the row over steel tariffs shows, it works. Starmer was prepared to openly disagree with him on his wild and offensive proposal to “take over” Gaza. But everywhere else, Trump’s thinking – on migration, gender, the size of government, national self-interest – is pulling British politics like a giant magnet. Even the language is mimicked – not “drill, baby, drill” but, in this neighbourhood, “build, baby, build”.
One ally of the Prime Minister’s reflects on the hugely distorting effect on British politics of Trump’s second term but concludes, “Keir will still be Prime Minister when Trump has gone.” That’s something very few in the British media are willing to hear. The right is taking revenge for what happened to Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and gleefully trying to make this pained-looking, conventional chap a diabolical hate figure. The left sees Starmer as a smarmy traitor and is consumed by gossip about a plot to complete the Blairite takeover under… (ta-da! – but no surprise, we knew he was behind that curtain all along) Wes Streeting.
Streeting is a fascinating politician, worth brooding over. He has a natural, irrepressible personal ambition that is frankly attractive. The best politicians have it. Most don’t. His East End memoir One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up is an inspiring read. He brims with urgency, which he explains by his cancer and the tiny margin by which he held on to his seat. Life is fragile. Time is short.
The Prime Minister has, so far, been unworried about his Health Secretary’s ambition. He doesn’t mind tall poppies, although as one colleague of Starmer’s puts it, “He has been fairly relaxed so far but that might change.” The threat everyone is thinking about is from Reform. In a recent speech, a shirt-sleeved Streeting explained how to beat the right-wing party (good), name-checking the rest of the cabinet as if he was doling out iced biscuits (less good). One biscuit recipient growled afterwards that it was all “a bit seigneurial”. Nor has taking impish potshots at Miliband and Angela Rayner won him new friends.
Democratic politics needs stars and Streeting is a star. But his biggest hurdle in reaching the top job in British politics is lack of support across the wider party. To progress in a leadership ballot, the candidate needs not just 5 per cent of constituency parties but also the backing of a couple of the main trade unions. Right now, Rayner would probably get a clean sweep of the five biggest ones.
He knows it. She knows it. Everybody knows it. A fellow minister says: “I can only see one route to [Streeting] becoming leader, which is a crisis so big the parliamentary party decide on a single candidate.” Which, in turn, suggests the kind of political car crash the party doesn’t want even to consider.
You might think that speculation about Streeting is a distraction, but his story points to a bigger question: what does being a radical government, or to use the fashionable language, a government of “disruptors”, actually mean? For Streeting, it means uncomfortable public-service reform to deliver for patients – taking on unions, attacking “woke”, demanding new ways of working. But for Bridget Phillipson at education, it is more about returning to the old Labour enthusiasm for comprehensive schooling and equal access to universities.
Phillipson’s Children’s Well-Being and Schools Bill is being debated in the Commons. One MP close to Downing Street tells me that “when the bill seemed essentially about breakfast for kids and registering children who are falling off the edge, everyone was all for that… But when did it become a rollback against Gove’s reforms, and indeed Blair’s reforms as well? Who was pushing that?”
The other key figure is, of course, Ed Miliband. He is regarded in Downing Street as authentic and passionate and they don’t want to lose him; yet when it conflicts with Reeves’ growth agenda, Miliband’s net-zero plan keeps losing out. He had to swallow her enthusiasm for a third runway at Heathrow. He may soon have to swallow approving the Rosebank North Sea oil field, and the jobs that would bring Scotland. Asked about it, one Scottish Labour MP replies: “My view? Up the workers!” But how many times can Miliband swallow it before he thinks: that’s one slice of humble pie too many? A colleague considers that “he is more likely to resign than be sacked”.
And yet there is growing talk of a substantial reshuffle. In it, many of the more junior ministers who were appointed, in effect, by the ousted chief of staff Sue Gray, are thought to be vulnerable; while those closer to McSweeney, such as Torsten Bell and Josh Simons may be promoted further. Reformation.
The big question is whether the counter-revolution demands a different kind of cabinet – what one of those involved calls, in reference to Margaret Thatcher’s purging of the “wets”, “our 1981 reshuffle moment”.
That, clearly, would bring dangers of its own. Sending prominent figures to the back benches risks creating a rebel leader-in-waiting. But, then again, who? Miliband is instinctively loyal. Louise Haigh, the former transport minister, though deeply hurt by her treatment, has been quiet. Rayner, as Deputy Prime Minister, looks simultaneously too safely in place and too dangerous to handle roughly.
And back-bench MPs, though worried and critical about the leadership, are more focused on the potential loss of their seats to Reform, and therefore still likelier to side with the counter-revolution. Still informal, still small, the Blue Labour group led by MPs Dan Carden, Jonathan Hinder and Jonathan Brash are spreading thinking that is approved by No 10, and are advising Downing Street.
We should be in no doubt about Starmer’s determination in giving the government a harder edge, however much anguish it might cause him personally. One early sign might come around the Chagos deal, in which the UK, having ceded sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius, will lease back Diego Garcia, the site of a US-UK airbase, for billions of pounds. Labour MPs say the arrangement makes no sense when they’re discussing the shortage of money with constituents.
Attorney General Hermer was instrumental in the deal. He may be an old friend of Starmer’s, but a colleague reminds me: “Keir is not somebody who is going to hang on to him just because of a previous relationship… If the politics require him to change the Attorney General, he will.” It isn’t just Chagos, either. Yvette Cooper’s Home Office is finding Hermer increasingly difficult in its struggle against illegal migration. Other ministers can see a gap opening between his cautious belief in closing off the government’s vulnerability to judicial review and Starmer’s increasing willingness to take legal risks to get what he wants.
What No 10 must be careful about, throughout this, is proportion: when does a shrewd reading of the political wind become a craven attempt to mimic politics loathed by millions of your own supporters? Can Starmer, while fending off Reform, protect basic principles about foreign aid, fair regulation, climate change? As ever, Bob Dylan has warning words: “A change in the weather is known to be extreme/But what’s the sense of changing horses in midstream?”
The dramatic “Reformation” of Labour does not alter the fundamental problem of an economy that is not growing, at a time when public services are failing. But make no mistake. This is a major shift in our politics, a response to Trump, a pivot against Reform. Like it or not, an unfamiliar synthesis is moving swiftly into focus.
[See more: The battle for Labour’s soul]
Listen to the New Statesman podcast
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 12 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Reformation