There is such a thing as Starmerism. In a speech on Thursday 13 March, the Prime Minister will lay out his understanding of government in a way we have not heard before.
It won’t satisfy critics who want a vision based on socialism or religious faith which uses high rhetoric and promises an eventual utopia. It won’t help much with the arguments ahead over welfare either.
But it should, once and for all, end the accusation that inside Keir Starmer there is politically “nothing there”; that he is a neutral, empty vessel for the machinations of others. His is a different kind of argument – and it is authentically Starmer.
He feels that his political thinking has been sharpened by international events. He has been appalled by the stodginess of European politics. Confronted by the obvious need to rearm and come together after the invasion of Ukraine, the slowest mover was dictating the pace of change. He has been struck by the jolt of energy caused by the arrival of Trump.
None of this changed his domestic priorities, set out in the “missions” and last summer’s election campaign – but it has changed how he thinks about the government he heads. Unlike the right, he champions an active state but, in the words of someone close to him, “What we have is the opposite of the active state – a state that is both oversized and underpowered.”
Decades of political leaders of all parties have shuffled off difficult or embarrassing decisions to an ever growing range of arm’s-length bodies, regulators and reviewers, sometimes with contradictory roles. This thicket of quasi-autonomous bodies disempowered the state and contributed to rising public distrust in it.
The Downing Street view is that the gap between public and political class has got ever wider, with voters feeling that elected leaders have lost political control over crime, education and much else, and that this is about state failure.
Meanwhile, cabinet minister after cabinet minister has complained about the effectiveness of their departments. So No 10 has been working on “punching through from the centre” – described as a complete overhaul and reform of the British state.
Energised by international events, Starmer now wants to accelerate this process. Government must do less, better. There will be a butchery of regulatory bodies, and every department will be asked what it would like to get rid of. Under the Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden, there has been a deep look at civil service effectiveness and numbers. Good performers will be promoted and better paid. Others? Well…
At this point a hefty dose of scepticism is appropriate. Leaders of right and left have said similar things throughout the past century, while government has grown ever bigger and slower to respond. This week’s new Planning and Infrastructure Bill, read carefully, actually increases regulatory safeguards.
And Starmer, the former public prosecutor, is not ready to confront the problem of judicial review, which makes it harder for ministers to take decisions and has had a chilling effect across Whitehall. He will get there, but not yet. He believes that he has the tenacity others have lacked; that when he gets his teeth into something he tends not to let go. We will see.
But meanwhile, his argument deserves a hearing. We live in a political culture which thinks of politics as fundamentally about visions and values whereas he sees it as about levers and pulleys – what people say vs how to build a more effective machine.
Toolmaking, his late father’s trade, is not simply a working-class job. It is a highly skilled and difficult art – turning out precisely crafted implements for the real, material world. Perhaps it isn’t so hard to see where the Prime Minister’s obsession with “what actually works” and his contempt for the easier answers of populism, comes from.
At any rate, here is Starmerism. And if, grinding remorselessly through Whitehall, it can yet produce a more effective state – a big “if” – it may turn out to be what demoralised, divided Britain needs.
[See more: Inside the Reform civil war]
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