The Ukraine crisis, almost everyone agrees, has been the making of Keir Starmer. Commentators liken him to 2008-era Gordon Brown or even Winston Churchill as they anoint him “the new leader of the free world”.
But inside No 10, strategists are more circumspect. Though they welcome the rise in Starmer’s approval ratings, they know that he will ultimately be judged on his domestic record (Brown and Churchill, remember, both lost post-crisis elections). “The public mood on national security, on defence spending, on Ukraine isn’t set – you’ve got to bring people with you,” one tells me.
Downing Street does, however, intend to use the political momentum that it suddenly enjoys. Starmer will seek to do so this week with a speech on state reform on Thursday. This will develop the themes set out in his 1,500-word letter to cabinet ministers last month – described by aides as distilling his “philosophy” – and discussed by Pat McFadden yesterday.
In too many areas, Starmer has concluded, the state isn’t working. Though it now accounts for 45 per cent of GDP, with over 515,000 civil servants – up from just 384,000 before the Brexit referendum – people have seen few improvements in their daily lives. “They don’t feel safe in their town centres, there’s not enough teachers in schools and the NHS isn’t hitting any of its targets,” says a No 10 source.
The reforms planned by Starmer are designed to break the status quo. They include performance-related pay for senior civil servants, an accelerated dismissal process for underperformers and greater digitalisation – with one in ten civil servants employed in a digital or data role within five years.
Though McFadden yesterday refused to set a headcount target, cuts are coming. Faced with this, some see a Trump-inspired plot to forge a British version of Elon Musk’s Doge (Department of Government Efficiency). And that’s perhaps unsurprising. Since the start of the year, ministers have dabbled in Trump-esque rhetoric. Rachel Reeves has argued that the UK can learn from the president’s “boosterism”, while Starmer has declared his intention to “build, baby, build”.
But state reform isn’t an American import – and not only because the sober McFadden is the antithesis of the maniacal Musk. “We aren’t taking a chainsaw to the state; we are giving it a new lease of life,” says one No 10 aide, referencing Musk’s recent appearance with the Argentine president, Javier Milei (who speaks of his “infinite” contempt for the state). “There are tons of excellent civil servants who are just as frustrated. We are giving them the tools they need – increasing their appetite for risk, their scope to be creative, their intolerance for mediocrity.”
A more illuminating comparison can be drawn with Dominic Cummings (who complained that “failure is normal” in Whitehall). Since their party entered office last summer, a striking number of Labour advisers have reached the same conclusion: that “Cummings was right”.
In his speech on state reform last December, McFadden recalled Cummings’ call for “weirdos and misfits” to join the civil service, emphasising that “we do want innovators, disruptors and original thinkers”. Starmer’s letter to the cabinet included the Cummings-esque declaration that “increasingly, politics is no longer built around a traditional left-right axis. It is instead being reimagined around a disruptor-disrupted axis. On public services, he complains, “our focus turned to making them better for the providers, rather than those who use them”.
But comparisons with Cummings can obscure as well as illuminate. While the Brexit strategist is perhaps best described as a “state capacity libertarian” – one who heralds Singapore’s fusion of deregulation and statism – Starmer’s vision remains more social democratic.
Though his letter to the cabinet has attracted most interest for its excoriation of state failure, other extracts – as yet unquoted – reflect a more balanced perspective. Starmer writes of how “the unquestioning establishment faith in the power of the market” and “the weakening of the state” left the UK more exposed to global shocks such as the 2008 crash, Covid-19 and the energy price spike. “We were cowed by the market – we came to act as if it always knew best and the state should sit it out,” he continues. “Our broken water system is an example of where this leads – it rips people off and fills their rivers with waste in return.”
Labour, after all, is expanding the state in numerous directions: renationalising the railways (and, perhaps, soon Thames Water), launching GB Energy, reviving industrial strategy, expanding workers’ rights.
To some, these anti-state and pro-state perspectives will appear contradictory – more proof of the simple incoherence of “Starmerism” (if you can call it that). But they can be reconciled: at heart, Starmer’s argument is that the centre left has the greatest interest in the state working well precisely because it believes in it. When voters lose faith in the capacity of government, it is the right that benefits – witness the fate of Starmer’s former allies Joe Biden and Olaf Scholz.
It isn’t enough, in other words, for social democrats to believe in a bigger or stronger state: they must also build a smarter one. Whether Starmer can achieve this will now be a defining test of his premiership.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Why Rachel Reeves has chosen cuts]
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