What makes Keir Starmer’s government different from its predecessors? In opposition the Prime Minister’s answer to this question was that it would be mission-driven. This new approach, inspired by the economist Mariana Mazzucato, would end the “sticking-plaster politics” that had afflicted Britain over the previous decade. Ambitions such as achieving the highest sustained growth in the G7 and delivering clean power by 2030 would be pursued regardless of the obstacles that had thwarted past administrations.
But in office it didn’t take long before the missions were marginalised, supplanted by more short-term “milestones”. “That prioritisation is, of course, important,” Peter Hyman, the former Starmer adviser who championed mission-driven government, has written, “but it seems to have come at the expense of an ambitious, long-term agenda that missions represent.”
Yet both approaches prompted an obvious question: what is Starmer’s real mission? Voters, ministers, civil servants and businesses alike all crave direction. The government’s preferred answer has been economic growth. Ministers such as Torsten Bell maintain that this remains the case, hailing an agenda defined by raising “catastrophically low” public and private investment.
But politically, Starmer has rarely convinced as a single-minded champion of growth. Rather than seeking to unleash animal spirits, his government began by warning that things “would get worse” before they got better. Critics on the left and right can cite numerous examples where another policy – maintaining Brexit, raising taxes on business, cutting immigration – has trumped the aim of boosting GDP.
Partly for this reason, Starmer has tried on numerous other suits. At times he has framed himself as “the security Prime Minister” in a new era of geopolitical turmoil, raising defence spending to 2.6 per cent of GDP while cutting foreign aid from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent. Regardless of your view of the policy choice this was one of the stronger moments of Starmer’s premiership because it represented what has too often been lacking: clear prioritisation.
But what has happened since? Despite pledging that core defence spending will rise to 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035, no reference was made to this target in the Budget, dismaying armed forces leaders (some in the cabinet favoured a defence tax to help fund this ambition). “When I hear senior political leaders, heads of state and government, commit to spend 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035, I want to see it programmed,” one senior military commander told a defence conference this week. “If we do commit, let’s bloody commit.”
More recently, following the abolition of the two-child benefit cap, Starmer has described reducing child poverty as his “moral mission” and “a focus on young people” as his political priority. You might, then, reasonably wonder why we didn’t hear more about both during the government’s first year in office.
A Budget that froze student loan repayment thresholds and cut the cash ISA limit sat oddly with a focus on young people, while on child poverty the government stands accused by MPs and charities of a paucity of ambition. True, more children are forecast to be lifted out of poverty (450,000) than in any other parliament, but that will still leave four million below the threshold. Where is the equivalent of the last Labour government’s pledge to halve child poverty by 2010 and abolish it by 2020? A “moral mission”, surely, necessitates such ambition.
The NHS is another cause that is sometimes identified as the government’s priority. But a solution to the social care crisis – which fuels exorbitant waiting lists – has been delayed until Louise Casey’s final report in 2028.
And this risks being the Starmer government’s epitaph. That it pursued numerous worthy goals – increasing economic growth, fixing the NHS, raising defence spending, reducing child poverty – without ever “bloody committing” to one.
The Prime Minister still has a narrow window of opportunity to change this. He could, as some cabinet cministers are urging, commit to a customs union with the EU, citing the imperative of raising economic growth. As well as signalling a clear policy choice, this would reaffirm a central part of Starmer’s political identity: his pro-Europeanism. But unless something changes, he risks being remembered for precisely the “sticking-plaster politics” he vowed to do away with.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: Your Party’s grassroots are losing patience]
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