I thought Labour would fix everything. I was wrong

Britain has become ungovernable

Illustration by Lincoln Agnew

The postwar British political establishment is collapsing. The Conservatives threw themselves into a death spiral last year, though it had been a long time in the making. Now in government, Labour is heading in the same direction, corkscrewing downwards, touching 15 points in one recent poll and haemorrhaging votes in every direction.

We are in a unique position, with a fragmenting multi-party politics stuck awkwardly inside an electoral system built for two. The likelihood is that at the next election, almost whatever happens, we will be stuck with a government we didn’t expect.

The nation’s patience has snapped. So many failures have brought the end of a politics of management and, both to right and left, the emergence of a politics of outrage and disgust. You can detect it almost everywhere, from the once-Tory shires to the NHS.

This issue is my last as the New Statesman’s political editor before becoming editor-at-large to look backwards and peer ahead. What follows may be bleak. But there is always the possibility of redemption. Nothing is set in stone. And politics is a messily emotional vocation, trading on leadership, inspiration and guts.

When I arrived on these friendly pages, Boris Johnson was prime minister and his administration was falling apart. For me, it was personal. The Downing Street lockdown parties had coincided with the constrained, limited-numbers, outdoor funeral we held for my father. The partying felt like the perfect example of selfish Conservative Westminster, the same elite heedlessness that brought the terrible Brexit deal from which Britain still suffers.

Then came the implosion of the Johnson government and that spectacular cascade of resignations. This was journalistically exciting in the same way that standing a little too close to a tower block being demolished must be. Then, interesting Liz Truss. You know about that. Then Rishi in the rain.

But at this point I succumbed to that hard-to-forgive journalistic sin: the faint prickle of optimism. I felt it as much as a citizen as a hack. With Keir Starmer, there was a public-spirited, faintly puritanical, undeniably serious figure, surrounded by colleagues who spoke well about the need for reinvestment in British infrastructure, clearing away the barriers to growth and giving the shunned, dilapidated parts of the country a new start.

We knew it wouldn’t be easy. Almost everyone understood that the forward budgeting left by the Tories meant there were gaping holes ahead in departmental spending. It was clear that trade with the EU was a big, continuing problem for growth. We weren’t talking about tariffs. Joe Biden was still in the White House, but Vladimir Putin had launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine; energy costs were streaking upwards and the sky was darkening. The Rwanda scheme was binned but the border immigration problem couldn’t be ignored. Whatever this was, it wasn’t the benign outlook Tony Blair found in the late 1990s.

Still, with a big majority, it seemed that, perhaps at last, the “grown-ups” were in charge. After the clown show, there was, Labour people thought, a pent-up surge of overseas investment waiting to arrive in a refreshingly competent Britain. Standing outside Downing Street, Starmer promised “to restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives, and unite our country”.

But overseas shocks kept coming. Any prim air of Church Army virtue about the new government was stripped early on by scandals – Waheed Alli, spectacles, clobber, concert tickets. They were small but profoundly demoralising.

Above all, the Labour establishment had underestimated the deeper difficulties of so much it was facing. The intractable problem of ballooning welfare spending and worklessness; the sheer incompetence of much of the state; the pressures on housing and public services caused by the post-Brexit immigration wave.

It did not feel as if a new government meant a new start, not in daily life. “Nothing works” continued to echo everywhere: from train travellers, swimmers on dirty beaches, millennials struggling to get into decent housing, motorists stuck in urban gridlock and outraged shopkeepers whose stock had been looted by gangs with no fear of the police. Very quickly, managerialism seemed as disappointing as ever.

The new government was also doing much that was good, useful and urgent: investment in clean energy; breakfast clubs for poorer kids; the announcement on new towns; getting a decent deal from Donald Trump on tariffs; a fairer regime for workers in the gig economy; supporting Ukraine while agreeing higher defence spending.

Very little of this sticks in the mind of the voter. Why? In part because there seemed to be more announcement than action. What happened to the radical rewiring of the British state we were promised? Meanwhile, a combination of hyperactive social media and inherited problems pushed fear of “the migrant” as an all-weather, all-purpose explanation of British failure into the politics of outrage. The riots and the flags mattered far less than the quiet turning away from managerial politics that started shortly after the general election and has continued ever since.

For now – perhaps for the rest of our lifetimes – the two-party system lies in ruins. On the right, Reform, we must assume, will continue to reshape itself for power. Policy after policy is being reassessed, including the extreme deportation proposals. Reform is discussing the future with the commanding heights of the British establishment, from Whitehall to the BBC and the Bank of England. The recent jettisoning by Nigel Farage of £90bn of promised, incredible tax cuts was a significant moment.

Yes, it’s possible that we are living through a Reform bubble that will burst. There are many hurdles ahead for the new party, both in policy and personnel. But the belief in some Labour circles that, offered a choice between Starmer or Farage, the country will inevitably choose the former is grossly complacent. From once-Labour Wales to inner-city London, people who a few years ago would not have given Reform the time of day are privately reassessing, due to impatience and despair. Unless something substantial changes, we are heading for a Reform government.

Meanwhile, to Labour’s left, Zack Polanski’s Greens have, in one poll by Find Out Now, nudged slightly ahead of Labour. It showed Starmer’s Labour polling with a 15 per cent share, a fraction behind the Greens. For comparison, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn scored its lowest share at 23 per cent. The Greens are also piling on new members.

But in a multi-party contest, the problem for Labour may be slightly worse than it looks. As Starmer tries to rally the centre ground against Reform, Farage will surely use the Greens’ positions on lax border controls, drug legalisation and higher taxes to discredit the prospect of a post-election Labour-led coalition. This is akin to when the Tories once suggested the Scottish nationalists would pull Labour’s strings. In the end, the underpriced Liberal Democrats may yet prove big winners.

To all of this, from ministers and others, I get a repeated “calm down, dear” – things are moving so quickly and there’s more than three years before the next general election. All true, except that with every day and week that passes, it is obviously a little less true. We will get a foretaste next May when elections take place in Wales and Scotland – and where an SNP triumph would revive the argument on independence.

Starmer, I insist, is a decent man with strong public values who is doing his level best. But thus far, he has been a managerial leader, unable to catch the nation’s attention and unwilling to force through the drastic changes Britain now requires. These are days for eloquence, fire and argument.

But even if Starmer is removed, his successor would have to be a leader of extraordinary skill and charisma to turn things around. Such people don’t grow on trees. The exit of this prime minister would mean a jink to the left, for if current policies aren’t cutting through, there is politically nowhere else to go.

Only a month or two ago, that seemed to be an open door for Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband or Angela Rayner. Cabinet-level gossip remains hot. Is the new Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, for instance, comfortable with her grand berth? Or does she, like some others, suspect that the next sacrifice for the greater good will be Chancellor Rachel Reeves if the Budget misfires? In that case, Starmer could hardly sack her from the government without creating a future danger for himself: would not the grand offices of the Foreign Office be the obvious place for her? In which case, what would that mean for Cooper?

You may think all of this is silly and irrelevant to the real problems of the country, but I’m afraid it is how people think as the corrosive, authority-sapping impact of the polls works its way through government. In terms of what might happen next, the tilt by Wes Streeting towards the left is the most interesting indicator of all. Further strikes by doctors or nurses could sink him. But for somebody we are regularly told is not liked by the Labour family generally, the response to Streeting’s conference speech was magnificent.

Whoever were to succeed Starmer, a changed Labour government looking for a “bounce” in the polls would need a story that goes far beyond managerialism and the end of “noisy performance”. It would need to go out looking to win arguments about fairness for workers and between the generations, about Europe, welfare and crime in a relentless, confident way. Streeting, like Miliband, is a man who seems to like an argument. But, I say again, nothing is inevitable. And nothing is foretold.

It will be for my successor, the brilliant Ailbhe Rea, to bring you regular stories as that tale unfolds. Political journalism doesn’t need to be either bitterly critical or slavishly deferential to the party in power: there is a sweet spot between them, which is found in these pages.

As for me, I’ve been panting long enough on the hamster wheel of weekly parliamentary journalism. I will continue writing here on politics but also on the harder stories that disrupt our beliefs, from arguments about faith to ones about our fragility in the age of immature yet hugely powerful technologies – as well as about the glories of these times, particularly in culture, that do not, perhaps, please and awe us as much as they should.

For somebody who has been writing about British politics since the early 1980s, the past few years have been shocking and disconcerting. During the 20th century, and well into this one, the two great forces shaping British politics – Labour and Conservative – seemed as much part of the world’s rhythm as winter and spring. You picked a side. But economic failure and a lack of patriotic confidence is driving us into an unfamiliar season.

The Conservatives, underpinned by business, hereditary wealth, the military and the poor old Church of England, are being scattered to the winds. The party of organised labour has gone the same way as, well, organised labour. Yet the old arguments about economic vitality, fairness and cohesion will also be the new arguments. My greatest fear is that we come to feel, before too long, that these past wildly turbulent years were relatively calm and kindly ones.

[Further reading: Does Reform already have more members than Labour?]