Leadership is the beginning and end of politics. Keir Starmer vowed yesterday that he would lead his party into the next election. But after last week, there is now no plausible alternative to a Labour leadership election.
In effect, the starting gun was fired on Tuesday evening with the breathless briefing to selected journalists, attacking Wes Streeting for being a good communicator, or something. Even by its own lights, that failed. To paraphrase Omar in The Wire: “You come at the contender, you best not miss.” Twice now, No 10 have struck at contenders and both Streeting and Andy Burnham are still candidates.
If there’s a silver lining in all this, it is that it surely dispels for all time the accusation that Downing Street have a communications problem. Their briefing dominated the news for the rest of the week. It buried the troubles of the BBC in the inside pages and was itself only blown out of the headlines by another story from “government sources”. This was a Treasury briefing to the effect that the Chancellor was about to U-turn on a U-turn that until recently had been briefed as being strictly, and unfortunately, necessary in the national interest.
Beginning to sound like a soap opera? That’s because it is.
It has been an open secret in Westminster since Labour Party conference that there are discussions about the future of Labour’s leader. The fire ignited by Andy Burnham has not been smothered. In the last week, what could reasonably have been called “Westminster Bubble tittle-tattle” has broken free of SW1. Now everyone knows.
The killer line this week was the assertion that Labour backbenchers should know they have to do what they are told because of the “bond markets”. Even as dedicated a Blairite as me thinks that outsourcing party management to the markets is a step too far!
To govern is to choose and those choices operate within real-world constraints like the challenge of debt management and that of productivity. But political leadership lies in the poetry of offering a transformative purpose within those constraints rather than binding yourself, your party and the country to prosaic, technocratic, process-driven government.
How has a Labour government which has a landslide majority and is only 16 months old got itself into the troubles that only normally afflict governments in their third term?
Firstly, it is an iron law of politics that when you are weak any action designed to show strength simply makes you weaker. No 10’s failed drive-by on Wes Streeting last Tuesday succeeded in showcasing his communications talents rather than boxing him in. The ease with which the Health Secretary shrugged off the attack with good-humoured references to Celebrity Traitors showed why he is a leading contender to replace Keir Starmer as Labour leader.
Secondly, to be honest, the answer has been hiding in plain sight since May last year when Keir Starmer unveiled the Labour Party’s campaign slogan – “Change”. This caught the mood of voters who overwhelmingly thought it was “time for a change”. But, despite a radical and policy-rich manifesto, the Labour government has failed to tell a story about the change it is bringing.
For all the language about missions, plans, first steps and next phases, there’s no narrative line linking the real policy successes. There’s no clear proposition about what Labour is changing the country from nor what it is changing the country to. In the absence of a compelling story, voters have focused on the actions of the government. In the jargon, the Labour government lacks a “political economy”, a throughline connecting its values, its actions and its aspirations.
Without anything else to go on, voters have judged Labour on its actions. First, making a priority of cutting pensioners’ incomes by taking the Winter Fuel Payment from nine million households, then trying – and luckily failing – to cut £5,000 a year from a million people with disabilities. Not the changes that anyone wants or expects from a Labour government.
Thirdly, Labour’s commitment to fiscal rules was necessary to reassure voters who are always worried that centre-left parties will be weak on the economy and reckless with spending. But those rules are meant to be the platform for change, not the ceiling. The lack of a compelling progressive argument has seen Labour’s leadership shelter behind a recycled Thatcher era argument – There Is No Alternative. No alternative to not raising income tax, VAT, and National Insurance; in consequence, no alternative to cutting social security; and, ultimately, no alternative to maintaining the two-child limit that relentlessly pushes children into poverty.
In the end, the PLP were unconvinced that hard choices should be made simply because they were hard. The pressure had to find a way though.
Foolishly, as Sky’s Sam Coates spotted recently, the Labour Party changed its leadership rules in 2024. Where once a challenge was only allowed in the run-up to party conference, a little-noticed amendment means that a challenge can happen at any time of the year. All a challenger needs is the backing of 80 other MPs – 20 per cent of the parliamentary Labour Party – and they can go straight to Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee who are obliged to call a leadership ballot. No slow build of letters to the chief whip like the Tories, just one and done.
However, if there is one lesson from the Tories, it is surely that changing your prime minister alone doesn’t change your electoral fate. Labour has lost its way, and the now necessary leadership election must be used carefully. The new leader needs to define a transformative political economy that meets the challenges of the moment, and articulate a vision of how the UK can prosper.
That’s a better way to build a new coalition of support for a progressive victory than to hang on and hope to be seen as the lesser of two evils in 2029.
[Further reading: Tracked: The Labour MPs criticising their own immigration policy]
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