At a Conservative Party policy meeting, Margaret Thatcher once thumped a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty on the table and declared: “This is what we believe!”
Keir Starmer has routinely performed the opposite of this act. “There is no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be!” he insisted in 2020. Four years later, in his first speech as prime minister, he vowed to lead a government “unburdened by doctrine”.
The absence of this has become one of the defining critiques of his premiership. Last night, at an event hosted by the Future Governance Forum, a think-tank with close links to No 10, Phil Tinline, the author of the new Power Failure report, challenged “the idea that stability and ideology are opposites… if you know the basic direction of travel then investment is more likely to come in behind that and civil servants don’t need to wait for a precise steer”.
He cited the example of Thatcher’s trade union reforms in the 1980s: “The ministers would go off and come up with ways that they could take more power off the trade unions and come in and volunteer them and she would approve them. I wouldn’t know what to do in that context in the current government”.
There are consistent threads that can be identified: perhaps the most notable is greater state intervention with the aim of raising productivity and boosting living standards. Hence the Employment Rights Bill, higher taxes on business and the large increase in the minimum wage (Labour MPs, adopting the language of the free-market right, have referred to this as “shock therapy”). But these acts – you could add rail renationalisation and the creation of GB Energy – have not been cohered into a doctrine that runs through the government as Thatcherism did.
This, combined with the government’s unpopularity, is why the search for one has intensified. In this week’s New Statesman, Paul Ovenden, the former No 10 head of political strategy, calls for an Anglo-Gaullist politics defined by sovereignty: “the dream of a country that builds back its resilience and self-reliance”.
Then there is Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism”, a Benn-esque combination of economic and constitutional radicalism: public ownership, new wealth taxes, greater devolution and electoral reform. Ed Miliband, the chief cabinet representative of the soft left – and spoken of as a potential leadership candidate or chancellor – has privately urged Starmer to root his focus on living standards in a sharper critique of inequality and trickle-down economics. Wes Streeting, meanwhile, is championing a fusion of social democracy and liberalism that he believes could unite progressives against Reform. Shabana Mahmood offers a communitarian politics shaped by place and faith and guided by the contributory principle.
At the close of last night’s event, Ovenden, who appeared on the panel alongside Tinline, reflected that the long war against Corbynism and the Conservatives had the effect of suppressing Labour’s intellectual tensions. “Lots of the differences between very good people, some of whom are sat around the cabinet now, who have fundamental ideological differences, were never ironed out in opposition”. The test of Labour’s next leadership contest – whenever it may come – will be whether they are.
[Further reading: How a single call sealed Andy Burnham’s fate]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment