One year of Keir Starmer

An era of inertia

During the run-up to the 2024 General Election, Keir Starmer was keen to define himself not by what he is, but by what he is not. Positioning himself as a largely contentless alternative to the operational dysfunction and ideological abandonment that had characterised the previous Conservative government. Picking up the mantle from an era of Corbynite radicalism, his pitch to the electorate was one based not on the merits of any particular platform, but on the objectively flawed nature of his opposition. Building a public image as a ‘sensible’, ‘moderate’ and ‘fundamentally decent’ person who should, at worst, be regarded as an unobjectionable placeholder to the task of keeping anyone else out of government.

Given the sheer size of the majority Starmer went on to achieve one year ago today, it is impossible to say that this as an election strategy wasn’t effective. Yet, the flaws of having no clear agenda vindicated by the electorate were revealed almost immediately upon taking office. The opening policy salvos — the abolition of the winter fuel allowance for most pensioners, increasing employer national insurance contributions — were intended to convey an image of a government willing to confront dire fiscal realities, which they (not entirely unreasonably) went to great efforts to blame the Tories for. This was the government that perhaps voters needed, rather than necessarily wanted: implementing unpopular policies intended to restore market confidence in the state’s ability to control spending.

Instead, both policies were simply interpreted by the public and Labour backbenchers as a fundamental breach of trust from a party that had promised stability and moderation, generating vast internal and external opposition. Meanwhile, the policies failed to deliver confidence in the markets, as investors judged the government’s tax and spending targets to be unrealistic. Since the budget, even against a backdrop of globally unfavourable bond markets, UK gilts have performed noticeably poorly compared to their European and global peers. Needless to say, the rolling back of these fiscal measures did little to reassure in an investor environment that appears to have already judged Labour to be no more economically literate than their predecessors. Whether it be across economic, defence, migration, or industrial strategy, government policy can increasingly only be uniformly characterised by indecision and inaction. ‘Starmer the competent operator’ is swiftly becoming ‘Starmer the directionless bureaucrat’. In a nation where the electorate is increasingly restless with the status quo, a head of government with personal tendencies of risk aversion and respecting systemic prudence is not one likely to repeat his previous electoral success.

All of this is not to say that Starmer’s government holds no preference or objectives at all, yet as months give way to years in power, any notion of radical change appears to have been ruled out already. Whilst the Chancellor has repeatedly disregarded advice she will be forced to raise personal taxes in order to pay for the government’s spending commitments, the calculations on which her rules are based continue to be relentlessly eroded by waves of fiscal and monetary events, some within and others outside of her control. Treasury insiders have executed a quiet but deliberate anti-tax narrative, as the economy strains under the current record burden of taxation. Reeves and other senior Labour figures are probably correct that there is currently no public consent for openly increasing taxes not on ‘the rich’, who are already shouldering a record share of the tax burden, but on ‘ordinary people’, which is surely required if the spending ambitions of most Labour MPs were to be respected.

So whilst personal tax rates remain politically untouchable, there is a clear direction of travel toward raising further revenues through less visible mechanisms, of which the changes to employer national insurance is just the most important. The issue of sticky inflation will produce an ever-stronger fiscal drag effect, gradually and deliberately bringing the UK closer to continental European norms of fiscal extraction. In an uneasy unison, senior government figures continue to insist on the simultaneous adherence to the fiscal rules, heavy capital expenditure, growing defence spending, big union pay deals, and maintaining crumbling structures of the state across every area of policy that will decide the next election.

Starmer’s personal flaws as a politician only compound this issue: his caution, his reactive instincts, his lawyerly tendency towards proceduralism over persuasion. On immigration, the Prime Minister’s extensive legal expertise means that he must know that without repeal or significant modification, the Human Rights Act will continue to make it effectively impossible for illegal migration to be curbed or for offshore processing and deportations to be meaningfully enacted. Starmer, despite his promises to smash the gangs, has seen record small boat crossings on his watch, and has seemed impotent when dealing with the issue of illegal migration more generally. On this trajectory, Reform will not require a particularly strenuous effort to craft the narrative for the 2029 campaign. Central figures in the government, such as Morgan McSweeney, are amongst the the few that appear to at least somewhat understand the increasingly dire predicament the government is in (though the recent revelation of McSweeney creating ‘synthetic voters’ with ChatGPT to test policy ideas must call even that into question). Pushing priorities towards the traditional white working class base of the party will be difficult whilst having little room to manoeuvre on delivering genuine structural reform. The effect has been to create a platform defined more by constraint than by direction; a politics of limitation, in which every lever of meaningful reform has been ruled out in advance.

Entirely absent from Downing Street’s arsenal is the ability to convey the message of what the next four years in government will look like. The government’s internal contradictions have rendered it incapable of articulating a coherent plan or hierarchy of priorities. At a deeper level, Labour remains bound by an unwillingness, partly thanks to the bovine moralism of their own backbenchers, to re-evaluate how the structures of the welfare state should operate in an age that is seismically different to the one in which these structures were created. Trapped by the persistent belief that reshaping or resizing the fabric the state is politically impossible, the cabinet is almost entirely devoid of the creativity or conviction that could sell and execute on a vision of a modern centre-left government. This is a cabinet caged within the confinement of Whitehall norms, operating under the same structures and doctrine created by the last Prime Minister that was able to genuinely move tectonic plates of government, back in the ’80s. Indeed, we could even say that this is a government that has led to civil service rule by default, owing to their total lack of competence and any new ideas, other than ‘being decent’ — thus allowing Treasury officials to force Labour into unwisely adopting their politically unpalatable technocratic pet policies, such as removing exemptions to inheritance tax on agricultural land.

Without the genuine force of will required to break out of the civil service mould, the Starmer government has will have pre-prescribed itself an unfortunate destiny: utter strategic paralysis. No vision or direction has emerged because no viable path has been left open — instead what is left is a cabinet hemmed in from all directions. Every action the government has taken has therefore been interpreted by the public through the same lens: not as forward motion, but as entirely reactionary. It is difficult to say where this government will go as their economic and social plans crumble. Potentially vicious culture-warring (not a hopeless idea, but of limited political utility). Perhaps constitutional reform (though only Brown seems to have much interest in this nowadays). Maybe the increased legal persecution of their opponents (itself risky given existing ‘Two-tier Keir’ concerns). But most likely, nothing much at all.

The only department with a discernible agenda is DESNZ, led by militant eco-communist Ed Miliband — the one minister the government appears to actively want to see fail, owing to the widespread internal recognition (as per The Times) that his plans are obviously insane. Miliband’s continued presence in Cabinet functions less as a statement of ideological coherence than as a means of symbolic containment. The fact that he alone is permitted a programme of action — one which even his colleagues privately disavow — speaks to the deep ambivalence at the heart of this government.

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In the face of all of this is renewed opposition from Farage, a man who for all his flaws has built a brand over the past two decades on seizing the narrative from slower-moving main party politicians. Despite Reform’s economic plans being even less coherent than whatever the Chancellor is currently pursuing, the strength of Farage’s personal brand and his focused messaging has pushed the party to becoming the obvious alternative across the centre-right. Especially since the beginning of 2025, Reform has pulled as many votes from Labour as it has from the Conservatives, pushing the government and the broader parliamentary Labour Party into panic. Reform’s indisputable victory in the 2025 local elections only served to intensify this response to such an extent that major cabinet figures now devote significant time to attacking a party that stills only holds a handful of parliamentary seats.

This diversion of energy risks further deepening the crisis of confidence in a government that is seemingly unable to win a single policy confrontation with Reform. Politically, the seemingly invincible Starmer, with his colossal majority, has now inexplicably been forced into a series of humiliating policy u-turns. There is already a stench of death about him. Cuts to winter fuel allowance have been mostly reversed, due to his fear of Reform. The review of disability benefit has been massively scaled back, thanks to a backbench rebellion which Starmer inexplicably failed to face down. Structural NHS reform, led by Streeting, appears to have been postponed. Each of these decisions only eat further into the Chancellor’s fiscal headroom, whilst winning back virtually no political capital across the electorate. Amongst the modest attempt at a political defence, the ‘far-right’ attack banner has already been cheapened on an electorate that has grown tired of having their basic priorities dismissed. Even Starmer’s ‘Island of Strangers’ speech, made in a desperate attempt to win back the traditionally Labour-voting demographics that continue to abandon the party for Reform, succeeded only in alienating his own backbenchers, eventually leading to yet another humiliating apology. As their time in government crawls on, Labour’s ability to frame their failures as a Conservative Party legacy will become increasingly unconvincing, particularly with Reform as their primary challenger.

Until recently, Starmer’s biggest challenge was that nobody understood quite what he stood for; now his issue is that the electorate recognise his inability to stand up against a government system stocked full of conflicting priorities. If a neutral observer was unaware of the sheer size of Labour’s majority or the huge length of time left on their mandate to govern, he’d be fooled into thinking this was a minority government running up against bump-stops of their term limits, such is the total lack of confidence in the way it is currently governing. Rather than dedicating time and resources to convincing the public that Reform is not the real answer to Britain’s problems, Starmer is already running out of time to spell out his alternative vision. No government in recent British history has experienced a collapse in popularity as quickly and as dramatically as this one. No government has been forced to walk back so many policy commitments despite commanding such a recently won mandate.

This is a battle of establishment party versus challenger party, in an age of Western democracy that looks poorly upon the incumbent. As the party enacts a total idealogical retreat, it has created a dynamic that has enabled Farage to achieve the breakthrough in mainstream personal popularity that had previously eluded him. Beyond simply gaining the support of disaffected voters, his control of the agenda has turned him from an outside figure of protest, into a leader ever more widely anticipated to be Prime Minister before the end of the decade. This has lent him an implied legitimacy he has never before enjoyed, further complimented by the Conservatives becoming an ever-more anonymous political force under the weak leadership of Kemi Badenoch. As Labour increasingly attempt to take on Farage on his terms, they are setting themselves an inevitable trap for when they inevitably fail to deliver and must face the democratic process.

Starmer’s time in government is being written entirely by events outside of his control: a foreign policy agenda set by Washington; a defence policy defined by NATO; an economic policy set by Treasury doctrine. To look back on our recent history, Starmer’s failures are somewhat reminiscent of those of David Cameron; another supposedly moderate and modernising leader who found himself forced into a reactionary stance by an inability to control the narrative in the face of the popular discontent brought by Farage and other Eurosceptics. Judging by his first year in office, it seems inconceivable that Starmer will be able to escape a fate any different from Cameron’s, except to be challenged by Farage head-on rather than adjacently. Yet Starmer’s government will not be remembered as we remember Cameron’s. The Cameron years were characterised by fiscal prudence under the austerity programme and the changing nature of British democracy with the Brexit vote. Starmer’s government will have no such impact. Constrained by contradiction and unable to recover their initial brief popularity, Starmer’s government seems destined to continue to flounder for the next four years before it is inevitably wiped out by forces it was instrumental in incubating, leaving no discernible legacy across any field of government.

In all likelihood, the Starmer years will not be recalled as a separate and distinct episode of the British political story. Rather, this is the prologue to the rise of a new populist party in a political system that is very, very effective at excluding rogue outsiders. Neither the direction nor the story of this government belongs to Keir Starmer, this is the caretaker government that never was. Farage is not yet Prime Minister — but for now, he doesn’t need to be. He is already running the show.

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This article was written by an anonymous Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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