What is Britain’s Labour government for?

IN a hot basement room in Liverpool, Pat McFadden, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the prime minister’s most trusted fixer, was regaling delegates at the Labour Party’s annual conference with stories of how the landslide victory in July had been won. As the campaign co-ordinator, Mr McFadden had spent days on end with Morgan McSweeney, another aide, plotting the destruction of the Conservatives in a tiny windowless office they termed “the cell”. It was when pizza was passed through the door that they realised they really were prisoners, he joked.

The conference in Liverpool ought to have been a wild victory celebration. Instead the heaving late-night bars were tinged with a deep sense of anxiety. The gear-change from a brutally effective campaign machine to a functioning government has been anything but smooth. The poll ratings for Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, are slumping. Sue Gray, his chief of staff, has been involved in a bitter and public struggle with newly appointed officials. “They are still finding their feet and getting across their portfolios,” says one corporate attendee. One question in particular hung over the conference. Is the Labour Party really inhabiting Downing Street? Or is its mind still in opposition, holed up in its cell, fighting the Tories?

A focus on winning the next election, due to fall by 2029, was very much in evidence. From the platform, Rachel Reeves, the new chancellor, exhorted delegates to show “iron discipline” as the Tories regrouped. The appointment of Hollie Ridley, who ran Labour’s field operations, as the new party general secretary is a sign that it is engaged in a permanent campaign. In his speech, Sir Keir sketched out a trajectory for his first term: one of painful choices being followed by a more prosperous future. That Nike-swoosh story of transformation and reward, noted one party insider, has been told by every election winner since Margaret Thatcher.

But what is alarmingly absent for many delegates is what Sir Tony Blair called “the project”—a deep analysis of the country’s strategic challenges and the prescription that flows from it. For Thatcher, that project was rapid market liberalisation; for Sir Tony, equipping Britons to compete in an era of globalisation; for David Cameron, shrinking the state after the financial crisis. Yet for Sir Keir it exists only in fragmentary form. “It all feels driven by 2029,” says one new Labour MP. “But the question is, what are we winning for?” Others ask bluntly: Where is the project?

The concern aired by many around the party is that an undercooked policy agenda was the price of victory. In opposition, Sir Keir had one priority: to get Labour back into power in a single parliamentary term. To do so entailed shoring up trust in the party on public spending and national security. That meant a slim manifesto, shorn of big spending commitments.

Discipline was prized above all. Labour, Mr McFadden mused, had to be an election-winning machine, not some sort of members’ club. Ms Reeves did adopt a sceptical stance on globalisation, which she called “securonomics”, but there was little room for deep reflection on questions of ideology. Labour Together, a policy shop close to the leadership, produced a telling report at the conference focused on the 14% of its electorate who switched directly from the Conservatives to Labour in July, whom it characterised as transactional and undogmatic voters with a low regard for political elites.

As a result, the recipe for change now that Labour is actually in power is “discrete rather than systemic”, observes one party figure. If there is one central idea to this government it is the pursuit of increased private and public investment in housing, energy and transport to counteract a chronic productivity problem. Sir Keir has shown flashes of radicalism in promising to liberalise planning laws for houses, electricity infrastructure and prisons. Whatever the manifesto might have said, Ms Reeves made clear in Liverpool she will pursue higher public investment through borrowing and tax rises, to be defined at the budget on October 30th. But until that moment comes, the sense of a government in limbo will persist.

The absence of a clear project has implications for Sir Keir’s concept of “mission-driven government”. This is meant to be a new, collaborative way of working that would bind the state, business and civil society together to pursue complex, long-term challenges. It is intended to be an antidote to the gimmicky short-termism of Westminster and the departmental silos of Whitehall. But the sorts of big questions that ought to infuse the idea of missions—what is the meaning of social mobility, say, or how desirable is parental choice in education—seem so far to be unanswered. The announcements at conference were just the sort of cheap, eye-catching schemes that Labour criticised in opposition: a £7m ($9.4m) pilot scheme for breakfasts in schools, a law to criminalise the (already illegal) act of assaulting a shopkeeper.

An approach to communication that served the party well in opposition is proving perilous in government. Its method before the election was blunt and highly defensive: the party was quick to rule out proposals it saw as risky, and disinclined to wax lyrical as to its own view of the world. In office that has produced an odd inarticulacy. It is, complain some, a mystery what Sir Keir thinks on swathes of policy, or how he sees problems. “We got too good at just saying ‘No’,” observes one figure.

To take one example, MPs are frustrated that Ms Reeves’s decision in July to restrict pensioners’ fuel subsidies was explained on the ground of saving public money rather than a more confident argument about intergenerational justice or the role of the welfare state. Gatherings of Blair-era veterans are laced with black humour at the failure to define and sell the project. “Put your hand up if you can name the five missions,” declared one to a bar audience.

Many MPs would like to see the operation in Downing Street dramatically restructured. But it is not clear whether any reconfiguration of people can compensate for the fact of a party coming to power with its thinking only half-formed and a leader with a limited appetite for political argument. In Liverpool Mr McFadden hailed the vim and focus that Sir Keir brought to national-security meetings. “I think he’s more suited to the job of being prime minister than leader of the opposition,” he said. It is remarkable how many people in his party wonder if that is really true. ■

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