The welfare bill was advertised as a financial expedient to keep The State going. If the Prime Minister cannot pass legislation like this then he does not have a majority in the House of Commons and ought to seek one. The question of what the Labour government is for must now be asked not in a ‘Search of a Starmerism’ sense but in an operational one; it is not inconceivable that No. 10 will simply run out of legislation and announce a ‘Pause to Politics’.
There will be a last fitful attempt at giving a shape to Starmerism in the coming tax increases. ‘Just raise tax. Just bloody do it’. Glowing-eyes Torsten Bell. We will hear a lot about finally cutting the Gordian knot of asset owners versus workers, young versus old; much will be made of the polling which shows that the British people want better public services but also want to pay less in tax (who would’ve thunk it!) as evidence that their disquiet over the increase is in fact irrational. Tom’s Law of Politics. Stylistically, this effort will feel similar to some of Stephen Bush’s garish asides about ‘punishment building’ that we saw just after the election. The attempt to establish a continental European-style tax code in Britain will not work, though. Given that the YIMBYist supply-side reforms now seem to have floundered Labour will not copy the other salient feature of continental social democracies: that it is actually possible to build things like power stations and railroads with the revenues raised. As such any extra monies will be spent on ‘little more than woke’.
What will also doom this strategy is that the public are in no mood to hear about supposed insoluble Dire Problems, Sophie’s Choices when it comes to taxation, services etc when billions are being spent to maintain Illegals in style in hotels. This ‘cost of woke’ is – as the Grimsby focus group shows – now firmly established in the public consciousness and will poison all these debates even if the sums are comparatively low; it is impossible to have a productive conversation about things like winter fuel allowance so long as it carries on. Much like Brexit in 2019 the British public has, in its wisdom, decided that it will not be entertaining any ‘hard conversations’ about their standards of living or the remit of the state until this basic howler is fixed. There’s now a house style among vaguely reform-minded British leftwing commentators which reacts in a puzzled Jim from The Office manner at how angry and unhinged the Britain of 2025 is (‘The Runcorn by-election is a Ballardian Apocalypse’; ‘The Oasis revival at the End of the World’); but the public’s demands are eminently intelligible and so the way forward for people like Mr Bell is clear – that to do anything housing, planning, taxation you need only restrain advisors like Hermer and break with Keir’s boutique commitment to the ECHR.
For the next few years the government will squat in office hiding from its own MPs and refusing to do anything about the dire problems that it itself outlined in July-August 2024. The country is by Keir’s own telling currently lying in ‘rubble and ruin’, but the government will now – much as it has done for the past year – simply preside over a series of culture war distractions on the pattern of hereditary peers, assisted dying, the Chagos Atoll and abortion. Four years of ridiculous solemnity with ‘free votes’ and Keir showily recusing himself. Iconic Venues profaned as the laws against vagrancy are repealed etc. Starmer no longer has the political capital to carry out the dreaded constitutional reforms; the opposition is now live to the danger and any changes will – unlike in 2010 – rightly be twigged as simply an attempt to poison the waters for the next admin.
After the failure of the welfare bill unamended we have now entered an absurd period where no policy will be made and in which Blairite society has made deep rhetorical concessions to its enemies, all under the aegis of a supposed hardliner. It will no longer really defend itself, but it will not repeal itself either. Many are, understandably, looking forward to a period of reform and truth-speaking, but I think we are settling into a long, fatuous era. An apt symbol of it will be found in the British right commissioning the Labour Party to investigate its own complicity in child rape. A second ‘low, dishonest decade’ beckons.
Good article but I'm not sure about the conclusion. I think we are one more Southport away from accelerated collapse as many decent people realise the State has lost the monopoly on violence but not on gathering taxes and respond accordingly
I sense that it won’t take much to stir people to action. The Government have shown how rotten they are. They say anything they like and from sheer ignorance they spout absurdities. The one in one out ‘deal’ with France is just a farce and typical of what Starmer is about. This will not end quietly.