There will be no birthday candles in Downing Street this week. Nor should there be. Twelve months after Labour’s landslide election win on 4 July 2024, Keir Starmer’s government has capped a year in office with a week of political dishevelment and ineptitude. The welfare reform bill itself is now a meaningless shell. The Labour party is united only in its frustrations.
The welfare rebellion was not a bolt from the blue. Instead, it provides the keystone to an arc of earlier blunders. It poses urgent issues about professional incompetence in Labour’s Westminster machine. It embodies what is not working in the way Starmer’s top-down party does politics more generally. This will not be the end of it, as the furore over Rachel Reeves’s tears at a raucous prime minister’s questions seems to confirm. Things can’t go on like this.
More specifically, the welfare bill poses the question of how the Labour party now negotiates its commitment to the truly poor with the concerns of the much larger number of voters who are not poor. Tuesday’s divisions showed that pitting one against the other is merely destructive. Yet Labour has not developed a plan to reconcile the two more sensibly. It will need to learn fast from this shock. The fact remains that Labour can only ever win and retain power if it is more than just the party of the poor.
The MPs’ revolt turbocharges other questions that were already dominating politics, long before this week, but which the welfare row embodied. First, how on earth did Starmer’s Labour manage to squander so much support so fast and decisively after winning its 174-seat Commons majority in 2024? And, second, what can Labour do about it in the time that remains?
The two are umbilically connected. But the second question is the one that matters more. Retrieving a dire situation means focusing on the future, not apologising for the past. Labour has to reverse its losses to have any hope of winning the second election victory on which Starmer once banked, but which now seems an unrealisably distant dream.
To do this nevertheless requires understanding of what has gone so badly. The past 12 months have been riddled with avoidable errors, tin-eared moments and, above all, have been painfully marked by an absence of vision and even competence. Anthony Seldon, doyen of historians of Downing Street, says no prime minister since 1945 has begun as badly as Starmer. The polling figures bear this out.
This is a crisis. Don’t bullshit about it. Don’t take refuge in blaming the media. It won’t do, either, to harp on about the unfairness of partisan attacks from Labour’s rivals. Nor is there much value in stressing the immense difficulties that have undoubtedly faced Starmer: attempting to govern amid war in Europe, the Trump counter-revolution, global migration pressures and a seemingly embedded economic stagnation. These are truths. They define the real context of the government’s task. But they cannot be excuses.
It should have been obvious on day one, even with a vast majority and the Tory party on its knees, that Labour’s 2024 performance wasn’t the triumph it sometimes felt like. Only 34% of the votes cast last year were for Labour. But only 60% of Britons voted at all. So Starmer’s parliamentary supremacy was conferred by a mere 20% of the country, and by fewer than 10 million voters. Right from the start he needed to broaden his coalition, to pay far more attention to building trust across the nation.
This required more than triangulating Nigel Farage or the striking of attitudes. The underlying truth about Labour’s relationship with the nation is that four out of five Britons were unconvinced by the party, even after the shambles of the Johnson-Truss-Sunak years. Today, that doubting majority is even larger. In an average of polls, Labour now stands on 23%. One in three of its already low total of 2024 voters have gone elsewhere. It was always a loveless landslide. It is now in grave danger of being an unwanted one.
It is true that other prime ministers have got themselves into difficulties, lost byelections, faced parliamentary revolts and had bad press in their first year. Within months of winning power in 1979, Margaret Thatcher came under open attack from members of her own cabinet over economic policy, something that has not yet happened to Starmer. Tony Blair faced a 47-MP revolt on lone parent benefit in his year one in 1997, almost identical to Starmer’s 49-MP rebellion on Tuesday. Both recovered to win landslides at the next general elections.
Why should Starmer not do the same? One reason is because trust in government and politics is now far lower than in the past. Starmer is an analogue prime minister in a digital age. Another is that it was always extremely clear what both Thatcher and Blair were aiming to achieve in government. Each had a project – Thatcher to roll back the state and the trade unions, Blair to modernise Britain’s economy and place in the world. Voters knew what they were getting. What, though, is Starmer’s project? What is the destination he aims to reach?
Answering this question is the most important task facing Starmer today. In the most famous sentence Charles de Gaulle ever penned, at the start of the war memoirs he wrote in the 1950s, he said: “All my life, I have had a certain idea of France.” As his biographer Julian Jackson makes clear, De Gaulle’s “certain idea” was not always consistent, and was never a fully articulated programme – more a stance than a doctrine. But De Gaulle’s idea had very clear features, which millions of French voters understood and often approved of. He stood for a distinct French historical identity, for France’s political independence, for its grandeur and for its social cohesion.
Whether Starmer has a certain idea of Britain, let alone has held that idea all his life, is hard to know. His recent interview with his biographer Tom Baldwin suggests not. The interview is oddly naive. It is full of regrets and admissions of bad judgment but has little sense of history or people. Yet the need for Starmer to tell an uplifting story to Britons about Britain is at least as important as his need to solve some of his more specific policy problems.
Starmer is a bit like a ship’s captain who, faced with rough weather and heavy seas, ploughs on without telling the passengers and crew why. He may in fact be doing the right thing for the ship of state. Calmer seas may perhaps await. The voyage may eventually prove prosperous. But whether the problem is his failure to explain, a lack of basic seagoing skills, or just a stubborn overconfidence, the result right now is very different – an unhappy Labour ship, and even a mutinous one.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
