Fewer reshuffles, more democracy
The prime minister once liked to suggest that one of the problems with the Conservative governments was its frequent reshuffles, which generated the dozens of housing ministers and dozens of prisons ministers who failed to build houses or fix the prisons. He was right. I was moved through six ministerial briefs in four years. I knew nothing about Africa when I was made the Africa minister. I had only just completed my Africa strategy, and introduced myself to the key African leaders, when I was made the prisons minister nine months later, still knowing very little about Africa and nothing at all about prisons. Little wonder that civil servants were reluctant to throw themselves behind my radical rethinks of my predecessor’s approach – not least because they sensed that I would soon be gone and my strategy with me.
Starmer has now done his own reshuffle, and it is if anything worse than what the Tories did. Cameron left William Hague as foreign secretary for four years. Starmer has taken David Lammy, just as he has built his relationship with world leaders, and replaced him with someone, Yvette Cooper, who has never held a foreign policy brief. The ministers who have painfully mastered the complexities of AI or the welfare system have all moved hardly more than a year into their jobs.
And the loss of knowledge is not compensated for with fresh talent. Cameron sent seven cabinet ministers in 2014 to the backbenches, replacing them with entirely new faces. Starmer has changed 10 of his secretaries of state. But he has only sent one to the backbenches. The others have simply been moved from one ministerial job to another. He has done the same to 20 of his junior ministers. His holding on to the same team in new posts without sacking the bad and introducing the new suggests a poker player too afraid to raise or fold. And he will just make his problems worse if he tries to tinker yet again.
But the fundamental problem he faces is not the individuals. It is the way in which every aspect of our political settlement – parties, whips and electoral systems – creates all the wrong incentives and behaviours.
The best hope for better government is not another reshuffle but a constitutional revolution. We should build on the success of the newish mayors in Manchester and Birmingham, giving them far more freedom to tax and spend and forge their own industrial policies. (Here we can learn from both France and Germany.) A New Zealand-style electoral system – balancing proportional representation and constituencies – could break the old parties and encourage coalitions around the centre. An Australian model of compulsory voting would force politics to pay attention to the marginalised and try to persuade the undecided centre, rather than indulge the extremes. And we should make far greater use of citizens’ assemblies – which, as Ireland has shown, can achieve remarkable radical progress that parties often cannot achieve – and which would have a democratic legitimacy that we are losing from our parliaments.
Rory Stewart’s new book Middleland: Dispatches from the Borders is published on 30 October
Do AI the right way and Labour could reap the rewards
The government has spent much of its first year in office trying to attract private investment into the British economy. This has meant changing planning regulations, “cutting red tape” and, most recently, opening the door wide to AI companies. But the point must not be to accept any kind of investment. We should be prioritising the type of growth Britain needs: innovation-driven, inclusive and sustainable.
The global investment summit last autumn, for instance, mostly attracted controversial financial companies such as BlackRock and Macquarie; the latter is best known in Britain for loading Thames Water with debt during its much-criticised ownership of the company. Getting AI investment right in this context is crucial, but there are worrying trends.
This week’s US-UK tech prosperity deal is an example of tech investment being structured poorly. US tech firms have pledged to invest £31bn in the UK, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia and Google, while the government refuses to rule out scrapping the digital services tax. It will lead to the outsourcing of more AI capacity across public institutions and the wider economy to US tech firms. With Labour promising to “mainline AI into the veins” of the country, we must ask: are we building AI capacity for Britain or Silicon Valley?
Labour should demand clear conditions alongside state investments – this is what the Biden administration did with the Chips Act that required semiconductor companies to limit share buy-backs and improve working conditions. In the UK, which remains 28th in the OECD for business investment, and where companies are often overly financialised and prioritise rapid dividends for shareholders, we should require that AI companies benefiting from government programmes make real investments in the country that are good for our economy. That kind of confidence was shown during Covid when the taxpayer-funded Oxford University/AstraZeneca collaboration ended up shaping public goals: knowledge-sharing and keeping costs and prices in check.
This isn’t about choosing between innovation and regulation. Governing AI for the common good means steering markets, not just opening them up for “business-friendly” contracts. Labour’s upcoming party conference presents an opportunity to reset this approach. Rather than “cut the red tape” fetishism, Labour needs AI governance that generates British capabilities and public value. The TUC argues that workers must have a role in shaping AI. As I’ve written recently, Britain should explore public funding models akin to the BBC licence fee – collectively supporting AI systems serving public purposes rather than commercial imperatives.
For a government struggling to bring the public with it, promising growth through unfettered AI adoption risks repeating the mistakes that fuelled populist backlash against globalisation. When citizens see deals with tech companies while local jobs fail to materialise at resource-heavy datacentres, the political costs are inevitable. Smart AI governance – with workers’ voices, public ownership stakes and visible benefits for communities – offers a positive radical and Labour vision. By showing the state can actively shape technology for public benefit rather than simply accommodate Silicon Valley’s agenda, Labour can rebuild trust that the government works for ordinary people.
Professor in the economics of innovation and public value at University College London, where she is founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose
Gaza is the stain
I resigned as a Labour councillor from Oxford city council in October 2023, days after Keir Starmer, then the leader of the opposition, agreed during a live radio interview that Israel was justified in cutting off water, gas and electricity in Gaza, after Hamas’s deadly attacks. Two years later, his government stands credibly accused of being complicit in genocide. The domestic politics of this are less important than the immense suffering that the people of Gaza have gone through, but it seems clear that this government’s inaction over Palestine has damaged its credibility in the eyes of many voters.
If there is to be any way back, the government must fully reset the UK’s relationship with Israel and acknowledge it for the destabilising force in the region it is. After all, Israel is accused of killing more than 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with thousands more missing and buried under the rubble. It has reduced Gaza to a wasteland and has launched attacks on Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Qatar and Tunisia. It is a flagrant violator of international law and should not be considered an ally of the UK in the way it has been up to this point.
Starmer could take a leaf from European countries such as Spain, whose prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, recently announced that he would formalise his country’s arms embargo on Israel, ban the use of Spanish ports and airspace to transport fuel or weapons to the Israeli military, and comprehensively ban imports made in illegal Israeli settlements. This is the absolute bare minimum and should have been done some time ago.
Journalist and crisis response campaigner working on Gaza
Stop being afraid of debate
Great political rhetoric doesn’t sell a policy position. It shares with us a vocabulary, a way of thinking and speaking about our situation, so that we can join with the rhetorician in making decisions. Then, we don’t buy what a politician offers; we agree with it because we thought it ourselves.
Labour is poor at doing this. The prime minister “umms” through interviews. Ministers focus on policy process rather than making arguments for a future we might all live in, defending their expertise and skills in the language of HR. Welfare reform wasn’t argued for but insisted upon as an inevitability, as if people could be forced into supporting a policy without a clear picture of how they might live in the world it would create.
Reform UK has benefited by taking the critical counter-position: smash the orthodoxy, humiliate the HR managers and give free rein to the few allowed to stay on the island. Greens are developing a lively language connecting environmental security with larger arguments about future housing, jobs and security. Your Party will probably employ a strident anti-war moral vocabulary appealing to those sick of a politics of “pragmatic” positioning.
These are parts of a tortured, fractious (and overly dramatic) argument that the country is having with itself, and to which this Labour government has contributed no key term, concept or description.
What Labour needs is an ideology: an overarching argument connecting policy areas to an analysis of what’s wrong with British politics, economy and culture, as well as the principles that define its response and a picture of a future we can see ourselves living in well. Ministers arguing for policy, instead of just insisting that they are hard-working and serious, could then show the bigger picture of which they are a part.
MPs could seek opportunities to share arguments with key affected sectors: local teachers, chambers of commerce, NHS staff. People won’t all agree but will respect being treated like rational citizens and potential participants in rebuilding society. Of course, this also needs to happen online, since that is the primary arena for ideological contestation today (as a few in Labour are beginning to understand). Imagine two or three Labour MPs with different takes, arguing things out at length on YouTube (without fear of expulsion). That would model good political behaviour, invite audiences to think for themselves and communicate an image of life beyond desiccated managerialism.
Only a minority are deeply attached to Reform’s politics, but they are confident in making arguments for it to friends, family and colleagues. That is why it is winning. Labour’s instinct is to keep members and supporters at a distance rather than supporting them in becoming active representatives of party-thinking online, offline, in work and with friends.
As long as Labour prefers the language of force, law and managerial necessity, it will lose – and what’s more, it will deserve to. The rest of us will have to find our own ways to push back against what’s coming.
Professor of political and social theory at the University of East Anglia and expert in political rhetoric
