Broken Politics

Finding Starmer's replacement reveals the political failure of the UK.

The media coverage around Andy Burnham in the nine days since his Makerfield by-election victory has bordered on the absurd. His train journey south from Manchester breathlessly reported on, including by a helicopter. The gang of MPs wanting to greet him. The Queen of Sheeba arrived in Jerusalem with less hype and noise. And rather more substance – she had scores of camels bearing spices, produce and gold to give to Solomon. Burnham, in Kemi Badenoch’s brilliant quip, brings just eyebrows and a black tee-shirt.

All this for one northern MP, albeit one who might or might not become our next prime minister. As yet we don’t know who is running; nominations open on 9th July and close on 16th. Wes Streeting effectively triggered the Labour leadership election when he resigned from the Cabinet on 14th May. In his resignation letter he wrote, ‘It is now clear that you will not lead the Labour Party into the next general election and that Labour MPs and Labour Unions want the debate about what comes next to be a battle of ideas, not of personalities or petty factionalism. It needs to be broad, and it needs the best possible field of candidates”.

Yet, having spent the best part of a month claiming he had the necessary support to run, Streeting has now “endorsed” Burnham. Did he do that to improve the quality of the “field of candidates”? Or was it to ensure a focus on the ideas, rather than Streeting’s personality (such as it is) against Burnham’s? I don’t know; possibly Wes doesn’t himself. Maybe Wes doesn’t think he can beat Burnham, so why bother? Better to endorse him with his followers (if he had them) and hope for a return to Cabinet. Streeting, who has done even less outside of politics than Burnham, is either part of an Andy4PM master plan or he’s misplayed his hand and is now a busted flush.

If there is no contest, which is clearly the hope of the likes of Labour luminaries like former transport minister turned Andy4PM cheerleader and ex-Corbynista Louise Haigh. Of course, having pled guilty to a criminal offence under the Fraud Act, Haigh is damaged goods. The Labour Party is riven with factions and a leadership battle would bring them out in force. Whether the public and media warm to Burnham being unopposed is questionable. Back in 2007, even Gordon Brown, whom Tony Blair nominated as his successor, had some competition. John MacDonnell could only secure 29 nominations, insufficient to force a vote but at least there was a debate. Streeting has folded early.

General Election

Whether there is a leadership election, or an attempt at one, or a pretence at an attempt at one lies in the hands of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The bigger question is whether there will be a general election thereafter. Calling a general election is the Prime Minister’s prerogative. Unless there is a moment between Starmer’s replacement as Labour leader and that replacement becoming prime minister, Starmer could call one. (To do so before there is a new Labour leader would quite possibly destroy the Labour Party Starmer professes to love. It would also involve an irrevocable decision, which isn’t his forte).

There is no requirement for the new Prime Minister to call one immediately. Brown didn’t. In 2017 Theresa May disastrously called a snap election within a year of taking over from Cameron (who resigned in 2016 following the Brexit vote.) May lost the Conservative majority but was able to build a working majority with the support of the Ulster Unionists. The lack of a clear majority made the entire Brexit process far harder and May only lasted a couple of years.

May was succeeded by Johnson, following a savage leadership election. Despite May’s assurance to the Queen that Johnson could command a majority in the Commons (a constitutional requirement for a replacement PM), Johnson lost his working majority almost immediately and called a general election in December. That delivered a landslide 80-seat majority. Then came Covid, the wheels falling off the Johnson wagon, the Truss weeks and the Sunak managerialism. Then Starmer got his undeserved landslide.

Will Starmer’s replacement call an election and risk losing the parliamentary majority? While winning an election would give the new prime minister some democratic legitimacy, it could cost him (or her) the power of a massive majority. Labour could even lose altogether.

Reform’s Nigel Farage believes that, hence his calls for a general election. Amusingly, that line is echoed by Lord Case, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ey093d039o who was the not particularly brilliant Cabinet Secretary for Johnson. I very much doubt Case shares Reform’s agenda and doubt we’ll ever see Farage and Case in agreement again; savour the moment.

Labour’s current polling is consistently behind Reform (currently 5% behind https://www.pollcheck.co.uk/gb-polls ), although Burnham hammered Reform in Makerfield, getting 16 votes for every 10 Reform won. Whether that was a result of tactical voting (which it rather looks like), candidate charisma or just the local electorate (most of whom did not vote) is unknowable. The polls got Makerfield badly wrong – touting it as neck and neck. So did the political parties’ own canvassing. Multi-party politics has broken the statistical tools used hitherto for forecasting elections. That means that the Replacement won’t be able to reliably gauge the probability of winning an election.

Gordon Brown survived three years of taunts before he called (and lost) a general election – at pretty much the latest possible date under the Fixed Term Parliament Act. If the Replacement can’t survive a touch of sharp abuse and run a government, they’ve run for the wrong job. Calling a general election makes no sense. That Lord Case thinks it necessary explains much about the Johnson years.

The Poison Chalice

The Replacement is inheriting a political and economic mess. Government spending is out of control; the rotten state of our armed forces has finally come to light. Fixing that won’t be cheap. Unfortunately gilt yields are at 10-year highs and rising; debt interest alone now consumes 8% of government spending. There is no money and the UK is entering a debt spiral.

So much for the good news.

The bad news is that migration tensions are increasing. One in five living in the UK was born abroad. 5.9 million migrants work in the UK; another 1.5 million (mainly EU) migrants claim benefits (some 20% of the total). Meanwhile, 9 million Britons are economically inactive, including 1 million NEETs aged under 24. It’s a recipe for conflict and division.

Growth has stalled, and unemployment is rising. We’re running out of electricity, which net zero is making ever more expensive. House building is stalled and much new housing is unaffordable – at least for UK residents and voters. Newly elected devolved governments will soon be demanding more resources, and NATO and Donald Trump will continue to demand that the UK spends more money on defence.

Starmer and Reeves failed to deliver meaningful growth because they didn’t grasp that a government cannot order an economy to grow. It might be able to set the conditions if it is wise. Unfortunately for the new prime minister, those conditions are generally thought to be low interest rates (growth costs money, so cheap money is helpful) and low taxes (attempting growth is risky, so it needs rewards). Money would be cheaper if the government budget were balanced, but that would require either higher tax rates (which may not deliver a higher tax take due to the Laffer curve and the currently free movement of capital) or reduced government spending (which is an anathema to Labour and its Union paymasters).

Even worse is what Starmer belatedly realised: the quangocracy created in the Blair years makes achieving any change, let alone improvement, incredibly difficult. The complex web of legislation and multiple agencies with statutory rights to consultation render making any decision slow and implementing it (assuming the inevitable appeal is quashed) even harder. Unless the New Incumbent has the intellect and guts to take a sword to the Gordian knot of British bureaucracy, they will achieve nothing. They’ll just have a ringside seat as the United Kingdom fractiously collapses.

Don’t Blame Brexit

With the advantage of 20:20 hindsight, one can put a proper perspective on what the Brexit vote really meant.

Remember, Cameron’s government was for Remain, to the extent that he forbade any contingency planning for a vote to leave. (This irresponsible ploy had served him well in the Scottish independence vote). The Liberal Democrats, Greens, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalists were all pro-Remain, although Labour and Conservative MPs were allowed to campaign on either side. The quangocracy was pro-Remain (not least because many quangos were EU-funded), as were much of the media. And yet the vote was 52% to 48% to leave (on a 73% turnout).

A small but clear majority of the population rejected the establishment’s advice. While commentary at the time focused on slogans on buses or hooky economic forecasts (both debates tiresomely continue today), what no one noticed or thought on was the majority of the electorate rejecting the views of most of their elected representatives. That’s an indicator not just of a thorny, controversial subject but of a political system that is failing.

Ten years on, that failure is now clear and is beginning to bite. Parliament is unable to hold the government to account because the government is unable to control the Whitehall machinery. Every law that is passed (and that is, of course, Parliament’s purpose) adds complexity, delay and cost to an already struggling economy. That stymies growth while requiring more tax to pay more bureaucrats; we’re legislating ourselves into bankruptcy.

We’re about to have our seventh prime minister in a decade. Some ask whether that means that the United Kingdom is ungovernable. Was Brexit, in fact, a revolution? It was described that way at the time, and at least some Brexiteers (including Nigel Farage) saw removing the EU from our law-making as the first step towards delivering a government machine that works for the UK. A decade on, the progress made has been risible, not least, of course, because that’s not in the best interest of the government machine itself, which continues to grow inexorably and unaffordably. From highways to defence to the NHS, the machine is failing to deliver.

Who’s to blame? Look in the mirror; we the electorate have been bamboozled by the blandishments of the political classes. We failed to kick the tyres, let alone look under the bonnet, of the promises assorted parties have made and, broadly, failed to deliver on.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of the internal contradictions of a centralised, socialist command economy, revealed by Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). At the time the UK was Thatcherite, booming, free, liberal and happy. The socialist economic handcuffs of the 1970s were gone; the budget was in balance. Economic liberalism may have overreached itself with the Poll Tax and subsequent riots, but the idea of a return to socialism was far from many minds.

Not least that of Tony Blair, who rebranded Labour as New Labour, invented (but never, ever explained) “the third way” and promised things could only get better. As it turned out, that was a tad economical with the actualité. Having pledged to keep to Tory spending targets for the first two years, he then let Brown start tinkering and socialism crept back into the government machine. Spending increased and there has been a deficit every year since. The financial crisis caused some cuts, but they were small and short lived. The massive (but futile) expansion of the state under covid reversed them and here we are, almost back in the USSR. We’re definitely back to the 1970s: the government has aspirations of taking over industries; it dreams of controlling energy (and other) prices. It’s even contemplating rejoining the EU to boost economic growth.

Currently about half the population (including me) remember the 1970s. We are quite likely to vote against repeating the experience. Unfortunately the other half isn’t. Many have been educated to believe in progressive, socialist politics. As time moves on they will become the majority, making it harder for an anti-progressive party to win. That is the final factor that will make the next Prime Minister decide against calling a general election soon.

Of course, that prime minister will be a socialist and so unable to control spending. That, as no socialist is able to understand, leads inexorably to a rerun of the 1970s and economic collapse. Enduring might teach younger voters to consider their wallets, not their dreams, when they pick their party, but only if the United Kingdom survives the trauma.

The Queen of Sheeba travelled to Jerusalem to assess Solomon’s wisdom, which astounded her, as did the opulence of his kingdom. I doubt she would have been so overwhelmed should she visit 10 Downing Street’s next occupant. The potholes wouldn’t impress her much either.

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