The problems of this Labour government set in early. Their huge parliamentary majority, with one of the smallest winning vote shares since 1945, was not enthusiasm for Labour. Tired of chaos and infighting in the Conservative government, people voted for the most plausible alternative. As the pollster Luke Tryl has said, many people thought they would rather have a government doing things they didn’t like, as long as they did them in a boring, competent way.
So on his first day in government, Starmer said he intended “to restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives, and unite our country…”. It is what we said we wanted.
But sometimes it turns out that we don’t like what we wished for.
Popularity off a cliff
With such a tenuous mandate, Starmer’s problems began almost immediately. Over only three months, his popularity rating fell from plus 19 to minus 31: the fastest and deepest fall of any recent prime minister, except Liz Truss.
Although voters responded generally positively to the government’s handling of the Southport riots and the prison crisis, they were much less sympathetic to a number of relatively minor scandals, which were seized upon with enthusiasm by a press which has never been sympathetic to the Labour Party.
And the deeply gloomy picture of the economy which Starmer and Reeves presented was not what people wanted to hear. In 2010, George Osborne convinced voters that the economic crisis was the fault of his predecessors, but this time, they were unconvinced. They wanted some of the previous government’s policies rapidly reversed and they deeply disliked some of the proposals to correct things.
The result was a financial gloom. Relatively trivial problems began to be seen as symbolic, and people began to feel that things would not get better, whoever was in charge. And the news began to feed the mood with stories of chaos and disaster.
What do we want?
But what do we want from government? The Office for National Statistics latest report shows that our highest priorities are the cost of living, NHS access and the economy, followed by immigration, crime, housing and the environment. And despite the headlines, while most people see immigration as symbolic of general incompetence, they do not regard it as impinging on their own lives.
And the pattern is true too of young people. Demos researchers found them wanting practical improvements in areas like housing, education and climate change, and an end to constant infighting and scandal. “Headlines shouldn’t always be about political drama,” said one student. “They should be about fixing the country.”
We said we wanted “boring competence”
The striking thing about the incidents which precipitated the collapse of confidence in the government is how little they have to do with those voters’ priorities. Starmer was right, we all want growth and stability after years of chaos. We said we wanted boring competence to fix the country, so are they doing it?
To tackle the cost of living, the government has raised the minimum wage and committed funds to support the poorest, to provide debt relief and insulate homes. The rollout of free school meals helps ease the food budgets of the poorest. In the NHS, after ending a string of disruptive strikes, waiting lists are beginning to fall. The Employment Rights Bill gives new rights to 15 million people. The Renters Rights Bill will provide new security for five million tenants and curb exploitative landlords.
Local authorities once again have mandatory building targets, with funds to build 300,000 affordable homes, and more to house the homeless. £14m is going to growing the construction workforce, with hundreds of new planning officers, and reform to speed up planning. There has been a large expansion of renewable energy, with onshore wind and nuclear, and new penalties for water polluters. And, not insignificantly, Starmer is widely acknowledged to have restored Britain’s tarnished international reputation, albeit perhaps at the expense of the domestic agenda.
So why the mismatch?
These are not trivial achievements. But of course, not every issue is being addressed, and not every strategy will be popular. There have been missteps. Most have been small in the broad landscape of government activity, but sometimes politically naïve, and communication has sometimes been very poor. But it is clear that the government is working on most of the issues which people say they want tackled. But much of the work is slow and unglamorous.
And we are impatient and rarely weigh big issues against trivia. A change which benefits a million people can be dwarfed by a story about free concert tickets, or party infighting. Symbolism seems more important than reality: abolishing the winter fuel allowance may have been economically rational, but people don’t like being mean to old people, especially when they do not expect to foot the bill.
The media role
A key aspect of the problem is the media, and not just the mendacity of an overwhelmingly right-wing print press and its allies. In an attention economy, driven by celebrity, personalities matter more than achievement. We asked for boring government, but they tell us we want more than that. And a culture has developed in which success for many journalists is the story that forces a policy reversal or brings down a minister. There are few rewards for explaining policy objectively. Ministers are regularly sent out on the media round to explain a new achievement, only to be diverted by some often trivial recent mistake or perceived failing.
‘You can’t always get what you want.’
People said they wanted boring competence to tackle long-standing issues. Arguably, that is what they are getting. But it turns out, we, or at least our media, also want vision, drama and excitement. The celebrity culture of politics demands blood. It is certainly not what Keir Starmer wants, or perhaps is capable of offering. Perhaps it is not what we want either, if we pause to consider.
But Starmer is still gambling that, as Mick Jagger sang, ‘if you try sometimes, you find you get what you need’.
More from East Anglia Bylines
