Changing the leader won’t save Labour – or the country
The well-intentioned but hapless Labour backbencher, Catherine West, spent the weekend warning that if she didn’t like Keir Starmer’s speech she’d launch a leadership challenge in a bid to flush out more serious candidates.
In the end, she backed down, but has called for a transition of power to a leader in September. She has since clarified that she meant ‘by’ September.
Despite all the talk of Labour’s impenetrable rulebook shielding sitting PMs from danger, it seems Starmer’s fate may be in the hands of a single MP with less than an iron grip on detail. However, she did manage to sum up the PM’s speech rather well: “too little, too late.”
It was a damp squib, that’s for sure. Nationalising a loss-making steel company and championing an EU youth mobility scheme does not add up to an agenda that meets the moment. Starmer’s main message was that it would be too dangerous to get rid of him, given the threats posed by Reform and the Greens.
While it’s true that these insurgent parties threaten to upend political norms, a more immediate risk is now coming into focus: the prospect of a lurch to the left. The Mayor of Manchester has his fans, but those fans are revealing. Angela Rayner and Sadiq Khan plus other left-wing Labour figures are calling for him to return to Westminster. He’s pacified the North, now he’s needed in the capital! But what would he do? What does he stand for, other than contempt for the bond markets?
The less said about Rayner’s economic agenda – or her tax affairs – the better.
What’s fair about an ever-increasing welfare bill?
Meanwhile, nobody is coming from the right of the Labour party (in as much as there is such a thing) to save the day. Nobody is coming over the hill warning that we’ve raised taxes too high and imposed too many burdens on businesses. Wes Streeting might be a ‘Blairite’ but that’s not a label the parliamentary Labour party likes very much, and as PM he’d still have to contend with their collective instincts for higher welfare spending, more regulation and more taxes on the energy sector.
That means if the PM falls his successor will either be Starmer with a better speechwriter or an emboldened left-wing replacement. Starmer is determined to stay and fight. Of course he is. As former Tory minister Steve Baker said yesterday, power is a drug and politicians are addicts. That might seem harsh after a reasonably heartfelt speech from Starmer about why he’s in politics – but it’s the truth.
And why is he in politics? Fairness, he says. But what’s fair about an ever-expanding welfare bill? What’s fair about households on benefits with more than two children getting thousands of pounds more each year while working people are dragged into higher tax rates?
The truth is that governing today should be about one thing and one thing only: economic growth. Not as a nice to have, not as proof that you’re doing a good job, but as the vital underpinning requirement for everything. This government has never recognised that.
Chances are no new Labour PM will, either.