Labour’s fanatical centrists are laying the ground for the next populist revolt

Britain’s new Prime Minister is enjoying quite the honeymoon. Across the centrist commentariat, there is elation that the “adults are back in the room”. An upswell of liberal hope that Labour heralds a return to competent, compassionate politics is palpable. In certain circles, awe at the return of “experienced” Blairites to government has been barely disguised. 

To his most ardent fans, Keir Starmer radiates an almost spiritual benevolence. While Tony Blair was filled with a kind of frenetic evangelism, Starmer has struck a more Anglican tone – authoritative, non-dogmatic, post-ideological. Perhaps it may yet cut through with a nation weary of perma-crises and endless culture wars.

And yet one cannot help but wonder how long the euphoria can last. After all, Western politics is hardly swinging back to a golden age of technocratic managerialism. From France to America, the centre is imploding. Starmer fans may think that the failed Brexit revolution has inoculated Britain from the new populist virus. More accurately, given the Tory implosion, many of the voters who ditched Labour in 2019 had little choice but to give the centre-Left technocrats another go at fixing the country. British technocracy is on its final lifeline, in other words.

Those of us who have not drunk the Starmer kool-aid, but are soberly aware that this country stands on the edge of a precipice, must hope that he does in some way succeed. This new Government deserves credit for at least making some of the right noises. With border control the glaring exception, Starmer’s Labour has generally proved more willing than the Tories to point out problems facing Britain. It has been bolder in its insistence that the NHS is broken and needs to be reinvented. It has also been more assertive about the need for planning reform, even at the risk of upsetting Nimbies.

Still, Starmer’s vow to “rebuild Britain” appears to be built on shaky foundations. 

Perhaps most worrying is that Labour lacks a compelling plan for growth. Though Starmer likes to present himself as a consummate pragmatist, his party has developed a romantic weakness for the supposed lessons of the Apollo space programme for the economy today. 

Obsessed with the age of astronauts and the heroic exploits of JFK administration, and suffering from an intellectual crush on the economist Mariana Mazzucato – who argues that the “muscular” state that propelled men into space must be revived to jumpstart growth today – Starmer’s plan to revive Britain hinges precariously on “mission-driven” interventionist projects. They range from a National Wealth Fund to the Great British Energy project.

It should go without saying that JFK’s mission to put a man on the moon – which operated on the mantra “waste anything but time” – is a ridiculous model for reviving broke Britain. 

But it is also a problem that Labour appears decidedly less enthusiastic about the far less glamorous supply-side revolution that the party would be well-placed to pursue. It is ominous that Labour, despite its fitful rhetoric, seems unwilling fundamentally to change Britain’s nationalised, highly-centralised planning system. The proposals Rachel Reeves announced are, if anything, even more dedicated to top-down control and therefore vulnerable to any change in the political weather in Westminster. 

Labour’s masterplan to fix the NHS seems equally flimsy. While some may be reassured by talk of bringing back arch-Blairite Alan Milburn to help reform the health service, fixing it doesn’t so much require an experienced hand as it does an unapologetic revolutionary. 

Milburn’s task under New Labour – to bring waiting lists down through decentralising reforms and more private sector involvement – was tough but straightforward, boiling down to a transfer of power from the centre to the frontline of care. Some in the health service, looking for pragmatic solutions to dysfunctional management and patchy state funding, were supportive of his plans (in the end, Milburn was arguably unstuck not by the NHS but the Treasury). 

In contrast, Labour’s aim today – to reinvent the NHS from a service that patches up patients at death’s door to one that seeks to prevent ill health in the first place – is infinitely more difficult. The party’s reluctance to level with NHS workers, and the country, on the basic reality that, in a stagnant economy, there is no magical source of extra funding for prevention is a ticking time bomb. Sooner or later, we will have to confront the need to redirect cash from frontline services. 

Some Blairites also like to wax lyrical about the salvational potential of technologies like genomics to predict and prevent ill health. But there are ultimately no technological silver bullets that can make up for our chronic shortage of healthcare workers or fix the smoking ruins of social care.

But perhaps the issue that Starmer is most dangerously weak on is migration. One wonders whether he has made the basic error of mistaking the outgoing Tories for rule-flouting populists that he must define himself against. The reality is that they were only reluctantly willing to flirt with drastic proposals that test international law because all conventional alternatives had failed. And although liberals appalled by the Rwanda policy may celebrate its demise, Britain is now without any deterrence policy whatsoever. 

The new Home Secretary’s Border Security Command repeats the mistake of the war on drugs, trying to clamp down on criminal networks while failing to address the underlying factors fuelling the industry. Experts have already voiced their scepticism that Labour will improve on efforts in the area of enforcement. Starmer may benefit from a fall in the number of legal migrants, driven by a tightening of visa policies announced by the last government. But the numbers will soon plateau. At which point the Prime Minister will have to consider more radical plans like scrapping the worker shortage list, or risk the ire of voters.

With the Tories in disarray, Starmer may be sitting pretty for now, but time is shorter for him to deliver than many think. One can almost hear the far-Left earthquake in France rattling the newly-installed furniture in Downing Street. Or indeed the Labour Left and their unions backers murmuring with anticipation that, with centrism imploding internationally, they may be able to install their socialist “secret weapon” Angela Rayner into No 10 sooner rather than later.