The problem facing Labour rebels: Starmer has many problems, but he isn’t THE problem

We read this morning that Labour MPs and the trades unions have started setting Sir Keir Starmer deadlines to turn things around. All of a sudden, the Prime Minister is another leader whose fate may hang on his party’s performance in next year’s local elections.

It remains surreal how quickly he and his party is speed-running the traditional life-cycle of a British government. Just over a year ago, both swept into power with one of the largest majorities in the history of the House of Commons; today, Starmer is reportedly hoping to “to use President Trump’s state visit to regain the political initiative” – of all the people to pose as the cavalry! – whilst his MPs have started talking up Andy Burnham as the next great red hope.

An obvious peril of a change of government from the perspective of a site such as this one is that the inner workings of government becomes suddenly more remote from our experience. But divisions, deadlines, and the fixing of implausible hopes in popular mayors? That’s just another day at the office for Tory-watchers.

The signal-to-noise ratio in the coverage of Labour’s internal struggle is probably very low. That isn’t (at least, entirely) the fault of the media, but a characteristic of the struggle itself. Very much like the Conservatives, the Labour Party knows there’s a problem but doesn’t want to confront what it actually is; the result is a churning foam of displacement activity.

In short, the Government’s ur-problem is the decaying orbit of Britain’s public finances. We are now almost two decades into a period without sustained, substantial growth – a period in which both the balance of our working-to-economically-inactive population has continued to shift in the wrong direction and various major revenue expenditures, such as welfare and pensions, have embarked on a journey to the Moon.

For whatever reason, be it the long shadow of the 2017 election or a sincere belief that simply Getting the Grown-Ups Back in the Room would be sufficient to get the economy on the right track, Labour allowed itself to be manoeuvred by Jeremy Hunt into fighting the last election on a promise not to increase any of the major revenue taxes whilst also declining to set out any programme of spending restraint. The result was a political bear-trap.

Worse still, from a specifically Labour perspective, its particular preferences don’t offer an obvious way out. The New Statesman enjoins the Government to ‘Just Raise Tax’, but to what end? Runaway revenue spending will eat the receipts, without doing a thing to correct the country’s economic trajectory – in fact, unless Rachel Reeves breaks some political taboos, tightening the squeeze on this country’s shrinking share of economically-active workers is only going to worsen it.

Does Starmer have shortcomings as a leader? A legion of them; as one wag put it to me: “it’s such a shame how Keir Starmer, God’s most special and innocent child, keeps being surrounded by damaging liabilities that he personally hired himself”. Does Burnham have virtues? Likewise, yes.

But none of them are really central to the Government’s problem here. Many Conservatives used similarly to treat Andy Street, the former Mayor of Birmingham, as a similar Prester John-like figure who might ride over the horizon and salvage the party. But without taking anything away from Street, who was a very good mayor, there is no automatic readover from excelling in a devolved role to excelling in a national one – at least not when the most important problems with which the latter has to grapple, such as immigration and the public accounts deficit, are simply not things which confront devocrats.

So beyond even the exciting practical considerations (such as, how might the rebels even get Burnham into Parliament when a) the leadership knows it would be signing its own death warrant and b) Reform might win any given by election), the most important question about any Labour rebellion is whether it represents an attempt to pivot towards reality, or away from it. On the current evidence, the latter seems far more likely.