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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is interim director of IPPR, a think-tank
First comes the reset. Then the renewal. And finally, the rejection. All governments have to go through these stages once the honeymoon period ends, according to Westminster lore. With the changeover from Sue Gray to Morgan McSweeney as head of Keir Starmer’s Downing Street operation, the Labour government has got stage one under its belt.
The need for a reset is not a surprise. That it took less than 100 days is a cause for concern. The task now facing the prime minister and his new chief of staff is to make sure that the “rejection” phase is not also racing towards them, obliterating “renewal”.
To do this they have to deliver on the one-word slogan emblazoned across the manifesto: change. Unfortunately, it’s not off to a great start. Some early policy wins have been overshadowed by a scandal about donations to cabinet members and a mis-step on means testing winter fuel payments. They have focused their communications on defining Labour’s “inheritance” — but have been unable to land with the public that they have a plan to solve it.
If Labour is to succeed this time — and where so many others have failed — the downbeat tone has to change. It will need to learn from the postwar governments that genuinely transformed the country: those of Clement Attlee, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. Here is what we found stands the best chance of keeping the promise that Starmer made to the electorate of “a decade of national renewal”.
First, while transformative governments do blame their predecessors, as Starmer’s Labour has done since taking office, they also attack the ideas that underpinned them. In doing so they lay the foundations for a new consensus capable of supporting a different approach.
Attlee’s Labour attacked not just Neville Chamberlain as one of the “guilty men” who tried to make terms with Hitler, but the Conservative party for being wedded to economic orthodoxies that saw a million men out of work on the eve of war. This strategy was used to articulate the case for state intervention: to “win the peace” having won the war.
Today, Labour ministers must direct their firepower at the real travesty of the last two decades. Namely, the failure to build a new economy in the wake of the financial crisis and to invest in the future rather than simply cut from the present. This should be a springboard to argue for investment and reform. New polling by IPPR and Persuasion UK finds that voters will reward Labour for a bold Budget with a positive message about rebuilding Britain’s public services and infrastructure.
Second, a string of modest but strategic reforms can, in aggregate, deliver fundamental change. Thatcher is thought of as a radical who broke the trade unions. But her approach was initially moderate. Only over time was action to rein in the unions ramped up — and to devastating effect.
By contrast, most governments fail because they pursue scattered incrementalism. Buffeted by events, bad headlines and attacks from opponents, they fail to prosecute a consistent political and policy agenda in power. This is the biggest risk for Labour today.
The government has introduced a borrow-to-invest wealth fund, a package of employment rights, and a draft industrial policy. These are welcome first steps. But what matters if it wants to transform Britain is that these are just the start.
Finally, sustaining a political project needs more than just policy delivery. It requires a party in power to make the link between the change people experience and the politics they vote for. Thatcher’s Right to Buy was a masterclass in this — and Labour should take the lesson from it. In a single policy, immortalised in the image of her personally handing over the deeds to one family’s new house — she ensured that the upwardly mobile working class were in no doubt whose side she was on, and could say “Maggie got me my house”.
Labour’s task is to determine who it stands for: which groups of voters the party needs to win at the next election to secure the decade it says it needs. A winning coalition for next time is not the same as maintaining the one it secured in July. Delivering change for these groups must be the galvanising purpose of the government, its policies and how they are communicated.
As one Conservative strategist reminded me the other day, the stakes are much higher than just partisan success. Trust in politics is at an all-time low. If Starmer fails it might not be a return to the centre right, but the emergence of a more scary populist alternative. His job is to show that responsible politics can also be radical politics. And evade — or at least put off — the day when rejection will, inevitably, come.