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A new phrase is gaining traction in Labour leadership circles — insurgent government. It might seem an unlikely epithet for an administration led by the understated Sir Keir Starmer. Yet, for good and ill, this approach is likely to be fundamental to the character of this government.
Having promised a politics that treads more lightly on people’s lives, the Labour leadership is now releasing its inner radical. One has only to watch Starmer or chancellor Rachel Reeves to see the change in their demeanour. They seem to be walking taller, suddenly unburdened by fear. For all the talk before the election of Starmer not offering a clear manifesto it is evident that he sees the one word plastered across its front — change — as the only mandate he needs.
The insurgency principle is driven by Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s campaign chief now installed as director of strategy in Downing Street. It has been picked up by ministers, senior aides and Starmer’s allies in Labour Together, the campaign group and think-tank from which the new prime minister has drawn his key cabinet allies.
It evokes uneasy memories of when Tory revolutionaries like Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief strategist, preached ongoing revolt against the machinery of the government they controlled. And there are those close to the Labour leadership who do not see Cummings’s instincts as entirely wrong, recognising his frustration with the inertia of the state. One observes: “We will treat people properly, we’re not going to go to war with the civil service, but we will insist on change”.
McSweeney argues that the next election campaign has already started and that strategy must evolve with a changed electoral landscape. A central premise is that delivery is not enough. A Downing Street aide cites Joe Biden as proof that economic growth and jobs are not enough to ensure victory. “Voters don’t do gratitude. We have to always be asking what’s next?”
The approach reflects the scare Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party has given a number of MPs in safe Labour seats. For one minister it is about embodying the founding ideal that Labour must always be — and be seen to be — championing working people over established interests, an outlook partly lost under Tony Blair but which is core to both Starmer’s and McSweeney’s politics.
There is no point in lamenting the never-ending campaign. It is now a fact of modern politics. But it can lead to short-termism and quick fixes. The danger is you end up with government by press release, with empty initiatives reannounced to a cynical public.
What can work, however, is if the insurgent mindset is turned towards delivery. There is, in fact, every reason to believe voters will reward change they feel in their own lives because they see it as a sign of competence. But it must be reinforced politically. Always campaign and always explain.
Starmer’s first few days offer some reason to hope that he is focusing on the right areas, namely those where the state is not functioning as voters demand. Already we can see the political strategy combined with hyperbole about inheriting a broken NHS, broken prisons and courts, a failed planning system and so on.
Aside from the obvious political benefit of placing blame on the Conservatives, Starmer is also buying some breathing space for the more radical, long-term reforms in which he himself clearly believes. And his ministerial appointments suggest an impatience with public services which do not adequately serve the public. In Reeves as chancellor, Wes Streeting at health, Liz Kendall at work and pensions, Shabana Mahmood at justice and the imaginative but risky appointment of the campaigner James Timpson as prisons minister, Starmer has signalled a readiness to embrace politically difficult reform.
From overcentralisation, a sclerotic planning system and a faltering NHS insufficiently focused on prevention to a prisons crisis and a welfare system funding rising numbers of long-term sick, Starmer has recognised problems which require more than the money he does not have to throw at them.
And there is a sweet spot, where the political argument bolsters the reform agenda. This is what Cummings could never bring off, not least because he was temperamentally unsuited to managing and carrying people with him.
The tension will come when Labour’s missions meet political opposition: when the media riles up voters against jailing fewer offenders; when the opposition lights on the power of Nimbyism; when labour market shortages rub against anxieties over immigration, not least from Labour MPs with Reform UK breathing down their necks.
It might also arrive when the growth mission clashes with regulatory instincts or wanting to be “on the side of working people”, such as over rights at work. Or when delivery is not keeping pace with the expectations of voters. So the insurgent outlook is also a message to Starmer’s MPs that sacred cows, trades union interests and suspicion of the private sector must also be set aside.
The ideal is a steady revolution, fortified by electoral strategy and overseen by Starmer, the reassuring radical. But politics tends towards the less than ideal. The financial constraints are considerable. Delivery is slow and unglamorous; insurgencies are impatient. How Labour manages that tension may come to define this government.
robert.shrimsley@ft.com
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