Labour has fallen into the pit of leadership speculation. Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, announced that he would stand in an upcoming by-election, only to be slapped down by Keir Starmer loyalists on Labour’s National Executive Committee. Wes Streeting is toying with running for Labour leader from the right, even if he publicly claims otherwise. Angela Rayner is said to be considering the same thing from the left.
For the next few months, this will dominate Labour thinking and media attention. Eventually – sooner rather than later, probably – it’ll culminate in a leadership challenge against the Prime Minister.
The administration has come unstuck. It needs change. But the debate around the leadership contenders is hopelessly superficial. It is dominated by personality and tribal identity rather than a meaningful discussion about what has gone wrong and what can be done better in future.
The deepest assessment we get of these individuals is that they are on the right or left of the party. This is the worst possible way to assess a future leader. The Government’s difficulties have not arisen because Starmer is too left-wing or too right-wing. They’ve arisen because he failed to properly plan for office, avoided difficult decisions once in power, and has no unifying vision to define the Government or its activities.
In many policy areas, Labour is still trying to work out what it wants to do. There are solid plans in children’s social care, but elsewhere it’s hard to be positive. Adult social care, for instance, is subject to a review which doesn’t come out until 2028 – precisely the eve-of-election period in which ministers dodge difficult decisions. The Government’s anti-immigration obsession is having a pulverising impact on staffing levels in the sector, but no thought has been put into addressing them. This is the picture across a whole swathe of policies – competing priorities, lack of serious thinking, a failure of preparation, an absence of funding and no consistent approach to delivery.
Once in office, Starmer managed to block off the routes to long-term national improvement because it threatened short-term party popularity. He ruled out tax rises in opposition, contrived to dodge any really difficult fiscal decision in the opening year, clawed around looking for income in the second, killed investment and saved up all the pain for later.
In power, he has shown no vision or narrative. This is a problem for the Government, because it has no storyline to tell voters, or explanation as to its purpose. But it is also damaging on a smaller day-to-day scale. Without a clearly articulable mission, civil servants, special advisers, ministers and Treasury officials are clueless as to what the Government’s priorities are, or the direction of travel. They cease to be able to make decisions without sign-off, creating a sense of stasis and malaise.
In this context, the least interesting thing about Labour leadership hopefuls is where they position themselves on the party’s left-right spectrum. Who really cares if Streeting is marginally more sceptical of trade unions and Rayner marginally more sceptical of big business? We should be asking a completely different set of questions of the future candidates.
What is their record at setting a series of targets and delivering them? How sensible were those targets, how competently were they pursued, what were the outcomes? Have they taken tough decisions and stuck to them? Do they have a set of priorities which officials and ministers can follow in their absence? Do they have a vision, a clear and comprehensible plan for what they would change?
Take Streeting. As Health Secretary, he has an interesting record. On the plus side, he introduced a 10-year plan involving community based, preventative and digital care. Performance is trending upwards in hospitals and staff retention has improved.
But structurally, he has behaved with something approaching reckless abandon. He abolished NHS England, merged its functions into the Department of Health and Social Care, and reorganised Integrated Care Boards. This is all set to be done at the same time as the Government phases out district councils, a major change to local government with potentially significant knock-on effects. It is likely to be very disruptive indeed and yet it is unclear if much planning was put into it or whether it is a worthwhile use of Whitehall capacity.
If we had a serious political culture, these are the issues which journalists and MPs would be focusing on when it came to selecting the next Labour leader. Instead, they are rarely mentioned by anyone, except perhaps for a handful of nerds in the think-tank circuit, drowning their sorrows in a Whitehall pub.
If we keep on focusing on the wrong things, we’ll keep on getting the wrong leaders. If we wish to see improvements in this country – if we want people’s lives to actually improve – these are the questions we’d ask. They would be about objectives, preparation, policy delivery, and competence. This is the conversation we need, instead of another hysterical merry-go-round of nothing.
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