One of Keir Starmer’s many complaints about British politics when he was luxuriating in opposition was it had fallen into a trap of offering “sticking plasters” that barely covered the big problems facing the country. He, of course, promised that he knew how to move away from these short-term solutions – and, of course, didn’t once in power.
Whoever replaces Starmer will be more popular than he is, at least for a few months, and will give Labour MPs and activists a false sense of a new beginning. But they’ll likely end up in the same position with a furiously disillusioned and disappointed electorate and an empty box of Elastoplast, because all our political leaders seem to be stuck in the same loop that Starmer identified then fell into as well.
That’s why Britain is becoming a laughing stock of revolving political leaders: none of the figures who take over their parties, whether Conservative or Labour, have any idea about how to solve the real problems weighing this country down – or any inclination to think about it.
With the political life expectancy of a prime minister shortening rapidly, so the perspective of politicians is narrowing to the immediate term: they don’t really expect to be around for long enough to resolve the long-running crises in this country. Crises such as shortages of housing, social care, the sustainability of the NHS, the welfare system or even the national debt.
None of these questions are easy to answer. In fact, answering them tends to annoy the voters. The reality of reforming all these areas involves trade offs that most people want to pretend they don’t have to make or spending, over what the state can reasonably say it can offer to people through a free-at-the-point-of-access healthcare system, over where homes should be built and to what standard. But failing to answer them leaves Britain hobbled in the long-term, and voters do, after the initial bad reaction to someone spelling out reality, know that they’re being let down by the politicians who they elect and pay to be honest and take the difficult decisions on their behalf.
One of the reasons Margaret Thatcher was not only a successful prime minister but also one who still dominates British politics four decades after she was in power, is that she told Britain that it needed to take its medicine and then didn’t demur when there were complaints while the medicine went down.
It meant she was forever hated by some quarters of the political world – including Starmer’s party – but she was able to diagnose and treat what she saw as the problem in a way that few who have come since have been able to do. Starmer squandered his best opportunity to level with the electorate on the big questions when he had the loyal parliamentary majority that he started out with. But, there is always going to be a good excuse for any political leader not to get on with answering the big questions in Britain.
Whoever takes over from Starmer still has three years to show that they are serious about finding those answers – not, as most politicians over the past couple of decades have done, just asking the question in the form of some long-term consultation or royal commission that delays the answer.
Unlike Starmer, who parked social care reform until the second term, a real leader would acknowledge that there is a real and urgent crisis that needs to be addressed now – and that the options for doing so have long been known. Similarly with housebuilding, an incremental approach that doesn’t acknowledge how difficult the regulatory environment is at the moment isn’t good enough and Labour is already having to acknowledge that, given the falling numbers of housing starts.
The Health Bill, which was published on the day Wes Streeting resigned, contained miserably little in the way of Labour’s pledge to shift the NHS from an acute hospital-focused system to one that treats problems earlier and in the community. The failure of Starmer and his colleagues to come up with serious welfare reform rather than poorly-thought-through cuts was one of the fatal blows that the Prime Minister dealt to his own authority. Yet none of the putative leadership contenders seems to want to address not just the ballooning benefits bill, but also the human crisis behind so many people who are out of work with treatable conditions that can be managed in the workplace with the right system.
Answering any of these questions would need a leader who doesn’t care about social media storms or polling fluctuations or the complaints of focus groups. But until we get a prime minister who is able to switch off all that noise and fixate on the real problems, we’ll get through many more leaders than this.
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