Starmer Reloading...
Labour cannot find its way out of Britain's permacrisis
Towering columns
At UnHerd, Tom McTague reflects on Keir Starmer’s inability to meet our present moment of upheaval in British politics.
The problem with Starmer’s attempted reset is that he is moving in the opposite direction; lowering the nation’s sights, leading not through dreams but powerpoints. We know that in his speech, Starmer will attach at least one specific target to each of his five “missions”, along with an extra promise to reduce immigration. This is all part of his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney’s belief that this government needs to kill the “fiction” that politicians can fix everything, because this in itself damages public trust. Instead of trying to do too much, McSweeney argues that Labour governments must remain focused on practical policies which improve people’s lives…
…So the danger of McSweeney’s approach is that as Britain’s challenges grow, the Government’s ambitions fall and public frustration increases. Because the health service is in such a bad state, for example, the new target is simply to get back to the kind of waiting-times that we once took for granted. And meanwhile people’s everyday experiences of the NHS deteriorate. We can order Christmas presents to our doors at the click of a button, but to attempt to see a doctor is to do battle against an unresponsive, maddening and seemingly unreformable bureaucracy. It is pretty obtuse not to realise that public anger at this basic failure is bound to grow; the decreasing length of the waiting lists for routine operations will only infuriate those who can’t get through a GP’s door.
Politics, as the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott observed, is ultimately the navigation of “a boundless and bottomless sea” where there is neither a starting-place or an appointed destination. Yet it is impossible to steer your course without looking up to the horizon. Those close to Starmer understand the dangers of appearing to fixate on a set of arbitrary targets as the world transforms around them; the boundless and bottomless sea suddenly raging while the captain merely stares at the map. As one senior aide reflected, the ultimate challenge is not just convincing Starmer of the importance of storytelling, but fashioning a specifically Labour story appropriate to the challenges facing the country. Because from immigration to energy transition and shifting social norms, changes are coming which threaten to overwhelm many of Labour’s most sacred shibboleths.
At CapX, James Newport argues that Britain needs to be much more ambitious in its search for economic growth.
In truth, the decades of decline we’re experiencing are because successive governments have failed to grasp the fundamental issues that need to be resolved. They have failed to set an ambitious and practical roadmap for growth. Instead they default to safe tweaking of tax and spending dials while confidently stating that they are ‘fixing the foundations’, ‘fixing the public finances’, or ‘fixing the roof while the sun is shining’. With this lack of ambition and use of repetitive slogans, the British people have become disillusioned and are starting to believe the problem is insurmountable.
We need action that addresses our long running systemic problems, namely:
The prevention of building housing, infrastructure and energy supply, as outlined in the renowned ukfoundations.co essay;
The sprawling inefficiency of the civil service and lack of strategic prioritisation; and
The inconsistent and poorly incentivised environment that restricts risk taking and holds back our innovative start-ups.
Without solving these, we cannot hope to prevent the continued decline. The importance of housing and infrastructure has been emphasised by the success of movements such as the YIMBY Alliance, but government action is still too slow, with excessive blockers to priority projects. Behind this, the sheer size and complexity of the government’s machine means there is such staggering inefficiency that, even with perfect regulations, the system will remain ungovernable. Finally, despite being an epitome of ambition and innovation, Britain’s start-ups and risk takers have been neglected and left to swim against a tide of growing regulatory burden and risk aversion. These problems are complex to solve but not insurmountable. It will be challenging and it will expose painful trade-offs. To succeed, we need leadership and a level of honesty and transparency that has been lacking for too long. But success will release us from decades of decline.
For the Financial Times, Camilla Cavendish believes the importance of land use has been neglected in the debates around farming and net zero.
What is missing is any strategic thinking about how we use land to meet competing objectives. How do we trade off food security against energy security? Ministers have approved a four-mile end-to-end solar farm on prime agricultural land in Lincolnshire. At what rate does government think it’s safe to displace food production, with changing weather making harvests increasingly unreliable everywhere? Where should we build the new homes needed to house a burgeoning population? Almost 300,000 homes were built on prime farmland between 2010 and 2022, according to the CPRE, the countryside charity. The Environment Agency says that 5.2mn homes and businesses in England are currently at risk of flooding.
Add up all the current government commitments, and you begin to see how badly we need to bridge the silos. The UK government is committed to increasing English woodland by a million acres — a larger area than Kent — and to creating new habitats for biodiversity by another million. It aims to enlarge the protected areas of England (National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) by around 1.8mn acres, to build more houses and to increase renewable energy — all while maintaining self-sufficiency in food at 60 per cent. At the same time, floods and drought are threatening harvests, which climate change will make worse. Some kind of land use framework is urgently needed to ensure, in the words of the parliamentary land use in England committee, that “we are doing the right thing, in the right place and at the appropriate scale”.
I am all in favour of net zero. But I’m not sure I want my taxes spent on the Forestry Commission’s impenetrable forests of spruce and corporate greenwashing. I’d rather subsidise farmers who reduce our reliance on food imports, who can steward the land to limit flooding, and who’ve spent the long years since Brexit learning how to farm with nature rather than against it.
On his Substack, Neil O’Brien examines how the new Education Secretary is undermining the progress made in schools policy under previous governments.
Once upon a time a headteacher had no real peers: now as part of a family of schools, good ideas and best practices can flow between schools, and resources and back office can be shared. Schools are cooperating with each other, in ways they generally didn’t with Local Authorities. 82% of primary schools reported improvements in staff training since joining a trust, 89%, improved sharing of skills and expertise. But Bridget Phillipson has immediately got rid of the two grants that help academisation and the growth of the best trusts: The Academy Conversion Grant is being abolished at the end of this year - and the same is true of the Trust Capacity Fund, which helped trusts take on more schools. In fact trusts that bid earlier this year have been told they won’t get anything.
The Confederation of School Trusts said the fund “has been very successful in enabling trusts to support maintained schools that need help, especially in areas with a history of poor education outcomes” and that “that will become much more difficult to do now. Trust leaders will be especially angry that ministers have scrapped this summer’s funding round.” Last month Phillipson also “paused” the final wave of 44 new free schools. She also made comments suggesting that “paused” may mean “cancelled” in many cases, and there won’t be any more schools coming through this route. The paused schools include three sixth forms proposed as a partnership between Eton College and the Star Academies Trust, in Dudley, Middlesbrough and Oldham.
This decision is despite the fact that secondary pupils in Free Schools consistently make more progress than any other type of state school. In 2022/23 the average Free School Progress 8 score was 0.21, higher than either LA-maintained mainstream schools (0.01) or converter academies (0.10) - even though the latter were typically already good schools which converted to academy status. On average over the last five years 69% of pupils in Free Schools achieved grades 4 or above in English and mathematics GCSEs, compared to 65% of LA-maintained schools.
At the Heritage Foundation, Emma Waters considers how pronatalism has captured the attention of Silicon Valley elites.
Silicon Valley’s pronatalism is distinctive in its approach to childbearing for one crucial reason: like many, Silicon Valley elites desire to control the process and outcome of childbearing, from the kind of children they create to the way their children are born. Unlike most people, however, these elites have the funds and tools necessary to act on these desires in unprecedented ways.
Such a worldview encourages these elite leaders in their use of technology to insulate themselves—in the name of their future children—from the risk, uncertainty, and vulnerability inherent in childbearing. By removing childbearing from its natural context and placing it in a tightly monitored environment, such parents receive a misleading, false promise of safety. In their effort to overcome the unpredictability of childbearing, many may increase suffering…
…In the name of their children living their healthiest life, this technological worldview has trained many in Silicon Valley to view the human person as individual parts or raw material whose genetic makeup predetermines their values, beliefs, capabilities, and identity. Nurture plays a secondary, or unimportant, role in the development of each child. Such conclusions, which ignore both religious insights and sociological findings, enable parents to free themselves from the personal responsibility of stewarding their child’s development. At the same time, it heightens their self-imposed responsibility to create and select genetically superior children.
For the Telegraph, Madeline Grant exposes the problems with the proliferation of fact checkers disguising liberal bias with false impartiality.
Per Juvenal; we might ask “who fact checks the fact checkers?” For we all have our flaws, biases and preformed beliefs – these people are no different. A glance at their activities confirms it. An investigation by the website UnHerd found that around 5 per cent of all BBC Verify articles since its launch had been corrected, clarified or withdrawn.
A recent “fact-check” on the family farm tax conceded that their researchers had confused acres with hectares. We all make embarrassing mistakes in our copy from time to time – I know I have! But the trouble with being a self-appointed truth guardian is that you are meant to practice what you preach. Moreover, “neutral” checks often give useful cover to politicians. In the absence of government impact assessments, many Labour supporters cited the disputed BBC Verify analysis about the family farm tax…
…A few weeks ago, Full Fact wrote to Kemi Badenoch, rightly criticising her claim that Labour’s budget had contained “no mention of defence”. The following week, the PM made an equally false claim, that “we haven’t touched National Insurance”, after hiking employers’ NI by £25 billion. I emailed asking why this hadn’t also received an open letter; Full Fact justified their non-intervention on the basis that it might be seen in the context of Starmer’s earlier pledge about not targeting “working people”. But this is itself highly contentious language; why is an “impartial” body uncritically adopting the Government’s debatable logic (that employers are not “working people”)? A small thing perhaps, but telling. Where one falsehood warranted a nagging open letter, another prompted fence-sitting.
Wonky thinking
The Adam Smith Institute published Britain’s ILR Emergency by Sam Bidwell on the legislative changes to Indefinite Leave to Remain rules that can prevent millions of people from settling in the UK permanently. Both Labour and the Conservatives have recognised that net migration has reached unsustainable levels. However, changing visa rules will only affect future waves of migration. It will be incredibly expensive and difficult for the UK to absorb these waves of new arrivals, particularly since 2021.
At a time when HM Treasury’s fiscal burden continues to increase year-on-year, this poses profound challenges to the UK’s balance sheet. After just five years of work here, however low-skilled and low-paid, ILR holders will be eligible for a lifetime of support from the British state. They also have a right to bring dependents to this country, meaning that a single five-year stint of work could see the British taxpayer burdened with the cost of an entire family - benefits, social housing, healthcare, pensions, and more.
According to figures produced by the OBR, the average “low-wage migrant worker” will cost the British taxpayer £465,000 by the time they reach 81 years of age. According to analysis conducted by Karl Williams, from the Centre for Policy Studies, just 5 percent of all visas in 2022-23 were given to high-skilled migrants who are likely to be net contributors - fully 72 percent of skilled work visas went to migrants likely to be earning less than the average UK salary. Against this backdrop, it is clear that opening the ILR door to millions of new migrants will impose a considerable and unwanted fiscal burden on the British taxpayer, for decades to come.
The case for scepticism is not merely a fiscal one. In a democratic society, the will of the people must be paramount - and yet this change has happened against the wishes of the British public. According to November 2024 figures from YouGov, 68 percent of Britons believe that immigration has been too high over the past ten years; just 5 percent say that it has been too low. In every YouGov poll conducted on this issue since July 2019, a plurality of those polled have expressed the view that immigration has been too high over the past ten years. In all but two of these polls, this opinion has been expressed by an absolute majority. Even if the migrants of the past few years proved to be net positive contributors to the Treasury, they came to this country against the explicit wishes of the British people. Can it be right that British citizens should have to live with the consequences of policy failure which they did not ask for?
As such, the Government should reform existing rules around Indefinite Leave To Remain, to limit the long-term harms of the so-called ‘Boriswave’. Given the scale of democratic discontent with the scale of immigration over the past few years, and the Prime Minister’s own admission that this policy has been a failure, it would be both possible and just to create new, emergency rules to restrict long-term settlement of visa holders who arrived in the UK over the past few years.
In doing so, the Government would achieve two things. First, it would give itself greater control over the question of whether to reissue visas to those who arrived over the past few years. If the Government determines that it was mistaken in handing out visas to particular individuals or to particular categories of person, then it could reasonably refuse to reissue those visas; this process is made easier without the addition of a ‘ticking clock’, namely the five-year ILR threshold for many visa holders. Secondly, it would mitigate the long-term fiscal burden of low-skilled migrants who are unlikely to be net contributors to the public purse, as already explained.
Reform has published Full stream ahead: the future of the Fast Stream by Patrick King and Joe Hill on improving civil service recruitment. New, high-quality talent is needed to improve the British state and restore economic growth. It should be a genuinely elite programme based on rigorous examinations, competitive pay, and robust training and development.
The Fast Stream was set up to recruit the brightest and best to government. It is a key brand for the civil service and its largest recruitment pipeline for hiring early career talent, offering participants “unlimited potential to reach the highest levels”. The status of the Fast Stream, and its relationship with Whitehall’s future talent pipeline, should warrant the upmost attention from senior leaders. Despite this, aspects of the Fast Stream offer – from placements that vary wildly in the opportunities they provide fast streamers, to training which is insufficiently focused on hard skills– threaten this hard-won status and make the Fast Stream less competitive than many other graduate opportunities.
Notable reforms were made to the Fast Stream last year: including the introduction of a new curriculum for fast streamers (with universal and technical training modules); aligning schemes with government ‘professions’ (such as the Government Economic Service); and increasing the number of placements delivered outside of London. The commitment, as the Civil Service said, to attracting talent “from the widest range of disciplines and locations” is the right one. As was an enhanced pay offer, to make the Fast Stream more competitive with other graduate opportunities. However, while very welcome, these reforms did not go far enough. Government must now double down on this progress to ensure the Fast Stream is best placed to develop Britain’s future public leaders, and has the strongest possible focus on building the hard skills fast streamers across schemes need to succeed.
With an annual intake of around 1,000 since 2015, the Fast Stream’s focus appears now to be much wider than just the recruitment of exceptional talent. But underneath the headline numbers, the composition of the Fast Stream has changed significantly. It remains an overall umbrella and brand, but rather than having one large Generalist Fast Stream (and a handful of other, more specialised ones), the Fast Stream is now split into 17 different ‘schemes’, each aligned with a particular civil service profession (for example, Policy). This has blurred its purpose: losing its focus as a programme to develop the next generation of cross-government leaders, and becoming a graduate recruitment programme for specialists in professional areas. Both aims are important and necessary to the effectiveness of government, but in its current form, the Fast Stream is not effectively doing either.
As government grapples with once-in-a-generation challenges, including how to build a resilient state, restore economic growth and deliver Net Zero, it will need a new generation of leaders. Now is the time to ensure the Fast Stream is a core component in delivering that. This paper proposes a new model: founded on more rigorous entrance exams and a new “Executive Leadership Scheme”, specifically focused on multidisciplinary expertise. It also sets out a new approach to Fast Stream training and development, codified through a knowledge and skills-based curriculum that would set a new benchmark for civil service expertise – taking seriously the subject matter expertise fast streamers across all schemes should acquire.
Book of the week
We recommend Gotham Rising: New York in the 1930s by Jules Stewart. The author looks at how Mayor Fiorello La Guardia transformed New York City during the New Deal era. Elected in 1934, La Guardia made it his mission to transform the NYPD into a crime-fighting force, stamp out corruption and the mafia, and launch new infrastructure projects to revive the economy. As a reformer and leader, La Guardia demonstrated the transformational nature of good governance.
La Guardia loathed the slots as a particularly odious form of ‘mechanical larceny’, and the man behind this operation, the cunning Mafia boss Frank Costello, was targeted as his number-one enemy. Costello was not one to sully his hands, much less his expensively tailored pinstripe suits, with his enemies’ blood. He instead acted as a smooth mediator in the Mafia’s relations with officialdom, at least that segment of the police and politicians who were not disinclined to slip their hands under the table. Costello astutely took pains to keep aloof from hands-on criminal activities, and in this he proved an extremely slippery catch.
The mayor instructed police commissioner Valentine to open a vigorous offensive against Costello and his slot-machine enterprise, but the wily mafioso was one step ahead of his pursuers. When the NYPD staged a series of raids to confiscate slots, arresting hundreds of their operators and assorted criminals working the gambling rackets, Costello quickly had thousands of his machines converted into sweets dispensers. Following the wholesale seizure of slot machines at the Mills Novelty Company, at the time the world’s leading manufacturer of slots, the company management obtained a court injunction against confiscation unless it could be proved the machines were used for gambling. A chewing-gum dispenser clearly did not fall into this category.
La Guardia was not one to be daunted by trifles like a court order, especially when the ruling ran contrary to his plans. In February 1934, the mayor strode angrily into the West 100th Street police station and announced that under the authority vested in him by the City Charter, he was sitting as a magistrate to take charge of the battle against the slot-machine racket. The first case heard was that of a woman charged with keeping a slot machine in her husband’s shop. La Guardia labelled this a typical example of criminal exploitation of humble shopkeepers. He dismissed the woman in her husband’s custody, until she could provide $5 bail. Then he turned to the police officers in the room and thundered, ‘Get busy and arrest these racketeers!’ In a message to the general public, a month later the Little Flower sponsored a free exhibition of seized slot machines in the concourse of Rockefeller Center. The purpose was to impress upon visitors that he meant business, in line with the NYPD’s anti-slots slogan: ‘You can’t win.’
The mayor took his case to New York State’s Supreme Court and then, in early May 1934, he expressed his delight on receiving a ‘splendid’ piece of news from the equally ‘splendid officials’ of the court, who backed his drive to rid New York of slot machines. In the end, New York State governor Herbert H. Lehman’s enactment of the Esquirol Bill made it unnecessary for La Guardia to press his case, for the state legislature outlawed the slots and dismissed the Mills Novelty Company’s suit.
Valentine immediately dispatched a fleet of Department of Sanitation trucks to round up the remaining machines. These were summarily dumped into Long Island Sound, where to this day they rest on the ocean floor. But not before La Guardia, with his irrepressible flair for theatrics, posed for the press at the waterfront, smashing up a pile of slots with a sledgehammer. Once the machines had been shoved from a scow off Eton Point, La Guardia told the assembled reporters, ‘I’m going to City Hall to swing the sledge there. There’s one reason why the politicians want to get control of the City of New York, and those hopes will go where the slot machines are going now.’
La Guardia’s crackdown on the one-armed bandits was hailed as one of the most spectacular triumphs of his early years in office. The mayor was notably less successful in his efforts to nail Costello, who quietly shifted his slot-machine operations to New Orleans, where they were promoted as ‘charitable games’. Louisiana’s flamboyant state governor Huey Long greeted Costello with open arms as well as pockets, in a deal that included a 10 per cent cut of the takings for the notorious Long, a politician who treated the state as his personal fiefdom.
Quick links
Economists believe the OBR will confirm next Spring that Rachel Reeves is breaking her fiscal rules.
Labour has launched a new review every two and a half days since entering office.
ONS figures show that labour productivity has fallen following migration-driven population growth.
The percentage of new social housing lets to non-UK nationals increased to 1 in 8.
Number of people paying 60% tax rates has jumped by 45% over the past two years.
Police refused to investigate a bike stolen from outside Scotland Yard until the incident was raised with the Sunday Telegraph.
A gene-edited pig kidney was transplanted into a living patient.
The number of bee hives has increased by 40%, returning to 1950s levels.
The most popular baby name for boys in England and Wales last year was Muhammad.