Today’s unemployment figures aren’t just a reminder of the mess the government has made of the jobs market with its national insurance hikes. They also underline the futility of the government more generally. It has moved into survival mode and cannot pursue the welfare reforms that are clearly necessary. As Ben Miller sets out here, there are more factors than just the NI increase at play here, with weak growth and the rise of AI hitting young people being just two. A healthy government would be able to respond to the challenges for employers and those out of work. One stuck in survival mode cannot.
Keir Starmer has long lost the trust of his backbenchers to be able to carry out any kind of meaningful welfare reform that goes beyond pots of money to ‘expand opportunities’. With his latest U-turn on the local elections, the Prime Minister has reminded his party that there is absolutely no reason to believe he will stay the course on any policy – and more damagingly that he doesn’t know what he wants to do on many things anyway. Now that most of his party is focused not on what Starmer does but on when precisely he will go, there is no prospect of real welfare reform – and there may not be with a new leader either, if Labour chooses to return to its comfort zone of someone who won’t confront the big questions at all.
Once again, the question is why is Starmer staying in Downing Street? It’s not so much that leaders are delusional (though they can be), but that even when they are embattled, their diaries can be full of things that make them feel as though they have a real reason for remaining and that they are making a tangible difference. For Starmer, the consuming nature of global diplomacy has long made him feel as though he is achieving far more as prime minister than those focused on domestic policy would be able to credit him with. Indeed, he failed in part with his welfare reforms because he was so busy with international summits that he didn’t properly engage with the brewing rebellion until it was too late.
Whenever I have covered the fall of a prime minister over the past 16 years as a journalist, I have always been struck by the gulf between the perception of those in the Downing Street ‘bunker’ and the mood in their wider party and country. Quite often the PM and their close advisers will be consumed with the calls from world leaders, the security briefings and the daily decisions that continue right up until the moment an outgoing leader is driven to Buckingham Palace to tell the monarch they’re off. The night that Boris Johnson fell as prime minister, I found myself talking to his No. 10 colleagues who were still infuriated that while their boss had been on the phone to Volodymyr Zelensky, his party was indulging yet more of what they felt was unnecessary psychodrama. They simply could not have the same perspective as those outside Downing Street.
Starmer will know that he is embattled, that he cannot ask much of his party. But the chances are that he won’t realise quite how futile he appears as prime minister to anyone outside his own office building. His days will still be busy and filled with decisions: just not the ones that involve enacting the ‘change’ he promised the country when he came to power.
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