You might expect a government elected with a landslide to enjoy a brief moment of hegemony. A few months of confidence. A honeymoon, even. Not this one. In its first year, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has managed the near-impossible: to enrage the left, baffle the centre, and still get accused of socialism by the right. The policies aren’t always the problem. The politics almost always are.
Consider the winter fuel payments fiasco. Rachel Reeves announced the means-testing of payments for pensioners, saving a few billion and enraging ten million voters. After months of backlash, including legal threats, parliamentary opposition and tanking polls among over-65s, the policy was hastily reversed. Not only was the government now funding the same policy it had deemed unaffordable, it looked weak, panicked and out of touch. Pick any of the three and you’ll understand Labour’s strategic positioning.
Labour thinks it’s being grown-up and pragmatic, when it’s actually being cowardly and bad at politics.
Or take the Welfare Reform Bill. Labour tried to outflank the Tories from the right, cutting disability benefits and proposing changes to PIP that would have left hundreds of thousands worse off. Reeves called it “tough but fair.” Disability campaigners called it an attack. 120 Labour MPs rebelled. The backlash was so immediate that large parts of the bill were binned within weeks. All pain, no gain. No fiscal savings, no political capital, no defence offered. We get just a flailing attempt at being “serious” that exposed the government’s cowardice.
That’s the theme: Labour believes it’s being grown-up and pragmatic, when it’s actually being cowardly and bad at politics. It governs in fear of what the Mail might say tomorrow, not what the electorate will feel next year. And it communicates like it’s briefing a Treasury spreadsheet, not a country in crisis.
It governs in fear of what the Mail might say tomorrow, not what the electorate will feel next year.
Even when Labour is making hard choices, it refuses to own them. It won’t say: we’ve inherited a broken economy, we’re constrained, and this is triage. Instead it says nothing, lets the right and Nigel Farage define the narrative, and waits for the storm. This is not strategy. It’s a refusal to lead.
Austerity, when introduced by the Tories, came with a narrative: the country had lived beyond its means; Labour crashed the car; we all had to tighten belts. Cynical, yes. But politically effective. Starmer offers no story, just the steady drip of rollback, retreat and resignation.
Austerity came with a narrative. Starmer offers no story, just the steady drip of rollback, retreat and resignation.
It’s not just policy. On Gaza, the Labour leadership has become a case study in moral evasion. When musicians at Glastonbury raised the Palestinian flag, Labour figures lined up to condemn the chants, not the war. Meanwhile, the BBC buckled under pressure and issued half-hearted apologies, terrified of accusations of bias. The party of Attlee and Wilson has become the party of backroom fear.
So Labour lurches from U-turn to scandal to bland announcement, with no momentum, no morale, and no idea how to communicate with the public it supposedly represents. It has a pathological fear of its own base, and an embarrassing desire to impress the people who will never vote for it. It trims, triangulates, and still gets set alight.
In the end, it’s not just that Labour governs badly. It governs without conviction. Worse: it governs without politics.
