“Move Fast and Fix Things”: Starmerism Unravelling
The early declaration from former Transport Secretary Louise Haigh that the intention of this Labour government was to “move fast and fix things”, an unconscious twist on platform capitalist Mark Zuckerberg’s motto, is an interesting starting point for understanding Starmerism in office. Political projects are never quite as clear cut as we imagine; with the benefit of hindsight, historians often brush over the contingencies and surprises which condition the development of governmental strategy. Although Keir Starmer’s Labour is nowhere near as intellectually coherent or as bold as a project such as Thatcherism, it is critical that we grasp Starmerism as an agenda with a set of ideas about how to change the country, and how those ideas are shaped by and adapted to the constraints of British and global capitalism.
The situation Starmerism inherits is dire. Stuck with a low growth, low productivity economy, characterised by a lack of investment, crumbling infrastructure and an ailing and ageing population, the ingredients for regeneration are lacking. Bad circumstances were not necessary for Starmer’s Labour to make a complete mess of its first 100 days in office, however. Between its electoral victory and the Autumn budget, the Prime Minister’s poll ratings had plummeted below his predecessor Rishi Sunak. Initially positioned by the press as a staple of competent integrity against both the Tories and the party under Jeremy Corbyn, a succession of controversies have rode roughshod over this facade. Starmer and his allies were exposed to a “freebies” scandal which revealed the Labour leader had taken £32,000 in free clothing and £20,000 in accommodation from Lord Waheed Alli, a Labour peer and entrepreneur; Downing Street was consumed by a power struggle between “dysfunctional” Chief of Staff Sue Gray and former Director of Campaigns Morgan McSweeney; and, in the first few months of Starmer’s government, racist pogroms unfolded on the streets across Britain, presenting Labour with a law-and-order problem on top of its already spiralling prison overcrowding crisis.
Labour have entered government with capitalist answers to capitalist problems. This administration is responding to some of these dilemmas with somewhat novel solutions. But Starmerism is predominantly a project which reflects both the hollowed out nature of political institutions and their incapacity to cope with the magnitude of crises that beset them. Politics today is indeterminate and unforgiving. A party as centrist in character as Starmer’s Labour, and as in hoc to the interests of the business class, forebodes disaster for us all.
The Limits of Growth
The erratic and poor performance of this government has crucially been underscored by the reality that it offers incredibly little meaningful reform to the bulk of the population. Since before the election, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has been extremely noisy about the necessity of plugging the £22bn ‘black hole’ in the public finances – a trap left behind by her Tory predecessor Jeremy Hunt – which has been the basis for the government abandoning its £28bn a year climate investment pledge. It is also plaguing the government’s first steps in office, as the Labour leadership has made growth, a vanishingly rare feature of Britain’s political economy, the pride and place of its agenda – repeating the idea that a rising tide will lift all boats.
In his first keynote speech, Starmer stated that: “Those with the broadest shoulders should bear the heavier burden”. Immediately afterwards, Number 10 spokespeople reiterated their commitment to maintaining corporation tax at its current rate. Early on, Labour made pay deals with sections of public sector employees in order to stabilise the industrial front whilst they slashed winter fuel payments to pensioners. An ambition of hers for a decade, Treasury officials commented on how swiftly Reeves agreed to cut winter fuel payments (out of step with even previous Tory Chancellors). Labour may have taken some hubristic solace from the fact that pensioners are a relatively small component of their electoral coalition, but the move has not done their public standing any favours. Echoing the political tactics of former Labour leader James Callaghan, Starmer and Rachel Reeves’ agenda involves the scrambling of popular opposition, mobilising classic binaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ – or ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’, in the case of the two-child benefit cap – under the guise of boosting growth and productivity to give the government some breathing space to placate the public sector workforce in preparation for future private reforms of the state.
This balancing act continues to shape Labour’s economic interventions in the Autumn budget. Reeves has committed to raising taxes by £40 billion, increasing employees’ national insurance by 1.2%, increasing capital gains tax, reforming inheritance tax and non-dom status, while borrowing will be increased by £40 billion this year and £39 billion next year. On top of this, to allow for these investment plans, Reeves has modified the fiscal rules to include government assets in the UK’s measure of debt. This change alone would let Reeves borrow an additional £50 billion a year by the end of the decade while permitting debt to continue falling. Although the chair of the Confederation of Business Industry (CBI) has played down the impact on businesses of a rise in national insurance payments in the budget, it is not the case that this is a budget for the working classes. Rises in the minimum wage were welcomed but less so were real terms cuts to benefits, raised bus fares, and the likelihood that employer national insurance increases will be felt by lower paid workers more than anyone else. The Treasury’s own distributional analysis of the Autumn budget shows tax and welfare reforms hurting the pockets of the majority of the population. Additionally, Labour have further abandoned their climate commitments, turning their promise of £8 billion climate investment over four years into £100 million in the first two years of their term.
If Reeves’ 2% “productivity, efficiency and savings target” for government departments may likely be a deadly euphemism for deepening future austerity, the meagre £1.3 billion funding grant for local government guarantees further cuts for local councils. In the past six years, eight local authorities have had to issue Section 114 notices, declaring the council’s inability to balance its books in the face of a £9.3 billion deficit. In the coming years, many more are at risk – endangering essential services.
Embarrassingly, despite the rhetoric, the Autumn budget already confesses to growth rates far below the 3-4% rise necessary to expand the British economy. Putting to one side whether growth is attainable or desirable – a case against it being eloquently made by James Meadway – there is a delusion in the Cabinet that it can be squeezed out from elsewhere. Confronting high interest rates and an unpredictably inflationary economy, Reeves’ too-clever-by-half attempt at managing Britain’s dire economic straits has been met with private sector firms slashing jobs at the highest rate since the pandemic, bond markets kicking up a fuss at the government’s fiscal shortfall, and dissent from the Confederation of Business Industry (CBI). Labour’s crisis management has pleased nobody. It takes money out of the pockets of its natural supporter base, antagonises those, such as farmers, whom it often comes into conflict with, and fulfils none of the expectations demanded of it from capital. The fact that one poll places them below Reform should surprise none of us.
The State Keeps the Score
Intent on minimally encroaching on capital, reticent to upset the Treasury but intent on increasing growth, Labour has become uncommonly interested in the health, energy and efficiency of the British worker. According to Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council’s Pathways to Work Commission Report, the economically inactive outnumber the officially unemployed by 6 to 1 as employment participation rates have declined by 4% in the past four years, with 3.7 million workers declaring that they have work-limiting health conditions. For people aged 16-34 years old, they are as likely to report a work-limiting health condition as someone aged 45-54 did ten years ago – and much of this increase is the product of mental ill-health. Even more profoundly, demographic ageing has contributed to 63% of the actual rise in economic inactivity between 2019 and 2021. The annual welfare budget currently sits at £266.1 billion, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies reporting that spending on disability and incapacity benefits for working-age individuals is likely to increase by a further £15.4 billion by 2028-29.
In light of this, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has committed to making annual cuts to sickness benefit worth 1.3 billion and retaining the work capability assessment – meaning that the narrowed ineligibility for incapacity benefits and 450,000 people receiving benefit will be cut by up to £4,900 a year by 2028. If, following Starmer’s counterrevolution against Corbynism, we understand that the faction now leading the party is a project to put the populist genie back in the bottle, it is also a project to undermine the policy radicalism which Corbynism was able to mobilise. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, positive views of welfare have increased over the last ten years with rising support for welfare spending and growing dissent towards the notion that social security claimants do not deserve benefits. Similarly, when 38% of Universal Credit claimants are in work that does not pay enough, it is no wonder that the proportion of people who thought falsely claiming benefits was never justified had fallen from 85% in 2011 to 67% in 2023.
In this context, DWP chief Liz Kendall and special advisor Alan Milburn have set upon a plan to confront the problem of long-term sickness amongst the working population. Milburn has been adamant that the long-term sick should be forced to search for work. Liz Kendall’s insistence that “the DWP will shift from being a department for welfare to being a department for work” is mirrored by Milburn’s contentions that Britain’s welfare state should become explicitly oriented towards workfare: setting national targets, merging JobCentre Plus with Careers Advice, and creating new classifications amongst the economically inactive in order to drive the national employment rate closer to 80%. Whilst Milburn alludes to a holistic approach to the nation’s labour regime – accounting for “barriers to work” such as childcare, social care, health and the character of contemporary employment – ultimately the methods remain coercive. In an interview on The Rest Is Money podcast, Milburn protested that we “don’t medicalise these issues… [T]here’s a risk that it becomes an excuse culture… You don’t need a psychiatrist, maybe a talking therapy or group therapy will help.” Concretising this logic, Kendall has declared that job coaches will visit “seriously ill” patients on mental health wards in an effort to force them back to work, with employment advisors deployed to hospital wards to give CV and interview advice.
On top of this, Labour has announced free health MOTs in workplaces, toyed with the idea of banning high-caffeine energy drinks and disposable vapes, prohibited vape and junk food advertising to under-16s, and given councils powers to block new fast food outlets near schools. While the NHS will receive a £22.6 billion increase in day-to-day spending and a £3.1 billion increase in capital spending, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has made it clear that his brief will prioritise a “prevention first” approach which will involve the increased presence of the private sector, structured as a two-tier system that privileges access to healthcare for those most well-off. One announcement in particular, indicative of the government’s direction, has been the declaration that unemployed people will be given weight-loss jabs to get them back into work. Streeting claims that “widening waistbands are a burden on Britain”, and has attracted a £280 million investment from Lilly – the world’s largest pharmaceutical company – to develop new treatments that can confront obesity and worklessness. A five year study will recruit up to 3,000 obese patients to explore whether the medication can boost productivity and bring more people back into work. The rich, it seems, will have the benefits of the health system, while society’s working classes will increasingly encounter the NHS as a vehicle for boosting their labour productivity.
From the point of view of Labour grandees, capital accumulation is encountering limits which need to be remedied. Across advanced capitalist economies, ageing, sicker and shrinking populations are becoming the norm, putting constraints on productivity and blowing headwinds in the direction of economic growth. In this context, the principles of maximum economy come to the fore – creating the need for greater coercion against workers who, more and more often, leave tighter labour markets and higher welfare bills in their wake.
Akin to the early twentieth century trade-offs between productivity gains and expanded welfare, Starmerism seeks out a retrograde social contract with a timid labour movement predicated on repealing limited aspects of anti-trade union legislation and increasing wages amongst some workers. Alongside the commandeering of worker demands for a 4 day working week into a “compressed” 10 hour day, Labour’s Make Work Pay agenda has been markedly whittled down. While workers will qualify for protection against unfair dismissal from day one of employment and get the right to sick pay from the first day of illness, Labour has abandoned its commitment to a single worker status, the right to switch off, full employment rights and increased sick pay from day one, the rolling out of sectoral fair pay agreements, and banning zero hour contracts and unpaid internships. Keir Starmer’s sacking of Louise Haigh after her denunciation of notable fire-and-rehire employer P&O Ferries is another sign of this administration’s direction of travel.
Overwhelmingly, in spite of the chorus of celebrations from sections of the trade union leadership, Labour’s synthesis of work, welfare and health policy constitute an expansion of the state’s coercive capabilities. Starmer’s government offers an image of exactly how ruling classes are seeking to mobilise authoritarian forms of population management to steer demographic transition into productive ends which disempower workers. In a service economy so dominated by William Baumol’s “cost disease”, where productivity increases are marginal because so much of the foundations of the economy are predicated on privatised care and reproduction, whether these moves will be successful is in serious doubt.
Rentier Britain
One of the most hotly contested aspects of Labour’s reforming agenda has been its approach to housing, planning regulations and infrastructure. In his speech to the government’s investment summit, Starmer told a room of over 200 executives including Blackrock’s Larry Fink, “We will make sure that every regulator in this country, especially our economic and competition regulators, takes growth as seriously as this room does”. The Labour leadership, following a long line of administrations, have made it a staple of their agenda that the country is being held back by planning regulation: presented as an obstacle to growth, homebuilding, and infrastructural development. Forming a new Regulatory Innovation Office, Starmerism’s growth-oriented infrastructure projects consist of reservoirs, hospitals, schools, railways, Northern Powerhouse rail, finishing HS2, the Lower Thames crossing and a £10bn AI data centre, bringing 4,000 jobs to north-east England, funded by a private equity firm run by Donald Trump supporter Stephen Schwarzman. This reflects Labour’s prime instinct as a rentier-friendly party, avowedly committed to the idea of incentivising asset managers and private sector investment to revitalise Britain’s building infrastructure at any costs. Although Starmer has promised to protect the greenbelt, he has also been clear that the promise to build new towns and 300,000 houses a year will involve building on both brownfield and greenfield sites. It is through this paradigm that we are beginning to see an exacerbation of the culture war between the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) factions.
On the one hand exists a coalition of developers, politicians and ideologues content with jettisoning the stifling influence of regulation and taking advantage of a construction free-for-all. From Starmer and Reeves to the Labour YIMBY faction, this assemblage is currently in the ascendancy. Within the socialist movement itself, there is an argument that only building more houses and loosening the tight control and price-gouging power property developers and landlords exercise over the housing market can contain the real estate lobby. On the opposing side, there exist a wide-range of conservationist Tories who despise further urbanising encroachments upon rural Britain, whilst the Green Party balances its commitment to housing justice in the city among younger proletarians with its rural opposition to construction. Rejecting the premise of this culture war, author and housing lawyer Nick Bano argues that “that there is no unique housing shortage in Britain today.” Whilst house building has decreased relative to the heights of postwar construction, there is one dwelling for every 2.25 people. For Bano, skyrocketing rents are instead a product of rentier and landlord power in a postindustrial age, enabled by the policies and laws that favour private ownership and capitalisation, underwritten by housing benefit (the state pays £23.4bn of the nation’s estimated £63bn rent bill). Property developers welcome Labour’s goal of increased housebuilding, and regulators and industry insiders have been clear that their priority is controlling supply and keeping prices higher. According to the Financial Times, the seven largest listed builders of homes for private sale cut their output by about a fifth – increasing average selling prices by 2 percent. Even worse, the biggest commercial housebuilders are all sitting on stockpiles of land where planning permission has already been granted.
It is in this regulatory arrangement, which enables the proliferation of landlord wealth in an economy predicated on low wages and high risk for those at the bottom, that Starmerism projects an image of moving fast and fixing things, but not transforming them. On the contrary, in the words of economist Daniela Gabor, Labour’s aim is to “get BlackRock to rebuild Britain.” The government’s investment summit is a taste of this direction. Starmer and Reeves are intent on opening the country’s infrastructure up to private firms with taxpayer incentives – transforming what remains of public infrastructure into assets, raising consumer costs and further curtailing any public control. Based on our experiences of privatised infrastructure over the past several decades – toxic water, limitless train delays and schools on the brink of collapse – one should not feel encouraged by Labour’s plans to “fix things.”
The Haves and Have-Nots
While in one breath Starmerism will persist in forcing sections of the population onto the labour market, in the other breath it will regulate society’s most vulnerable in the interests of making us all insecure. Labour’s Border and Security bill, though scrapping the Rwanda scheme, will maintain the Tories’ migrant deportation bill and supplement it with a new Border Security Command with new “counter-terror” plans to police migrants and refugees under the rubric of combating illegal smuggling gangs. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s early pronouncements that her department will carry out immigration blitz raids on car washes and nail bars provides another vital sign of the reactionary nature which underpins this government. The government’s upcoming white paper seeks to reduce historically high levels of immigration via a discriminate points-based system. This dynamic – increasingly fitted to a deeply unequal, ailing, service economy characterised by demographic ageing and sicker populations that need looking after cheaply – sees a confluence between high immigration on the one hand, and repressive border systems and revanchist discourses from above on the other. By reinforcing forms of illegality and informality amongst migrant workers, dehumanising them publicly at the same time, Starmerism devastates their living conditions while also reproducing conditions of precarity and competition throughout the broader labour market.
But the effects of this poverty need to be contained too. The Crime and Policing bill reveals the government’s intention to introduce a Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee that increases the visibility of police in communities, Respect Orders which ban “persistent adult offenders” from town centres, the building of more prisons, and a drive to break down the barriers to conviction rates. Today, while the crime rate in general has remained broadly static, according to the Office for National Statistics, street theft has risen by 40% and shoplifting increased by 30% over the past year. It was only last year that there were fears of an “epidemic” in collective theft from high street stores – or “organised looting”, according to the Co-op’s Director of Public Affairs. As well as this, in response to energy regulator Ofgem threatening to lift the energy price cap in 2022, 200,000 people committed to a campaign of non-payment with pollsters estimating 3 million would refuse payment of energy bills had Liz Truss not reduced the cap. E. P. Thompson, in his essay The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, documented the clash between trade liberalisation and price rises and the consequential explosion of popular revulsion, food riots and theft. In today’s morbid context, the emergence of a distinctively new ‘moral economy’ amongst a minority of the popular classes appears to be materialising and Starmerism is determined to subject them to its authoritarian methods.
Junior puppy
Typical of Labour’s Atlanticist illusions, in the face of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine, Starmer has repeatedly defended the Zionist state’s eliminationist assault on Gaza and its expansionist ambitions against Lebanon and Iran. The enthusiastic noise surrounding the appointment of progressive lawyer Richard Hermer KC, a critic of Israel and an opponent of Michael Gove’s anti-BDS bill, has evaporated. Despite suspending 30 export licences to Israel, Foreign Secretary David Lammy has refused to suspend any more – in particular the F-35 plane component parts which have been absolutely instrumental in Israel’s decimation of Gaza. This new government’s foreign policy commitments, composed of support for a “nuclear-deterrent triple lock”, increasing military spending by 40% over the course of the 2020s, and the promise to maintain the current levels of support for Ukraine’s war effort, typify its dogged enthusiasm for US hegemony and the lurch towards rearmament.
Yet, reflecting Britain’s tortured place in the world economy, Rachel Reeves has tried to brush off a Chinese spy scandal and pursue closer Chinese ties and greater investment. The election of Donald Trump for a second term, and his opening salvo of a 20% tariff on all US imports, would dramatically bludgeon any economy as open to global supply chains as Britain’s, potentially lowering economic growth by 0.7% according to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
Conclusion
Ultimately, although Starmerism is a growth-oriented vision of the economy conducted by authoritarian means, it is moulded by its own fealty to the Treasury, rentier capital, and a declining Atlanticism. The world is in a state of great flux. The old neoliberal consensus is in jeopardy, weighed down by its own contradictions: the breakdown of the US-led global order, the decimation of living standards across the board, the growing impact and realisation that runaway climate change is here to stay, as well as demographic decline to boot. Britain’s economic model isn’t simply breaking down, the social contract which rode Thatcher, Blair and then Cameron to power is cracking. The proliferation of high housing costs, increased interest rates and demographic ageing shatters the privatised welfare state which underpinned the neoliberal social contract and saw millions borrow credit in order to fund elder and social care, consumption and their children’s futures.
In the spirit of deprovincialising Britain, its trajectory may not be indicative of a global picture but – of all the advanced capitalist states – Britain is the least well-equipped to cope with this situation. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) warns that these emerging trends would triple Britain’s debt mountain to more than 270% of national income over the next 50 years. Taking the OBR’s fiscally prudent premonitions with a pinch of salt, Starmerism as a political formation is a conditioned attempt to find its feet between two worlds which necessitate quite distinct needs and wants. But it is a formation which is unabashedly trying to find its feet in the interests of capital and empire. After a humiliating first hundred days in office, McSweeney remarked that his first priority is to “make Number 10 boring again”. Since then, Starmer has spearheaded a “reset”, declared his ambition to make the state work “more like a start up” and “mainline AI in the veins” of the nation. Reeves is now warning departments to find savings in the lead-up to the government’s spending review, with more than 10,000 civil service jobs set to be slashed in 5% worth of cuts alongside billions in disability welfare cuts. Scaling down and condensing the election manifesto’s promises into six “milestones”, Labour have also watered down their clean power target to 95% by 2030.
These conditions, and Labour’s response, exhibit just how much of a “political sandcastle” their rule truly is. The election gave us a hint as well. The rise of five pro-Palestine, anti-austerity independent MPs was a great embarrassment for Starmerism, epitomised by the constant public attacks these new Parliamentarians attract from leading Labour lights such as the ex-MP Jonathan Ashworth. The seeds of an islamophobic moral panic against sections of a multiethnic working class seeking to organise independently of the party of government are another sign of Labour’s weakness. The Greens tail close behind Labour in up to 40 constituencies and Nigel Farage’s Reform, boosted subsequently by farmer protests, Trump’s election, and unending press attention, trail them in almost 90 seats. Starmerism’s auctioning off of Britain to rentierism, its hostility to migrants and its hollow insistence on its technocratic supremacy open up a pathway for Nigel Farage to have an inordinate say on who enters Downing Street in 2029.
The task of radical politics, aware that the projection of boredom entails a radically regressive shift against the working classes, is not simply to put a spanner in the works of Starmerism. As desirable as this is, socialists also need to develop an organising account of how we construct a radical leftwing majoritarianism which unites homeowners with renters, racialised majorities with racialised minorities, the rustbelt regions with the gentrifying metropoles and private and public sector workers. The election of five independent and four Green MPs, the mass Palestine solidarity movement, and the growth in discussion of developing a serious alternative to Labourism, all need to be capitalised upon. For too long, socialism has been understood as national state ownership and an equitable distribution of society’s resources. Instead, socialists today should build a project which emphasises building power from below and organising feasible political challenges which facilitate the unification of distinct class agents subjected to different experiences of capitalist domination – drawing together the provincial, national and global spheres into a network of global socialist strength. The Faragist right is doing this successfully, recreating insubordinate images of national and bodily sovereignty, masculine uplift and racialised resentment whilst also leaning into popular economic terrain such as supporting water nationalisation and opposing the two-child benefit cap. Our side needs to get up to speed.