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Keir Starmer is embattled but not threatened. It is a strange combination. He is not challenged by Kemi Badenoch, who is weak in parliament and irrelevant outside it. Nor is the prime minister in immediate peril from Reform, the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. They pose electoral challenges in the coming years but they can’t stop the government passing laws in the meantime. The Labour leader is not in danger from backbench rebellion. Dissenting MPs grow in number but not at the rate that presages regicide.
Starmer has been dealt a tough hand in some ways. He inherited a rotten economy in a volatile world. But he also has advantages not enjoyed by many of his predecessors: a vast Commons majority, an obedient cabinet, a splintered opposition. His greatest problem isn’t a politician or party. It isn’t an industrial lobby or foreign power. It is a question, small but deeply penetrating: why?
Labour has done lots of stuff, often making people cross. Winter fuel payments have been rationed; businesses have been landed with a higher national insurance bill. There have been winners, too. Junior doctors and train drivers got a pay rise to end their strikes, but trouble averted doesn’t win political friends as efficiently as pain makes enemies.
It is hard for any government to earn credit for what they do if voters cannot easily intuit why they are doing it. This is Labour’s big problem.
“Why” is a deceptively simple question, containing two different concepts. It inquires into process and motive. It asks “from what cause?” and “to what purpose?” One is an explanation about the past, the other is a story about the future.
For example, one answer to the question of why cut benefits is that the Tories left a £22bn budget black hole. But that doesn’t explain why it has to be winter fuel or personal independence payments. The Conservative legacy is a cause of budget choices, not a moral compass pointing to the better path.
Another answer might be that the benefits bill is a poor use of public money, going to people who don’t need it or could replace it with wages if only they would work harder. But if that is the argument, the Conservative legacy loses its potency. If there are savings to be made anyway, and that’s the right thing to do, why blame it on the black hole?
It should be possible to recognise that there are perverse incentives that need ironing out of the benefits system, while also striving not to drive vulnerable people into destitution. But that is an agenda of reforming the state, not shrinking it under fiscal duress. So which is it? It is hard to sound authentic in defence of a policy when your party’s core economic argument and its collective body language all scream reluctance and queasy compulsion.
The same problem now arises with Labour’s immigration policy. Starmer has declared that he wants to bring net migration down. Why?
One answer is that voters say they want it and will back Nigel Farage if they don’t get it. The prime minister insists that isn’t the reason. In a speech launching an immigration white paper on Monday, he rejected any suggestion that government policy was about “this or that strategy, targeting these voters, responding to that party”.
That wouldn’t need saying if his audience found it easy to imagine less cynical motives. But if we take Starmer at his word, what does he say is the reason for this particular set of policies?
The argument is that the Tories ran an open-door policy, importing workers to do jobs that might otherwise have been done by British citizens. That the domestic workforce lacked the skills to do those jobs was also a symptom of Conservative neglect. The influx of foreigners undermined social cohesion. Without reversing these trends, Britain risks becoming “an island of strangers”, the prime minister said. The damage already done is “incalculable”.
The proposed remedy is to stem the flow of migrants. The shortfall in workers will be supplied from a glut of millions who are classified as “economically inactive” in labour market data, but capable of work (or will soon be deemed as such by the Department for Work and Pensions).
The gap in skills will be mended with funding from higher levies charged on businesses that request visas for migrant workers. Employers that want to bring in foreigners must also have an approved plan to boost the capabilities of domestic workers.
There is a dubious simplicity in a labour market equation that neatly cancels out net migration with re-activated benefits claimants.
Assuming the switch is even possible it is gargantuan in scope – a fundamental reconfiguration of the way Britain works. The white paper concedes, with unintentional bathos, that the process “will take time to establish”.
It doesn’t acknowledge the cost. The Home Office could turn off the visa taps and hope for a miracle in the domestic jobs market before the NHS, social care and other services are crippled by staff shortages. More likely, the Treasury will intervene, insisting that the transition be incremental enough to keep the economic wheels turning. Net migration will come down – it is falling already – but not with such tangible demographic effect that voters will notice a change in the national complexion and thank Starmer for it.
If the harm done by the Tories was “incalculable”, how will Labour calculate the reduction in harm after just a few years of running its own marginally less permissive regime? The lurid rhetoric that was chosen to define the motive behind the white paper – answering the question of why Starmer is doing this – guarantees that it will be judged a failure by the very people to whom that language is addressed.
And yet most of the actual policy could have been presented with the opposite inflection. The emphasis could have been on Britain’s historical record of successfully integrating migrant communities and the vast economic and cultural contribution they have made. The argument that unmanaged borders undermine confidence in government and put community cohesion at risk could still be made. So might the case for rebalancing the labour market.
But there is a way to narrate those issues as a confrontation with cynical opportunists who revel in division and foment mutual suspicion. Immigration reform could be sold in terms that demolish the economic illiteracy of parties whose business model is burning bridges and turning neighbours into strangers. Labour could still talk about rules, fairness and border control, but make it a challenge to Farage instead of a tribute to him.
But that would be out of character for a prime minister who has reached the top by swerving hard choices, flinching from difficult debates. His method has worked. It is why he is prime minister, but only in one sense of the word. It is the reason for his victory, not the purpose.
The lack of that second part, a better answer to the question why Starmer is prime minister, explains how he has come to look so constrained, even with parliament at his command; beleaguered when his enemies are divided. It defines the strange spectacle of the unchallenged leader who besieged himself.
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Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
