Starmer Has Already Perfected the Art of Doing the Least

It’s giving nothing.

by Rivkah Brown

12 July 2024

Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. REUTERS
Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. REUTERS

For a party that hates trans people, Labour has in its first week in government shown a gift for political drag. With its frantic announcement blitz, the leadership appears to have already mastered the art of appearing to do the most while doing the absolute least.

On Tuesday Rachel Reeves gave her first speech as chancellor, indicating not so much what Labour would do as what it wouldn’t: namely, build council houses. Yvette Cooper appeared in slick social media videos glad-handing police officers (hopefully they accept handshakes at Aldi now, as Keir Starmer has already intimated he won’t be increasing public sector pay). The Daddy of Downing Street (personally I welcome the more liberal use of “Daddy” in public life) hinted at a Euros bank holiday.

Meanwhile, Ed Miliband – who appears to have been handed the plum job of good-cop-in-chief – immediately repealed the ban on onshore wind farms, one of the few actual things that happened this week. The energy secretary also nixed new oil and gas licences with immediate effect – except he didn’t. Civil servants were embarrassingly forced to correct the Telegraph’s gun-jumping story, based on a real but as-yet unfulfilled Labour manifesto pledge. Who could possibly say where the paper got its “complete fabrication”?

The most elaborate act, however, was given by one Wesley Streeting.

Throwing off his usual head boy persona, this week Streeting appeared before the nation as a GP. On Thursday, the health secretary unveiled his newest extended metaphor: he would “diagnose the problem” in order to “write the prescription” for the ailing NHS. Now all the 7.6 million of us waiting for a routine hospital appointment must do is wait a few short months for lead investigator Ara Darzi to find a sufficiently protracted way to tell us what we already know.

The thing is, Lord Darzi – a world-renowned innovator in the fields of both keyhole surgery and ways to waste money – may have other ideas. Darzi was last asked to review the NHS by Gordon Brown in 2008. Darzi recommended London open up 150 “polyclinics” that would combine GPs with other health services such as urgent and social care. The key feature of these clinics, besides their £250m price tag? Private healthcare companies like Bupa could bid to run them. Despite 1.2 million people petitioning against Darzi’s proposal, Gordon Brown went with it. Two years later, polyclinics had proven an abject failure and were binned by the coalition government. Yet what is history but a fable agreed upon?

Darzi’s proclivity for private-sector solutions to public-sector problems chimes perfectly with Streeting’s own. In his four years as shadow health secretary, Streeting made increasingly unsubtle noises about the need for NHS privatisation (he prefers “reform”). Like all Starmerite politicians, Streeting has found ever more creative ways to invoke his working-class roots to justify his deeply bourgeois politics, challenging “middle-class lefties” to stop him from selling off the NHS (you go, Glen Coco!).

Darzi’s penchant for expensive schemes, however, may displease the health secretary – though if the Forde Review proved anything, it’s that Starmer loves nothing more than to completely ignore a review he has himself commissioned. In fact, Brown’s response to Darzi was the historical anomaly, since the very purpose of government reviews, from the Casey Review of the Met Police (it’s fixed now, apparently) to the post-Grenfell Hackitt Review of building regulations and fire safety, is to kick hot potatoes into the long grass (an almost Streeting-level mixed metaphor there), buy the government time to do nothing and bamboozle the public with policy jargon.

Streeting’s NHS histrionics hint at what we can expect of Starmerism: endless – and ironically, ruinously expensive – diagnoses, zero solutions. We will come out of the Starmer administration with more investigators, inspectors, commissioners and commanders, more research and reviews than any government has ever produced. Global temperatures will rise by 1C solely from the heat of Whitehall printers churning out 180-page reports on how poor we all are and how terrible everything is. The same ten quid will be endlessly reannounced by media outlets starving for scoops while Labour spends what little money it actually will shooting one million “best value inspectors” into space to examine the black hole in council finances, hoping like some Reddit-pilled quantum physicists that if you look at something under a microscope, it simply ceases to exist. God help us all.

Rivkah Brown is a commissioning editor and reporter at Novara Media.

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