As every administration nears its end, historians and commentators try to pinpoint the particular moment, if any, when it all started to go wrong. In the case of the Starmer Government, I suspect that there will be a fair case to make for yesterday’s King’s Speech.
It isn’t that there wasn’t good stuff in it. I like data centres and wind farms, and giving the Crown Estate more powers (it owns most of the British sea bed) was an imaginative touch. And much of the bad stuff, such as the smoking ban and the abysmal Martyn’s Law were originally ours.
It certainly hasn’t done much to shake the media’s narrative (which suits both Labour and the Conservatives) that this represents a big swing towards a ‘big state’, as if we previously had a small state, nor the steady flow of favourable comparisons to the previous government.
But we should do Labour the courtesy of assessing it on its own terms. Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves set themselves a very ambitious goal of turbocharging housebuilding and kick-starting economic growth – and if the Chancellor’s rhetoric about “living standards” is any indication, she means the real, per-capital-GDP sort of growth, not the adding-people-to-the-economy sort.
That is an entirely commendable ambition. So it is a pity that yesterday is probably the day they failed to do it, for two reasons.
On housing, the challenge is practical. Houses take time to build, and there is considerable delay between enacting legislation and spades going in the ground. This King’s Speech was, according to analysts I’ve spoken to, the only chance to deliver substantial planning reform and have it pay off in this Parliament.
Alas, Starmer’s offer proved to be no better in reality than the anaemic proposals in his manifesto. Labour has balked from a root-and-branch reform of the planning system; like a certain previous Housing Secretary, this government excels at conjuring dramatic headlines (and pretty pictures); the actual policy offer is much less impressive.
It’s not that the measures announced are bad, per se (although the permanent mortgage guarantee scheme was missing). But maintaining the overall planning regime means that the Government will have to actively fight councils and objectors every inch of the way, even as events and distractions (not to mention objections from newly-elected Labour MPs with narrow majorities to defend) start to mount.
(This is to say nothing of their reviving the Renters (Reform Bill), an historically-illiterate piece of populist nonsense which was already making people homeless, as the Renters Rights Bill. Always remember: the private rented sector has the highest occupation density, so cracking down on it in the absence of a big increase in overall housing supply will reduce the number of rooms going.)
This lack of will to challenge the status quo – whilst very much leaning into the impression of doing so – ties in with the problem on growth.
The sad thing about growth is that it isn’t deliverable inside either party’s comfort zone (accepting that the Tory Party’s revealed comfort zone is ‘wherever the Treasury tells it to sit’.) That’s why we haven’t had any in so long. David Willetts set out the test facing Starmer on this site a couple of weeks ago:
“The battle to get economic dynamism and higher growth is hard and unpopular work. It is particularly hard to deliver in a mature democracy richly endowed with interest groups, many of which are organised to try to stop things happening.”
Instead, we got plans for a raft of new employment protections and, thus, a stickier labour market. Not necessarily bad legislation on its own terms – one can simply support more workers’ rights – but in a genuinely pro-growth programme it would need to be balanced by other pro-dynamism measures which aren’t there.
Other interventions are less defensible. We have touched already on Martyn’s Law, another kick to our ailing hospitality sector. But the real Death Star just entering detection on the edge of our solar system is the Draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill, which aims to expand the regime of the Equality Act into new pastures.
Direct racial discrimination on pay has been illegal in this country for some decades (as had sex discrimination in 2010, when the Equality Act was cynically enacted by the outgoing Labour government). But that applied to specific, evidenced cases; the new version allows any any headline disparity in pay, even between groups doing different jobs, to be classed as discrimination.
Remember those historic equal pay lawsuits that bankrupted councils for the crime of having effectively-unionised binmen in years past? Just wait until the lawyers start combing over the racial profile of their various workforces – and that’s before they get to the NHS.
(There’s no mention in the official notes about distributing lucrative public contracts on the basis of race though, so that’s something.)
None of that paints a picture of a pro-growth environment, even if said picture has a welcome abundance of pylons in it.
Of course, Starmer has only been in office two weeks; it is an early stage at which to write off his government. He and Reeves can bring forward more legislation, and make vigorous use of other means (have you heard the good news about development orders?).
But they will likely never be stronger than they were yesterday, fresh of an historic election and with the media primed for radical action. Even then, we can see the first traceries of what could be tomorrow’s cracks: the hurried announcement of a task force to buy off backbenchers over the two-child limit; a simmering mutiny over an over-mighty chief of staff.
Even if the Prime Minister and Chancellor grow wiser in office and realise stronger medicine is needed, they may not be able to deliver it, especially without having got their MPs buy-in via the election manifesto. This was likely their best chance to show us what they’ve got. It was not enough.