Labour’s screw-ups reveal how the party will govern Britain

For a barrister, Sir Keir Starmer is surprisingly slow on his feet. The Labour leader had an illustrious career at the Bar but can struggle under light interrogation. When Israel launched its assault on Gaza in response to Hamas’s attack on October 7th, Sir Keir was asked a seemingly simple question during a radio interview: “A siege is appropriate? Cutting off power, cutting off water, Sir Keir?” Sir Keir replied: “I think Israel does have that right.”

The trap was sprung. Clips of the former human-rights lawyer appearing to endorse what many regard as war crimes went viral in Labourland, where Israel and Palestine is a poisonous issue. Panicky aides clarified that Sir Keir had said that Israel had to stay within international law, but the damage was done. Dozens of councillors resigned; mps were inundated with emails from pro-Palestinian members and voters. Threats of shadow-minister resignations unless Sir Keir endorsed a ceasefire followed; the Labour leader refused, largely to stop Britain becoming an outlier among its allies. He was stuck, kippered by a breakfast-show radio dj.

Sir Keir has triggered a month-long internal row. Slapdash behaviour from Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, caused a more amusing episode. Ms Reeves had found time in her schedule to bash out a book titled “The Women Who Made Economics”. A reviewer at the Financial Times noticed that phrases had been lifted from Wikipedia, the Guardian and even one of Ms Reeves’s own colleagues. In one case, four paragraphs from Wikipedia on the concept of rent-seeking were copied in almost word-for-word.

Both of these errors tell a story. One is serious, one is silly. Neither will determine whether Labour ends up in power. But each demonstrates how Labour will govern when it does.

A bitter row over Gaza is a reminder that with Labour in power, its neuroses will replace Conservatives ones. Britain has spent a decade wrestling with its position in Europe not because voters demanded it, but because Conservative mps were obsessed by it. With Labour in office, topics such as Israel and Palestine will become matters of internal political psychodrama rather than cold debate about policy. Backbench Tory bores waving copies of the Treaty of Rome will be replaced by Labour counterparts quoting the Balfour Declaration. It was, after all, a row over Israel that led Tony Blair to realise his time was almost up in 2006.

Party unity is a fragile thing. Sir Keir has tight control of the party, but it has been achieved with sticks rather than carrots. Dissent has not been tolerated; fringe elements within Labour have been cowed. People within the party have put up with this due to the prospect of power. Painful decisions have passed with little protest as a result. This summer, Labour confirmed that it will not remove a two-child limit on child benefit. Doing so would lift 250,000 children, which is the population of Stoke-on-Trent, out of poverty at a cost of about £1bn ($1.2bn; 0.05% of GDP), but fiscal credibility came first. Gaza has shown the limits to discipline.

Control was one part of the Labour leadership’s pitch. The other was competence. Ms Reeves’s literary endeavours have damaged that bit of the pitch. The shadow chancellor mentions her brief stint as a Bank of England economist in her 20s with the swagger of a former West Ham youth player turning up to play five-a-side football on a Monday night. Being caught lifting an explanation of rent-seeking from Wikipedia straight into a book is not career-ending. But it is mortifying.

Labour’s reputation for economic competence is relative: it relies on Tory ineptitude. Labour has failed to explain how it would differ in government from a Conservative one on fiscal matters. Ms Reeves has ruled out any tax rises beyond tinkering with things like vat on private school fees, while also keeping roughly to Tory spending plans. But Conservative polling is only four points above where it was at the nadir of the Liz Truss era, when her chancellor was appearing on television with a graphic of sterling plunging next to his head. Voters would choose anyone else; Labour are anyone else.

Sheer luck is the most overlooked part of Labour’s rise. Sir Keir’s tenure as leader could easily have ended in 2021 after a humiliating by-election defeat in north-east England and a narrow victory in another. The Conservatives rode to his rescue in 2022, switching prime ministers twice in two months and triggering a financial crisis. Even the row about Gaza could be worse. Few voters are paying attention to it. Helpful distractions have emerged, such as an inquiry into Boris Johnson’s inept handling of the pandemic (complete with foul-mouthed WhatsApp transcripts). Luck, however, cannot be relied on. It was bad luck that a reviewer spotted borrowing in Ms Reeves’s tome. It was bad practice that put it there.

Step by step

Labour have reached the edge of power by making few mistakes. This is fortunate, since error correction happens slowly. A quicker leader would not have made his error on Gaza in the first place; a more flexible one would have corrected it faster. The response to Ms Reeves’s borrowed paragraphs was a delicious cocktail of denial and confession, noted one wag. Labour’s slow-and-steady approach can be an asset in opposition but will be a liability in office.

Now that a Labour government is seen as an inevitability, Westminster journalists have begun inflating the feats and skills of Sir Keir and Ms Reeves to fit their poll lead. Boot-licking season has begun. Yet what is now considered masterful inactivity can as easily be labelled timidity. Under Sir Keir, Labour has let others make major policies on his behalf. When it comes to foreign policy, Labour has been happy to follow allies. When it comes to fiscal policy, the party has moved in lockstep with the Conservatives, creating a new economic consensus. In government, however, Labour will occasionally have to stride out alone. Sir Keir will have to learn to be quick on his feet. ■

Read more from Bagehot, our columnist on British politics:
The rise and fall of class dysphoria in Britain (Oct 26th)
How rationing became the fashion under the Tories (Oct 19th)
The rise of Britain’s new nanny state (Oct 10th)

Also: How the Bagehot column got its name