LONDON — T.S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month. For Keir Starmer, June will be the most grueling.
The U.K. prime minister will reckon with an avalanche of reviews — on spending, defense, China, welfare, immigration, industry, trade and more — that start to turn nebulous policy into something more concrete for his nascent Labour government.
Put simply: sh*t is getting real.
For some of Starmer’s own MPs, more firm direction will be a relief. His first few months in office were rocked by ethics and staffing rows, riots, and falling poll ratings. The return of Donald Trump complicated matters further.
Change might be on the way. Ask any department how a major project is going, and the chances are you’ll be told it’s due in “spring.” Whitehall officials often buy time by using astronomical spring (which ends on June 21), not meteorological spring (May 31). And that means a glut of announcements is likely to be bunched up around June — if, of course, they aren’t delayed again.
Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney is antsy — and has lately been looking for ways to paint Labour as “insurgents.” McSweeney recently briefed Labour MPs that there are three things on his mind: defense spending, a center-left vision for AI and tech, and radically reforming the state, one person familiar with the conversation told POLITICO.
Starmer is meanwhile setting his sights on rewiring Britain’s institutions. Reforms of planning rules to spur more building were spelt out this week; the welfare system next week. Starmer will say Thursday that the state has become bigger but weaker thanks to a “cottage industry of checkers and blockers slowing down delivery.”
Both men know the clock is ticking down to the next election in 2029.
One business lobbyist, who like other people spoken to for this article was granted anonymity to speak frankly, said: “In order to have its impact at the end of the parliamentary term, this is when the rubber has to hit the road. ” A union official was more blunt: “People don’t know what the government is trying to achieve. They don’t have a story to tell.”
POLITICO takes stock of the biggest things coming up that could define Starmer’s government.
Spending review
The defining moment will be Rachel Reeves’ review of three years of future government spending, expected around June.
The chancellor will preview her thinking in her spring statement on March 26, revealing crucial economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog (OBR). After years of chopping and changing under the Conservatives, Reeves once insisted this would not be a “major” fiscal event — yet it’s now widely expected to pave the way for Whitehall spending cuts as the OBR restricts her economic headroom under her self-imposed fiscal rules. A 10-year plan for the NHS is also expected in spring, but protecting health service funding could lead to more cuts elsewhere.
The key question will be whether Reeves’ “envelope” for public service spending rises holds steady at 1.3 percent per year, according to Paul Johnson. The director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a nonpartisan think tank, said the spending review will be a “huge moment” with “pretty big rows” if the envelope is reduced further, even if “all of history suggests that those numbers will get topped up later on.”
The wider question is how and when Britain’s anaemic growth will pick up. For this, Reeves is relying on many reforms that either sit outside her budget or are not “scored” by the OBR.
Johnson said: “My sense is that they’re beginning to understand the scale of the task, how difficult some of the trade-offs are going to be, how difficult it is to change some of the planning things and so on … It’s been clear for some time that they weren’t desperately well prepared at the moment that they came into office, and to some extent, the first period has been a very fast learning curve.”
Industry and trade
The government’s industrial strategy, trade strategy and small business strategy are all due roughly around June, one person familiar with the plans told POLITICO.
Businesses will be invited into the Department of Business and Trade in the coming weeks for a deep-dive to draw up the small business plans, an industry figure said.
An update sent to consultees on the industrial strategy Wednesday said “detailed policy design” is now under way on regulation, skills and access to talent, along with the role of public finance institutions. Publication — delayed from earlier in the year — will be aligned with the spending review. It is focused on eight “growth-driving” sectors including defense, financial services and advanced manufacturing over the next decade.
A “Financial Services Growth and Competitiveness Strategy” is also due in spring.
But looming over all these plans are U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports to the U.S., including steel and aluminum — which took effect Wednesday despite last-ditch attempts from Britain to secure a carve-out. The U.K. is still in talks to try to avoid broader U.S. tariffs from April 2. Trump has said a deal offered by Britain on tech and AI could avoid tariffs, but this is only expected later in the year, and he has not spelt out how.
Defense review
The government’s strategic defense review is due to report back in the first half of 2025. One U.K. official said it remains on track despite Trump upending much of the global order with his push for a peace deal in Ukraine.
Led by former NATO Secretary General George Robertson, it is looking at military capabilities, threats and “modernizing” the armed forces. An “integrated review” was published only in 2021 but had to be “refreshed” in 2023 as the world order changed.
The official quoted above said that most of the work on identifying threats was complete by late February, when Starmer announced a path to spending 2.5 percent of GDP on defense by 2027. Robertson’s team has been in the Ministry of Defence in recent weeks, and Starmer’s announcement will help it nail down the rest of the review.
The review could also include some findings from a separate look at the AUKUS submarine-building pact between the U.K., U.S. and Australia, by former National Security Adviser Stephen Lovegrove. It was delivered late to ministers in December and officials believe much of it will be kept confidential.
China
A delayed “China audit” of London-Beijing relations across government is due in the spring too. But officials say the Treasury and Foreign Office have been at loggerheads over its focus, which has broadened from defense and security to the search for economic growth.
Downing Street aides insist the tension between these two goals can be held in balance. But it will be tested hard when Starmer visits China, a trip that is being planned for later this year. Meanwhile officials say the audit is still being drafted.
This tension is highlighted by the continuing silence on whether the Chinese state will be included on the enhanced tier of Britain’s Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, a lobbying rules shakeup which will require people in the U.K. to register work they do for foreign entities.
The Sun newspaper reported earlier this month that China will not be in the enhanced tier. Two U.K. officials told POLITICO it was likely that, while individual Chinese companies or individuals could end up in the enhanced tier, the Chinese state as a whole would not be.
U.K. and U.S. officials also expect a deal to hand British sovereignty of the Chagos Islands — a militarily strategic archipelago in the Indian Ocean — to Mauritius will be agreed soon. But a treaty could take up to a year to pass through the U.K. parliament. Expect heated rows over how much Britain will pay to lease back the joint U.S.-U.K. Diego Garcia air base for 99 years.
Welfare benefits
Reeves and Starmer plan to cut Britain’s ballooning benefits bill, particularly for sick and disabled people. Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall is expected to publish a green paper early next week.
A person with knowledge of the plan said it will likely start a consultation on changing the “work capability assessment” (WCA) for sick and disabled people, which could take effect as soon as September, and announce other measures more quickly. Freezing the disability benefit Personal Independence Payment is one option on the table, as is tightening up “conditionality” for people who fail to meet conditions for claiming other benefits.
While Labour MPs mostly back reforming benefits, many baulk at slashing support for disabled people, and privately believe the plans are driven by Treasury cost-cutting. Plans for Kendall to unveil the cuts in a Commons statement this week were delayed and No. 10 officials instead engaged with worried MPs.
But one official said the overall figure of £5 billion to £6 billion a year in welfare savings is unlikely to change. They added WCA reform would likely only be “scored” in the summer spending review, while other measures such as a PIP freeze could be scored in the spring statement.
Two-child limit
The government’s child poverty taskforce, led by ministers, is expected to produce an “action plan” around June — and has revived internal Labour pressure on Reeves to scrap or modify the two-child limit on benefits, brought in by the Conservatives but kept by Labour.
This will give a sharp focus to the welfare reform debate. One Labour MP said Treasury and DWP officials are “talking at cross purposes,” adding: “I think the Treasury is invested in the cuts and DWP is invested in getting back to work. For f*ck’s sake, they briefed against Liz Kendall in the papers … because she was saying this is about getting people back to work, and they were saying no, this is about cutting the benefits bill. Those things are similar but they are not the same.”
One union official described the coming economic statements as “for the financial markets, not the public” and warned that Reeves’ cuts and gloom — after limiting winter fuel payments for the elderly — could cast her in the same light as former Conservative PM Margaret Thatcher, who was dubbed “milk snatcher.”
Immigration and EU
The Home Office is due to publish an immigration white paper in spring, adding meat to Starmer’s promise to cut legal net migration into the U.K. Visas, fees, and rules for international students and their dependents are all in scope.
This will see the reality of skills shortages butt up against the Home Office’s political desire to see numbers fall. Labour officials have always said they are focused on improving skills and training — and migration crackdowns inherited from the previous Tory government mean numbers are already likely to fall. But the public will expect to see results fast. Aides will also be braced for press coverage of the usual summer rise in small boat crossings of the English Channel.
What will happen to the EU’s repeated calls for a “youth mobility” scheme — allowing young people to live and work for a set time period in the U.K. — remains a mystery. Starmer has promised to “reset” the U.K.-EU relationship and has not ruled out a youth mobility scheme, but refuses to be drawn on any details.
Youth mobility has been raised by the EU repeatedly in private talks with the U.K. for months, a person with knowledge of them confirmed. EU officials including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will kickstart the high-level conversation at a U.K.-EU summit on May 19.
Meanwhile other thorny post-Brexit talks are still going. The “Windsor Framework,” governing goods movements between Northern Ireland and Britain, is due to take force fully on March 31. And officials expect long-stuck talks over the status of Gibraltar, a British overseas territory, to resume soon between the U.K., Gibraltar, Spain and the EU.
Crime and justice
Also due in “spring” — a.k.a. before June 21 — is the final report of a review of sentencing policy by former Tory Justice Secretary David Gauke. His interim findings said political bids by successive governments to sound “tough on crime” had brought the justice system to the brink of collapse. It will be a balancing act for a government that wants to sound tough while also putting reformers round its table.
The Home Office is preparing a white paper on policing reforms, which will take forensics labs and IT capabilities out of individual regions and pool them centrally to “drive efficiency,” but it is now expected in the summer rather than the spring.
And a so-called “Hillsborough Law” — named for the 1989 football stadium crush that killed 97 people — imposing a legal duty of candor on public bodies is expected to be introduced before April 15, the anniversary of the disaster. One government official suggested it may reduce the need for statutory inquiries into future disasters because it will be easier to compel public bodies to cooperate with investigations.
Local elections
Elections will be held on May 1 for 24 of England’s 317 councils; a tally that would have been bigger if not for delays caused by a reorganization of local government.
It will be Starmer’s first test as prime minister after falling poll ratings, but these seats were last elected in 2021, a low point for Labour. Pundits may look more closely at the performance of Nigel Farage’s upstart party Reform UK.
Tory and Labour strategists will already have an eye on the election for a mayor of Greater Lincolnshire. Defector Andrea Jenkyns, a former Tory MP, is running for Reform on an anti-net-zero ticket and one Conservative MP predicted she could win.
Westminster will also watch a by-election in Runcorn and Helsby, where Labour MP Mike Amesbury is resigning after he was handed a suspended prison sentence for punching a constituent. The by-election can be held on April 17 at the earliest, but may coincide with May 1, and Reform’s performance will be watched closely.
A second Labour MP said that while colleagues are fiercely loyal now, “the sh*t could hit the fan after the local elections” and “people will start to panic” if Reform and the left-wing Green Party make gains at the expense of Labour. They said some Labour MPs are already keeping a close eye on seat-by-seat “MRP” polls that predict they will be gone in 2029.
Assisted dying
Backbench Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s bill to legalize assisted dying has become a point of furious debate as it trudges through the slow process of becoming law. While not officially supported by the government, Starmer has voted in favor of the principle.
Supporters expect the committee stage to be complete by parliament’s easter recess, meaning a final vote of MPs before the bill goes to the House of Lords would happen some time in May or June.
The general expectation is that MPs will vote on the bill again on one of the Commons’ first few sitting Fridays after Easter recess — April 25, May 16 and June 13 and 20. It would take at least two sitting Fridays before it can be dispatched to the Lords, where it will face more grinding debate.
The question will be whether the “magic number” of 28 MPs switch sides from pro to anti, blocking the bill before it can clear the Commons.
And the rest …
Many thorny problems will remain unresolved long after June.
There is still no agreed plan for the restoration of the crumbling Palace of Westminster, the seat of the U.K. parliament. MPs are due to have fresh options and indicative budgets put to them later this year, but few see Reeves approving billions of pounds of spending.
Eyes within the government are already turning to Starmer’s next king’s speech, the moment when another year’s worth of policy will be announced. Aides typically refuse to say when it will be held, but July or early autumn would not be unexpected.
And there are whispers — naturally unconfirmed — about whether the PM will carry out a ministerial reshuffle later this spring or summer. Those on Labour’s “soft left” worry about the future of their few remaining advocates, including Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy. No. 10 refused to comment on reshuffle rumors.
Perhaps Starmer would be wise to hold back — if nothing else, for the sake of party unity. “Once it’s done, people who have been loyal will know whether they’re getting promoted,” said a third MP. “If I were them I’d delay the reshuffle forever.”
The post Why sh*t gets real for Keir Starmer in June appeared first on Politico.
