LONDON — In the beating sun of the Downing Street garden last summer — weeks after winning an historic landslide — a downbeat Keir Starmer warned Brits “things will get worse before they get better.”
His MPs — and voters — are still waiting desperately for the upturn.
As the U.K. prime minister marks his first year in office this week, he’s beset by huge problems that show no signs of easing.
This was on stark display Tuesday night. His Labour government, which has a huge working House of Commons majority, was forced to fillet a plan to reform social security after enraging Labour MPs. The affair raised serious questions about Starmer’s grip on his own party.
It only gets harder from here on out.
With populists breathing down Starmer’s neck, undocumented migrants continue to reach U.K. shores in record numbers. Economic growth remains elusive. And squeezed public sector workers — despite sizable pay hikes — are getting restless.
A year ago Starmer was elected on a platform of “change” by voters furious with the Conservatives, who burned through leaders as public services creaked.
But after 12 months of major political missteps and screeching U-turns, voters and Labour MPs alike are now turning on the prime minister.
“I think this year is going to be bumpy, choppy,” one long-serving Labour MP predicted of Starmer’s second year in office. This, they warned, will be the “crunch” year for his leadership.
“Year two is the real test of: Come on, can you deliver?” agreed Luke Tryl, executive director of progressive polling think tank More in Common.
Starmer could yet prove his doubters wrong, but to do that he needs to show he is really making progress.
Friends and colleagues
Tuesday’s welfare debacle highlights an immediate problem for Starmer as year two looms: party management.
MPs have now got a taste of rebellion — and have forced major concessions they won’t soon forget. “There is now a new core of MPs who are going to be permanently or very often on the naughty step,” the MP, a welfare rebel, who was quoted above predicted.
They said the “baseline” of rebels had now increased. “I think they’ve sucked up so much so diligently they are now kind of beginning to look around and think that this isn’t what it’s meant to be like,” the MP added.
Gavin Barwell, a former chief of staff to Tory Prime Minister Theresa May as she lost her authority over Brexit, warned that “once backbenchers think a government can be pushed into U-turns, they’re more likely to try. You can’t undo that.
“Everyone is now going to think this is a government that, if enough of us call out a policy, they’re going to be forced into listening to us, essentially, so that is a problem.”
Starmer has thrown his arms around his Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney as the welfare crisis deepened, with the Times reporting that he told his Cabinet: “We will not resile from our record of achievement and we will not turn on our staff — including our chief of staff, without whom none of us would be sitting around this cabinet table.”
But the scale of the climbdown on Tuesday night means questions will continue to swirl about the makeup of Starmer’s top team. Meanwhile, ministerial frustrations about the slow pace of change in Whitehall abound.
But a former Labour Cabinet minister from the Tony Blair era said: “It’s a weak minister who makes that excuse. Only weak ministers blame the officials.”
Autumn renewal
With MPs heading off on their summer break in a matter of weeks, it will be Labour’s autumn party conference, swiftly followed by the setting of the U.K.’s budget, which offer the first big tests of whether Starmer can turn things around.
His team are already eyeing the conference as a chance for a “reset.”
“What that reset moment looks like, I don’t think even the government knows, but I think they’ve now realized that they need one,” said one Labour figure who speaks regularly to No. 10. They were granted anonymity, like others in this piece, to speak candidly about internal party discussions.
A second Labour figure close to No. 10 framed the conference and the autumn budget as natural opportunities to “redefine what you are and where you are going.”
Yet those efforts to reclaim the narrative could be quickly overshadowed if the government’s spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, downgrades its U.K. economic forecast. The U.K. chancellor has pledged that the government’s budget should be on course to be balanced or in surplus by 2029-2030, with debt falling as a share of the economy.
The rules — meant to shore up market confidence and to show that Labour can cut its cloth accordingly — severely restrain Reeves’ room for maneuver.
Helen Miller, incoming director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank, says reopening the Pandora’s box of departmental spending “seems unlikely” so soon after Reeves’ Treasury carried out a wide-ranging government spending review. The huge U-turns on welfare — yet to be costed in full — make things tougher still.
“That leaves tax rises,” Miller says. But this would be a hugely tricky moment for Reeves, who pledged not to increase taxes on working people in Labour’s manifesto and already stretched that definition with a controversial hike in employer taxes in the government’s first few months.
“If she needed a big tax increase, like a large amount of money, it would be genuinely hard to do without touching one of the big tax bases,” Miller added.
Pressure on Reeves’ budget could also come from public sector workers desperate for higher pay awards. Ministers swiftly settled pay disputes last July shortly after coming into office.
But the British Medical Association, a trade union representing doctors, is currently balloting members for strike action that could last six months.
If other unions follow their lead, some services could grind to a halt — hindering Labour’s aspiration for high economic growth.
“What they did last year in terms of accepting the [pay review body] recommendations is absolutely a step in the right direction,” said Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress. “Do I think it is in the medium, long term, enough to resolve those recruitment and retention issues in public services? Absolutely not.”
Stop the boats
After reckoning that the battered Tories are a sideshow for now, Starmer has identified Nigel Farage’s populist-right Reform UK party as Labour’s key opponent. Local elections at which Reform stormed to a host of victories nationwide only bolstered that theory.
Yet on a hot-button issue that animates Reform UK voters, the stakes are high.
Labour MPs in Reform-facing seats are growing anxious about what they see as little visible progress in their constituencies on either stemming the flow of small boats boarded by irregular migrants across the English Channel — or curbing the use of hotels housing asylum seekers.
“The biggie is boats where we haven’t made progress quickly enough,” a second MP said.
Starmer’s more collegial approach — working with Interpol, amping up cooperation with other European countries, and investing in intelligence — must “start to have real impact,” the second MP said.
If the numbers remain high “it might be that that turns out to be really, really tough, and we don’t really know how to solve this problem,” they warned.
Stop the war
Addressing these issues may not even end up at the top of Starmer’s priority list. The attritional war between Russia and Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East will also continue to vie for his attention.
In a weekend interview, Starmer admitted only having turned his attention “fully” to the growing welfare rebellion when he returned from the June 24-25 NATO summit in The Hague and after being “heavily focused” on foreign affairs.
While all prime ministers find themselves consumed by international affairs to some extent, Starmer has an enormous amount on his plate. The PM is also playing a pivotal role in post-Brexit talks with the EU following his much-vaunted “reset” with the bloc agreed in May.
Starmer has so far held these negotiations close rather than delegating to his foreign ministers, and they will be another drag on his time away from domestic matters.
Some members of Rishi Sunak’s former administration argue Starmer could take a leaf out of his Conservative predecessor’s book. Sunak effectively delegated foreign policy to former Prime Minister David Cameron, who was brought back into the Tory fold as a big hitter.
Starmer, however, is unlikely to loosen his grip on his international role. With the help of National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell — a Blair-era veteran — it’s the sphere where he has been seen to enjoy real success, keeping up European support for Ukraine and managing relations with the ever-unpredictable Donald Trump.
“The election of Trump in November sharpened so many of the challenges the U.K. is facing,” said Olivia O’Sullivan, director of the UK in the World program at the Chatham House foreign policy think tank.
Britain is also in a bind on China. It wants to drum up foreign investment in its pursuit of growth — but must rely on a deeply China-skeptical U.S. as its key security and defense partner.
A planned Starmer visit to China in the coming year could collide with efforts to keep Trump onside — not to mention tough-on-China language in the U.K.-U.S. trade deal the two sides agreed earlier this year.
“The big question is whether that language is actually going to mean anything in practice, because Trump is very unpredictable,” O’Sullivan said.
Starmer will also face renewed calls to take a tougher stance with Israel amid its continued campaign in Gaza — a galvanizing subject among many of his MPs, some of whom face losing their seats at the next election because of it. A third Labour MP, who is campaigning for the British government to recognize Palestine as a state, said “the pressure will continue from the backbenches” despite international efforts being stalled for now.
“Keir has been consistently behind the curve on this, and it’s a serious problem,” the MP said. “My voters want to know why he hasn’t done more.”
Voter anger
Britain’s next general election should still be years away. But after a local elections drubbing earlier this year, two big tests are coming up that will keep Starmer’s government in campaign mode.
Votes for the devolved administrations in Wales and Scotland will be closely watched to see if Starmer is recovering lost ground — or opening up new vulnerabilities. A YouGov poll in May put Plaid Cymru, the center-left Welsh nationalist party, in the lead for next year’s Welsh Senedd election, while Ipsos polling put the Scottish National Party in pole position in Scotland this week.
Both votes take place amid real frustration among voters.
“We won the election because voters were furious. We had a short grace period after coming into office. But almost immediately that fury transferred straight onto us,” a Labour staffer said.
“Sure the government has made mistakes, but the level of patience among voters is just non-existent,” they added. “People want simple and immediate-sounding answers. And Nigel Farage and Reform are good at capitalizing on that.”
Tryl of More in Common said that “levels of anger are off the charts in focus groups. I keep telling people I’m slightly worr[ied] that I’m coming across as hysterical, but it is quite deeply unhealthy.”
“The forthcoming 2024 election concealed a lot of the anger,” Tryl said. “Then Labour having come in and not met expectations, that has really bubbled up.”
The fightback
A spate of interviews around Starmer’s first anniversary as PM have shown him to be in a reflective mood.
He admitted his Downing Street garden warning had “squeezed the hope out,” adding: “We were so determined to show how bad it was that we forgot people wanted something to look forward to as well.”
The second Labour figure close to No. 10 quoted above also reckons Starmer’s team now know their enemy: “It’s not the Tories anymore — it’s the forces of populism, and not just Reform.”
“The PM can be a bulwark against populism and division. If the next election is going to be populism versus delivery, competence versus protest, I can’t think of a better person to do that than Keir,” they said.
Allies also point out that Starmer’s first year as Labour leader almost culminated in his resignation after a drubbing in a crucial by-election, but he battled on to prove the doubters wrong, see off multiple Tory leaders, and win a landslide. Starmer has said that having cleared up the Conservative mess, people will “see the difference that the Labour government made.”
Others are going to need much more convincing.
“If you asked Keir Starmer to sit down and write on a piece of paper the three things he’d be remembered for in 50 years, what would he say? I bet he couldn’t do it,” said the former Labour Cabinet minister.
Noah Keate and Emilio Casalicchio contributed reporting.
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