LONDON — Keir Starmer was meant to drain the swamp.
Swept to office in no small part due to the near-constant drumbeat of scandal that had engulfed his Conservative rivals, the Labour leader promised to do things differently and restore trust in Westminster.
Labour included a wave of significant reforms in its manifesto, with the wannabe U.K. prime minister telling voters in the final days of the campaign he’d start ripping the rot out “straight away.”
But while the party made a handful of quick moves on taking office — establishing a so-called modernization committee tasked with shaking up standards and working practices in the House of Commons and beginning the process of removing hereditary peers from the House of Lords — campaigners and policy experts say they are underwhelmed by the Labour government’s efforts.
Daniel Bruce, chief executive of Transparency International UK, said Labour’s welcome but “modest” progress on the agenda amounted to little more than “tinkering around the edges.”
A recent study from the National Centre for Social Research found that since the 2024 election, trust among voters that the government will put the nation’s interests above those of the party is at a record low.
“The government might be busy responding to outside events and the instability around the world, which is perfectly understandable and defensible, but you can’t pause the clock on declining political trust, and without that political trust the very legitimacy of the government and faith in our democracy is going to continue to erode,” Bruce said.
Susan Hawley, executive director at campaign group Spotlight on Corruption, argues that an embarrassing controversy over the acceptance of free gifts and hospitality by Labour’s top team just months after taking power may also have dampened ambitions. “Unfortunately, the freebie row probably pulled the rug out and made it hard to look like they were on the front foot with the agenda and cleaning up the last administration’s problems,” she said.
A government spokesperson told POLITICO they were “committed to establishing the right structures to uphold the highest standards in public life.”
“We have already taken steps to improve probity and transparency, including through introducing a new ministerial code which emphasizes the principles of public life, by strengthening the terms of reference for the independent adviser, and by introducing a new monthly register of gifts and hospitality,” they added.
Great expectations
Having put his plans to restore trust in politics at the heart of his first speech as prime minister, a quick flurry of announcements offered hope to campaigners that despite the early crises that had rocked his administration, Starmer was not to be distracted from the fight.
A significant commitment was delivered straight away with the establishment of a Modernisation Committee. The body quickly closed a loophole to stop MPs from being paid by outside sources to provide advice on issues related to parliament, or on “public policy and current affairs.”
There was more early progress made through an update to the ministerial code, which emphasized restoring trust and embodying public service. An important reform was also delivered to ensure the adviser on ministerial standards was properly independent, by removing the prime minister’s right to veto the watchdog’s investigations into potential wrongdoing.
But those achievements represent only a fraction of the agenda that Labour had repeatedly told the public was urgently required to reverse hemorrhaging trust in British political institutions.
While hereditary peers are headed for the chopping block, there has been scant detail around Labour’s plans to force peers to retire at the age of 80. Even less has been said about its lofty manifesto goal to replace the upper house with a more representative alternative.
And while having successfully closed one lobbying loophole, progress on the rest of the Modernisation Committee’s work to ban most second jobs for MPs and add some rigor to the standards regime has been glacial.
It’s the same story when it comes to ministerial scrutiny, too. While data about meetings between outside stakeholders and the prime minister and other Cabinet Office officials have been moved to a monthly, rather than quarterly publication schedule, the government has ditched its promise to implement a commitment made by the previous Conservative administration to apply the same rules across all Whitehall departments.
Slow walking
Campaigners insist that no matter how much further progress is made on those issues, the barometer of trust won’t shift an inch, given key planks of Labour’s ethics plans remain up in the air.
Having rightly concluded that voters are genuinely concerned about standards in Westminster, the party realized that attempting to discuss the often dry and technical solutions during the chaos of a campaign was futile. Instead, Labour strategists shrewdly decided to concentrate its sleaze-busting pledges on establishing an independent Ethics and Integrity Commission — a concept simple enough to grasp the attention of voters, and a convenient soundbite for Labour hopefuls to deploy when asked about how it would clean up politics.
But having sold the body as an all-singing, all-dancing remedy for wrongdoing, its continued absence has become a 10-ton elephant in the room.
Despite decades of slapdash additions to Westminster’s standards landscape, campaigners had been cautiously optimistic, given Labour’s apparent energy and ambition, that the chaotic jumble of regulators and rules could finally be whipped into shape. But as the months have ticked by, concerns have only grown that whatever form the body eventually takes, it will lack the teeth and the mandate required to properly overhaul standards.
Those concerns were further cemented this week after the Guardian reported claims from government sources that the process of setting up an independent body had been deemed too complex, and that a rebrand of existing regulators under a new “umbrella” was now the most likely outcome.
“If, as is being suggested, that title is used as a tool to hoover up what is a complicated standards regulation landscape under one umbrella, but fundamentally not change how they’re able to do their job, then it will fail,” Bruce said. “We won’t move on.”
Multiple campaigners and policy experts suggested that the transition from opposition to government had resulted in responsibility for the brief being handed over to ministers with less appetite for the fight. Others have questioned whether Labour felt it had secured enough goodwill with voters during the campaign that it could afford to let the timelines and details slip.
No matter the reason, Labour’s stagnant progress has dented the confidence of campaigners, meaning a recent commitment to deliver an elections bill later this year has been met with less celebration and more trepidation than would have been expected just 12 months ago.
Anti-corruption groups fear that welcome moves to limit foreign money in politics and enhance the power of regulators will be used as cover to avoid the contentious but vital step of introducing a cap on overall donations — a measure seen as fundamental to curb the corrosive public perception that parties are beholden to those with the deepest pockets.
But the biggest frustration is that Labour has fallen directly into the traps that campaigners had spent months warning them to avoid.
For instance, while election reform is included in Labour’s manifesto, ministers barely mentioned the plans in public until it was revealed that Elon Musk was toying with the idea of donating tens of millions to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party — offering the insurgent parliamentarian a golden opportunity to paint the proposals as a knee-jerk establishment stitch-up.
“A lot of the bits they were thinking of doing are now likely to be perceived as if they are trying to keep Reform out of power,” Hawley added. “They’ve already lost the first mover advantage on that, so they actually do have to go quite bold to make it cut through. If you’re just going to tinker around the edges, then that really isn’t going to move the dialog.”
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