No plan, no passion. Keir Starmer's Labour is already running on empty

The National

28-05-2025

The first was that even after 14 years out of power, the party was woefully unprepared in policy terms for entering government. The second was that even measured against the pitifully low calibre of recent Tory leaders, Keir Starmer just isn't very good at politics.
Let's deal with the second of those points first. Prime Ministers Questions is hardly the be-all and end-all when it comes to the public forming their impressions of party leaders. However, it still plays a role in testing a leader's ability to think on their feet and set out a political narrative on behalf of their party.
'Forensic' was the word most commentators reached for in describing Starmer's low-key approach at first. But while that should have been like Kryptonite to the bluster, blether and outright dishonesty of Boris Johnson, it still never really landed. In the end, Starmer profited simply by not being his opponent.
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We can skip past Liz Truss, in this at least. Yet even when it came to Rishi Sunak – a man who finished his premiership with even poorer ratings than did Johnson – Starmer's leaden, deaden, flat-footed approach barely made an impact on prevailing trends. Again, he profited simply by not being his opponent.
The first point, however, is the one which has played the biggest part in Starmer and his party squandering what little goodwill they might have begun with. For while a prime minister with a tin ear for public opinion can still prosper if they have good advice on tap and a plan that people understand and think will work, it's pretty clear that Starmer entered Downing Street last year without having either of those things.
You can question whether the initial blame for this lies with Sue Gray or Morgan McSweeney as his two key chosen lieutenants at the time. Either way, the failure even yet to pull together a compelling narrative about what the Labour Government wants to achieve in office and how it plans to do it, is something where the buck stops with the Prime Minister alone.
A government with a plan and a clear story to tell would be able to castigate the Tories for the mess they made of Brexit and the economic disaster they left behind them.
It would have a compelling argument about why any genuinely 'tough decisions' were both necessary and in everyone's best long-term interests. And the impact of those decisions would be something which they'd have steeled themselves to ensure fell only on those best able to withstand the impact.
Instead of that, it's the elderly, the disabled and the financially marginalised who either have or are about to bear the brunt of Labour's fiscal tightening. Their Brexit mitigations are offered not confidently as a return towards sanity, but almost as an apology wrapped in toxic 'island of strangers' rhetoric. Meanwhile, showpiece pledges such as cutting energy bills simply fall to pieces in the face of bills heading obstinately in the opposite direction.
The harsh lesson for Labour is that if you campaign on a pledge of delivering 'change', then change you had better deliver. And so we had the announcement last week that Labour will reverse their cuts to the Winter Fuel Payment – just without any detail on when or how.
Starmer has also apparently let it be known in private that he would like to scrap the two-child benefit cap after all. Although, once again, there is no indication of when or how this might come about.
Yet there is still no confirmation of when his government's 'Child Poverty Strategy' – originally planned for publication earlier this year – will eventually see the light of day. And even yet, having apparently failed to learn anything from those earlier mistakes, his Government is still considering ending the Personal Independence Payments that so many people rely on.
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It's all drift, dither and lack of direction. And while ordinarily, Starmer would continue to profit by simply not being his current Tory opponent, he has been outflanked by Farage claiming from the luxury of opposition that he would reverse the Winter Fuel Payment cut and the two-child cap, while the SNP have already committed to doing so from the position of being in government.
In many ways, Starmer seems to be becoming like Gordon Brown in government – surrounded by courtiers pretending to know his mind, all while the man himself remains suspended in a permanent state of indecision.
Except, liberated from office, even Brown has managed to say publicly and in his own words that the two-child cap is cruel and needs to go.
So with less than a year to go until the Holyrood elections, where is Anas Sarwar in all of this?
Speaking truth to power in London? Urging Starmer to 'read his lips'?
Telling Scottish voters, with the chutzpah that only he can muster, that they need to vote 'Scottish' Labour in order to protect Scotland from Labour?
Before the last election, Labour politicians were on loop claiming that a resurgence of Scottish Labour was necessary in order to secure a Labour government in Westminster. It was a claim which was as dubious politically as it was mathematically.
How ironic it is that barely 12 months later, it is now Scottish Labour who are desperate for a resurgence in UK Labour fortunes in order to save their own skins next May.