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Governing is hard, and sometimes it is harder than others. This morning, Keir Starmer had to give a short speech welcoming the election of a deputy leader of his party seven weeks after he had sacked her from his government. This seemed to be a fitting end to a week in which all candidates to lead the grooming gangs inquiry withdrew; a migrant deported to France came back again on a small boat; Labour was humiliated in a by-election where it had always won in Wales; and a migrant sex offender was set free by mistake. In fact, Lucy Powell won the deputy leadership by a narrower margin, 54 per cent, than expected, considering how unhappy Labour members are with the direction of the party. But her win will strengthen the argument of those who want the government to spend more and tax more, a month before a Budget in which Rachel Reeves is already in an impossible bind, trying to spend less and tax more without breaking manifesto promises. In her victory speech, Powell also repeated the plausible but misleading slogan, “We won’t win by trying to out-Reform Reform.” Her election reveals a party unwilling to face up to the harder truth, which is that Labour will lose if it fails to stop the boats, which is one of the causes of Nigel Farage’s lead in the opinion polls. It is unusual for a government to face two impossible problems at once, but that is the situation that Starmer is in. The public finances are caught between irresistible spending pressures and immovable promises not to raise taxes, while this government seems just as powerless to stop the boats as the last one was. I bumped into Michael Crick this week, one of my heroes of political journalism. He is working on a short biography of Ted Heath, one of a series on prime ministers published by Swift that includes Harold Wilson by Alan Johnson. He said he thought that politics today echoed 1974-75, when it seemed that Britain had become “ungovernable”. Then, it was the difficulty of reconciling the demands of workers organised by powerful trade unions with the fight against inflation. Today, the economic problems seem just as insoluble, but with the issue of uninvited immigration on top. Another of my heroes, Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times, the most stylish commentator of our age, puts forward a theory in his latest column. He suggests that governments cannot keep up with the instant gratification offered by capitalism. Giving the example of being able to stream almost any music at zero marginal cost, he writes: “In 1990, the Sultan of Brunei didn’t have his whims indulged as swiftly as a middle-income person does now.” He suggests that people are angry not just about the outcome of irregular immigration but about the failure itself: “The incomprehensibility of not having a reasonable desire met, at speed”. There is something in this thesis, which is, as he admits, very Tony Blair, but it is only a sharpening of a frustration that would be justified in any era. People were just as annoyed that “nothing worked” in the bigger public sector in the 1970s, and politicians found it just as hard to respond to the demands made of them. One way that politics has changed is that it has become more responsive to demands for change, but not necessarily in a productive way. It was notable that the reflex response to defeat in the Caerphilly by-election from mostly anonymous Labour MPs was for a change of prime minister, as well as for a change of policy in the wrong direction, namely “higher spending and ignore the boats”. Has Labour learned nothing from the turnover of Conservative prime ministers, an average of one every two years from 2016 to 2024? Let alone the turnover in France, which has been even higher? No one, Labour or Tory, has come up with a credible plan to restrain public spending or to persuade the voters to accept the reality that taxes will have to rise. And no one knows how to stop the boats. This, of course, is the competence challenge facing Farage, and he knows it. He has just junked his Truss-level unrealistic tax and spending pledges from the last election, knowing that the test for a party that might actually get into government is a little stiffer than it was for him last time. And he has not come up with a credible plan for stopping the boats either, opening up the alarming possibility of yet another government that will fail. Which raises the possibility that it may not be competence that is the problem, or the comparison between public services and the private sector, but that the voters expect the impossible of their politicians. If Starmer does go, will the next candidate to preside over inevitable failure please step forward?
