Sir Keir Starmer came to power pledging to bring order and stability to government after 14 dismal years of Conservative rule, trading on his record as chief prosecutor while promising to rescue public services and restore faith in politics.
He declares that he will show how Westminster can improve lives, saying Britain is “broken but not beyond repair”. This is a noble desire. Yet the Prime Minister has struggled to share his personal vision or define a core ideology, despite all the “plans for change” and mission statements, while his stock has plummeted rapidly after a series of messy rows, mishaps and muddles that are sparking questions over his political skills.
There remains a nagging sense that Starmer is simply a technocrat, a decent and determined man earnestly wrestling with state failures, but also a politician who lacks any driving sense of ideological direction while the dark clouds of populism close in menacingly on Westminster.
He believes that one of his biggest successes during his five years as Director of Public Prosecutions was moving from paper to digital files, according to his biographer Tom Baldwin, who said that Starmer saw this as transformative, since it cut costs while speeding up the justice system. Yet even then he was accused by his critics and predecessors of lacking a clear vision.
Now we are at the start of a new year, six months into his Government, and starting to see the shape of this Labour administration as ministers promote their reforms. But strangely, this only adds to confusion over its ideological underpinning, since they are pushing in very different directions in the two key areas of education and health.
The governments of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and even, to some extent, David Cameron offered voters a choice based on an explicit sense of purpose with their policies. Yet under Starmer, the two most pivotal public services are proposing simultaneous reform agendas that appear to be radically different in their approach.
Wes Streeting, the Health and Social Care Secretary, said within hours of taking office that his policies were based on the belief that “the NHS is broken”, underlining how all that infantile talk about it being the envy of the world has been ditched, even on the left.
This is long overdue; I have been arguing for almost two decades that sanctification of this public service covered up its deficiencies, inequalities and safety scandals.
Blind worship finally became unsustainable after the system became so blatantly dysfunctional with its long waiting lists and overloaded surgeries – although bunging cash at junior doctors and postponing crucial social care reform fail to inspire much confidence in the Government’s fortitude to deal with such giant problems.
Yet now there is a clear sense of how the Government plans to deal with the crisis, after Starmer this week unveiled his strategy with increased community provision and more diagnostic services.
The approach is unashamedly Blairite, as might be expected after Streeting recruited his predecessor Alan Milburn as an adviser. It is based on patient choice over hospitals and medical opinions, targets to cut waiting times and greater transparency, backed up by deals with private-sector providers to speed up treatment in specialist areas.
There will be league tables for hospital trusts, with greater freedoms on funding for better performers and failing managers getting kicked out.
The sickly state of the National Health Service is shown up by the fact there is a target for 92 per cent of patients to be seen within 18 weeks and that this is seen as bold – but at the moment, fewer than six in 10 people manage to access elective treatments in this amount of time.
Starmer proclaims this as “radical reform” – although as analysts point out, he is building on a strategy adopted by previous Tory and Labour administrations.
But he is right to argue that the NHS should deliver more convenience for patients in this digital age, just as people can book holidays and buy clothes online, and to say it cannot continue as a “national money pit” if it is to survive in our ageing society.
Now look at education, the other great delivery department, which is lurching off in the opposite direction to lessen the benefits of competition, weaken accountability, reduce parental choice and stifle freedoms in the system.
The approach of the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is based on the appeasement of teaching unions, corroding a model that has proved so successful over the past three decades at raising standards in schools in England.
Neil O’Brien, the Tory shadow Minister for Education, says that ditching “the magic formula of freedom plus accountability” is “pure vandalism”. He is right since Phillipson’s stance is disturbingly regressive – although his party’s attempt to use the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to push for a national inquiry into grooming gangs is grossly hypocritical.
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Read MoreWhile many of our public services decayed, England’s schools became an unusual success story, reflected by their rise up international league tables for literacy and numeracy. This was based on significant cross-party consensus that drove reform.
Yet Phillipson complains about “tunnel vision” on exams and a system incentivising “a competitive rather than a collaborative model”.
She is scrapping the single-word Ofsted judgements that are so helpful for parents, replacing them with wafflier reports that make comparison harder, while curtailing the ability of schools to innovate, adapt curriculums or pay higher rates to the best teachers.
Sadly, the poor performance of schools in Wales and Scotland shows the impact of this softer, more statist, style.
Meanwhile, Phillipson offers no adequate solution to the educational sector’s most pressing issue – the floundering and overloaded system confronting pupils with special needs – beyond vague talk of greater inclusion and tackling absenteeism.
Perhaps this reflects Labour’s determination to duck the toughest issues, which is seen also with that shameful shunting aside of social care salvation.
It is bizarre, however, to see such ideological divergence as these two major departments grapple with policy. Starmer has promised to “drive reform through the public sector”. But the big question remains: does he really know where he is going with his Government?
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