“I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require,” said the new leader, to counter the mood of national trepidation at a time of crisis. The stricken nation and the stricken world might have come from a recent Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves address, though there is an implied sense of urgency which hints neither is the speaker.
The words are Franklin D Roosevelt’s and the occasion is the inauguration of his presidency on 4th March 1933. During his campaign, Roosevelt had stressed the urgency of action and, on taking office, he summoned Congress at once into a special session which lasted three months and yielded 15 bills, encoding 77 substantive changes of the law to protect savings, provide relief for the sick and elderly, and stimulate agriculture and industry, which had suffered the deprivations of the Great Depression. On 24th July Roosevelt gave a radio address to the nation, in which he surveyed what had been done in the first 100 days of his presidency. Ever since Roosevelt coined the phrase in that address American political journalists have held their presidents to a 100-day account. Now, it seems, the curious practice has come to Britain.
The new Labour government is under pressure to unveil its New Deal for Britain or, if it does not have one, to explain why not. After all, unveiling their plan was precisely what Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did in 1997, even to the extent of borrowing Roosevelt’s title. The official retort would be that Labour does, indeed, have a plan and it was on display at the international investment summit in London on 14th October. The plan is to attract investment into the UK and, as an upshot of an industrial strategy with a strong stress on net zero, to guide the nation to a more secure way of making its living in the world. Yet it does all sound more like a plan to have a plan than it sounds like a plan. So, the question is a fair one: does the government have a plan of action and, if not, why not?
It is worth clearing up, first, what we mean by a plan. A plan, strictly speaking, is an account of method. It is not a set of repeated objectives. A campaign demands slogans which are pithy descriptions of hopes for what is to come. The Labour party is rather loftily declaring itself in favour of certain hard-to-argue-with virtues such as growth, security, better public services and clearing up the mess. But government requires rather more prosaic work—Labour must set a course for the realisation of those hopes.
Planning is a form of practical wisdom, and results in a rather boring document. You can be assured that if the cavalry of lobby journalists did get to feast their eyes on a detailed plan, they would declare it too dull to be worthy of coverage. Bear in mind, too, that it is often precisely when a government gets a plan that it becomes less popular. The chancellor’s fiscal plans will soon emerge from the mist, but that does not mean that the organised tribunes of British business will cry hosannahs because she might have a plan to increase capital gains tax.
But if government does not yet have a detailed plan of action, why might that be? There are mitigating reasons why it might be slow on the uptake. In 2019 Labour suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1935. It really has come from a long way back; Starmer often said that he was attempting to do, in a single term, what it took Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair three to achieve. When Labour last returned to power from opposition, Blair and Brown had been the beneficiaries of all the political recovery work done by Kinnock and the policy review conducted by Smith. New Labour had a long gestation in the academy and the thinktanks as well as in political chambers.
Starmer’s truncated time span has another important implication. Blair was widely assumed to be a prime minister-in-waiting from the moment he became leader of the opposition. He arrived with the aura of power already visible, and that brings with it money and staff of the highest calibre. This was not true of Starmer, on whom the nation was slower to make up its mind. By the time it was probable that he would be prime minister, the general election was almost upon him. The time for preparation was necessarily tight.
The prelude to the Starmer government was also frenetic, with the first two years as leader of the opposition taking place behind closed doors thanks to Covid. A series of policy reviews were established under Anneliese Dodds but they never really went anywhere, and so an inexperienced cabinet has arrived in office without the policy weight required. Given that journalists abhor a vacuum—there must be the same volume of news every day—the space has been filled by discussing when Angela was in Ibiza, who bought Keir’s glasses and whether Morgan is prevailing over Sue.
It is all hopelessly trivial when compared to the Attlee government, which traded heavily on the detailed policy prospectus of the Beveridge Report. Twenty years later, Harold Wilson inherited the policy revisionism inspired by Anthony Crosland’s 1956 book The Future of Socialism. The example of Wilson, so often the Labour leader to whom Starmer looks, provides a clue to the true nature of Starmer’s predicament. What, in these years after the global financial crash, is the future of socialism? Or to put the point less grandiloquently, what does it mean to be on the political left in troubled times?
The Blair and Brown model of social change—collect the buoyant tax revenues from the professional services which are leading a global revolution and convert them into social programmes—is no longer available. Reeves is more of a latter-day Stafford Cripps, trying to avoid the charge of austerity in public spending. The deficit, in other words, is not just economic; it is philosophical. The deeper reason for there being no policy plan is that it is not at all obvious how the pieties of the political left are, these days, to be enacted. The Starmer government will be, in its way, the very embodiment of Herbert Morrison’s famously philistine formulation that socialism is what Labour governments do.
It is in fact common for British governments to arrive in office without a clear sense of where they are going. The Thatcher government is now known for its programme of privatisation, none of which featured in its first term of office. For all the preparation done before 1997, the Blair government conspicuously changed course two years in: on assuming office, it had undone Conservative reforms in the management of school and hospitals which, two years later, were reversed. And most governments end up being renowned, for good or ill, for events that were never in the plan: Thatcher for the Falklands, Blair for Iraq, Brown for the financial crash, Cameron for Brexit.
Perhaps what the coverage of the passing of the 100 days really highlights is that the government has yet to articulate a clear story about the direction in which it is taking the country. There is no patience in modern politics and judgements have already been entered. So, here is what to do. Behind the scenes, polish the plan. In public, tell a tale.
