The attempted murder of Donald Trump – and Joe Biden's reluctant acceptance that he is too old to carry on as president – mean that events in the United States have dominated the headlines in the weeks since Labour's landslide victory. But while most people have been distracted from goings-on in Westminster, Keir Starmer's government has been worryingly busy.
It's true that, after 14 years of hesitant tinkering and not much else, it is oddly refreshing to see a government powering ahead. It's a relief not to find myself shrieking ‘What the hell are the Tories doing now?’ when I hear an official policy announcement. But 'Action This Day' could be storing up trouble for tomorrow.
Few of Starmer's ministers have been busier than Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, who has torn through the bureaucratic procedures and objections that stopped the Tories doing anything at all. Reviews, consultations, committees, panels and processes: they don't seem to matter much to Miliband. In mere days, he’s declared that he’s doubling onshore wind by 2030 and tripling reliance on solar power. Miliband has given the green light to Sunnica, a giant solar farm. Bish bash bosh. I don’t like to make predictions but I strongly suspect that, when the lights go out, because some of these policies are Lysenko-level crackers, the word ‘Miliband’ will become one of those convenient shorthand terms, likeHindenburg or Titanic.
Similarly, without a whiff of thought or consultation, or even much attempt at justification, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves has announced a ‘fiscal lock’ to ensure any government budget decisions can no longer bypass scrutiny by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). Just like Gordon Brown’s granting of independence to the Bank of England at a similar moment in 1997, this is an apparently dull and procedural move that is, in fact, storing up trouble for decades to come. It removes democratic accountability and oversight of budget decisions and plonks it in the lap of an unsackable, unchallengeable, quango of ‘responsibility’.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy – and Development Minister Anneliese Dodds – have also been busy. They have decided to reinstate funding for the discredited UNWRA (UN Relief and Works Agency). The taps were turned off after allegations by Israel that some staff were involved in the 7 October attack against Israel. Now the government tells us that, because the UNRWA has set out 'detailed management reforms, (it) is confident that UNRWA is taking action to ensure it meets the highest standards of neutrality.' So, that's OK then.
Labour has also launched plans to release thousands of prisoners early to solve the crisis in our prisons. 'Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood has set out how the government will stop the impending collapse of the criminal justice system,' the government's own press release breathlessly told us. What could possibly go wrong?
One of the few things the Tories could boast about from their time in power was Britain's schools, which improved a lot. But is that legacy about to get unpicked? Starmer's administration has wafted in a pet professor to lead a shake-up of the national curriculum for schools in England. Professor Becky Francis will chair a wholesale review of the school syllabus 'to breathe new life into our outdated curriculum', according to the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson. This sounds like it is more likely to involve fun ways to keep feral pupils in the classroom than benefit kids' educations.
Labour's pitch to voters was that it would offer a security blanket of quiet competence after years of Tory chaos. The acme of this new look was Keir Starmer telling us that the government would be ‘unburdened by doctrine’, as if the Tories had been all doctrine doctrine doctrine, morning, noon and night. When was that again? What was this doctrine? I must have missed it. You could call them a lot of things, but doctrinaire? Did anybody ever look at Rishi Sunak and see doctrine? It just looked like flailing about to me. A bit of doctrine might have been nice.
If the new government does have a doctrine, it is pretty much the same as the old one had; to outsource as much of their power to somebody – anybody – else. This way, of course, they don’t have to carry any cans.
But what we see so far after a fortnight of a Labour government is the illusion of stability and competence - but with bombs being planted everywhere. Where the Tories just drifted, Labour are taking bold, open, positive steps…to stuff everything up even more.
The government is getting away with this by paying lots of attention to presentation and aesthetics, which are by far the most important considerations in British public life. You can do almost anything if you do it in a sensible skirt and shiny shoes. You can break apart the institutional framework if you pretend you’re doing it in a reserved, gradual, incremental way, with boring-sounding baby steps. This is where Liz Truss really went wrong. She moved too quickly and portrayed what she was doing as big and radical and slightly scary. Keir Starmer might be doing the same – but more slowly, and without anyone noticing.
So far Wes Streeting has been making the best decisions and Ed Miliband the worst.
I suspect a lot more of the gender bullshit is going to enter our school curriculum’s and will be so hard to get rid of when Labour are removed.