Change and Continuity in British Politics: Can the Starmer Government's Approach to Governance Resolve the Crisis in the British State without Radical Reform?

Starmer’s government was elected on a manifesto of ‘change’. However, this vision of ‘change’ remains difficult to discern. Emerging from the 2024 Labour Party conference, the new administration struggled to reconcile its message of ‘steady as she goes’ with transformative change. The inherent tension between continuity and change is the seam running throughout the last century of British politics.

The legacy of the past

As the historian David Marquand reflected prior to the election of the last Labour government:

Crucially, there was a belief that Labour should be the natural party of government, representeding ‘working people’. The result was a somewhat hubristic faith among its leaders that ultimately the party would be afforded the opportunity to pursue a long-term programme of ‘incremental state reform’.

Westminster is permeated by a top-down, elitist view of government, adversarial in nature and organised around powerful, siloed Whitehall departments. Its power-hoarding instincts have been recognised as contributing to a malaise in public administration and governance that has fuelled a legitimacy crisis. The main parties have been largely ineffective in responding to this dynamic.

Newly elected governments are generally reluctant to deliver on the rhetoric of radical change employed in opposition. But change in the British state has been apparent in two key areas over the last four decades: devolution and reforms to the UK state bureaucracy.

The recent wave of UK-wide devolution was informed by concerns about the need to shore up the Union, rather than by any meaningful commitment to a ‘new localism’. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty remains absolute.

The ‘new public management’ (NPM) reforms sought to bring in a new model informed by decentralisation and the competitive pluralisation of service provision. But its claims of increased efficiency have not been realised. Now, an increasingly complex, yet fragile network of private and third sector actors deliver front-line public services.

The UK state poses a profound set of challenges, reflecting a combination of a fragmented system of policy delivery where the borders of service delivery do not align either with geographical or governmental boundaries—in addition to a centre that lacks the strategic capacity to oversee and organise the local level—but which continues to hoard power.

What is the Starmer administration's governance statecraft approach?

The UK is a striking example of how a persistently weak economy estranged from its leading trading partners in Europe leads to a high burden of taxation alongside a high level of public debt. The public finances have been stretched to breaking point, while public services have endured fifteen years of under-investment and mismanagement. The redistributive dimension to what is regarded as a very traditional ‘tax and spend’ Labour budget is targeted at restoring the faltering condition of public services.

There is good reason to anticipate that Labour will continue to employ a centralising approach, while adopting the language of a more shared, networked form of governance— ‘plurality without pluralism’. Some fear that greater decentralisation will exacerbate regional economic inequality and uneven subnational spending power.

Labour's conception of the state under Starmer thus remains, at best, a work in progress. What can be discerned are various strands of thinking which are yet to be moulded into a coherent national project.

The first strand is so-called ‘securonomics’, drawing on the policy agenda of the Biden administration. The belief is that active government intervention will spur the clean energy transition, reducing bills for consumers and creating additional blue collar jobs.

The second strand of thinking on the state partly draws on the economist Mariana Mazzucato's makeover of the notion of the ‘entrepreneurial state’, this time under the guise of a ‘mission-oriented’ government willing to take risks, investing in nascent growth sectors and promoting innovation.

The third strand of thinking about the state is the attempt to define a new model for managing public services that addresses the pathologies of NPM. There is a rejection of market-based competition in public services, but the alternative models based on collaboration, systems thinking and ‘community power’ remain embryonic.

These strands are potentially replete with tensions, contradictions and dilemmas that will make the task of governing competently in Labour's first term challenging at best.

The weakness in Labour's approach is the illusion that a different set of more competent actors pulling the levers of the UK machinery of state will lead to fundamentally different outcomes. In most areas, that is unlikely given that the pre-existing pathologies and problems that lead to under-performance in the system of government are systemic and structural. They reflect longstanding overreliance on the private sector, the poor track record on major public infrastructure, the impact of fifteen years of austerity, a still unresolved post-Brexit settlement for the UK, the inadequacy of parliamentary scrutiny, too much poorly conceived legislation, and widespread confusion around the relationship between Whitehall departments and arm's length bodies.

Conclusion

The indications are that Labour's statecraft will not be a wholesale reversion to the past. Yet, nor does its governing project represent a coherent vision for a reimagined state. If the economy continues to exhibit anaemic growth and stagnant productivity while public services experience further decline amidst rising taxes, the narrow window of opportunity available to Starmer's Ministers to enact an ambitious agenda for change will close. Those ‘tough decisions’ will merely be set to get a great deal tougher.