All about the Outcome

By​ 2014, Keir Starmer was tired of running up against the ‘limits of legal justice’. He had recently stepped down as director of public prosecutions when his local MP, Frank Dobson, announced his retirement. Starmer entered the race to replace him as the member for Holborn and St Pancras. He was a political unknown in a crowded field, facing past and present leaders of Camden Council as well as a popular local doctor. He drank ‘literally hundreds’ of coffees with local members and was, in his own words, ‘ruthlessly focused’ on their concerns. His speech at the selection meeting was a bit underwhelming – one supporter says ‘he didn’t really have Blair’s panache’ – but it didn’t matter. He won. Ten years later, he’s prime minister.

By 1985, Diane Abbott was tired of parliamentary selections, of being the token Black woman on the shortlist and of being rejected. She applied to Hackney North and Stoke Newington only because her secretary at the film technicians’ union, where she was equality officer, drafted the letter for her. She was up against a popular sitting MP, Ernie Roberts, as well as the leader of the local council, who had been all but anointed his eventual successor. Abbott spoke last at the selection meeting, aware that no one in the room thought she could win. Her speech began with her Uncle Charlie in Jamaica and ended with Maya Angelou. As she spoke, she could see the audience ‘struggling with the increasing realisation that, whomever else they had promised to vote for, on the basis of this performance they might have to vote for me’. She won. Nearly four decades later, she still sits as a Labour MP.

None of Andy Beckett’s other ‘searchers’ – stalwarts of the Labour left – does. Jeremy Corbyn is out of the party and won as an independent at the last election; John McDonnell had the whip suspended in July for voting against the new Labour government to scrap the two-child limit for Universal Credit or child tax credits; Ken Livingstone has Alzheimer’s. Their shared mentor, Tony Benn, is long dead. Beckett is an astute chronicler of his subjects’ fortunes over the decades, and a fair-minded referee of their battles with Labour’s centrists. His story begins with Benn’s self-reinvention as a tribune of the people in the wake of 1968. Benn’s foundational insight was that ‘more people want to do more for themselves, and believe they are capable of doing so, if the conditions could only be created that would make this possible.’ Benn demanded that the concerns of feminists, Black activists and others organising for themselves be absorbed into the Labour Party, which he saw as too preoccupied with class and economic inequality. He also wanted to devolve economic power by means of industrial democracy and workers’ control, on a model pioneered in 1976 by the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Combine Committee, which had formed to contest job cuts but ended by developing its own corporate plan for Lucas Aerospace focused on making ‘socially useful products’ such as heat pumps, solar panels and artificial limbs.

Benn’s Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) went much further, encompassing major public spending increases, public ownership of one large company in each major sector of the economy, price controls, withdrawal from the EEC and import controls. Much of this wasn’t new. The historian David Edgerton has described the AES as a ‘modernising, techno-nationalist, productionist, autarchic programme’ that was basically complementary to Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ agenda. It was, however, profoundly out of step with the European Community Britain had joined in 1973. The economist Stuart Holland, the brains behind the AES, quickly came to feel that it had become too statist and dirigiste, not focused enough on competition and entrepreneurship.

Benn’s influence inside Labour peaked with the deputy leadership election in 1981, which he lost to Denis Healey by 0.852 per cent. One of Benn’s supporters said it was ‘the most intense power struggle I have ever witnessed’ (though he was writing before the great clashes of the Corbyn years). Despite Healey’s victory, the Labour manifesto for the 1983 election was stuffed with Bennite policies. Some of these still lie outside the political mainstream: radical reform of the banks and the press; empowering workers in company governance; unilateral nuclear disarmament. But many became common sense under New Labour: a minimum wage; more opportunities and rights for women, ethnic minorities and gay people; government transparency; banning foxhunting; moving towards the UN ambition for some states to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid. Others are still up for debate. Gordon Brown recently revived the idea of abolishing the House of Lords. One of Benn’s biggest goals was realised in 2020, when the UK left the EU.

The 1983 manifesto was so long and so Bennite because of the party’s right. John Golding, self-described ‘hammer of the left’, said he was ‘determined that the left would get the blame’ for what was widely expected to be another Labour defeat: ‘I was going to hang [Benn] by going along with some of the barmiest policies he had got through.’ Labour was nearly beaten into third place by the recently formed SDP. Golding was pleased when Benn lost his seat: ‘We counted it as a Labour gain.’ Benn re-entered Parliament the next year as MP for Chesterfield after winning a by-election, and threw himself into local activism, waking before dawn to help the miners during their year-long strike and organising socialist festivals in the town (attended by a young Starmer in 1987 and 1988). But his power had ebbed.

As Benn’s stock fell, Ken Livingstone’s was rising. He took control of the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981 after a thrilling bit of political manoeuvring, with the ambition of using his tenure at City Hall to show what the ‘post-1968 generation’ could do with power. McDonnell, who played the cat to Livingstone’s Dick Whittington in the 1984 GLC staff pantomime, was in charge of the money. He was brilliantly creative in finding it, combing through legislation and regulations to find provisions such as the ‘Miscellaneous’ section of Ted Heath’s lengthy 1972 Local Government Act, which gave local authorities the power to raise rates by 2p a year in order to fund any new activities they thought beneficial. McDonnell began with a budget of £1 billion and ended with £3 billion. He’s still thrilled by the memory today.

Under Livingstone and McDonnell, the GLC promoted and subsidised co-operatives and worker control. It gave out grants – worth more than £50 million a year by 1986 – to groups of all sorts: women, gay people, Black people, disabled people, pensioners, law centres, political activists, environmentalists, playgroups, religious groups. It set up one of the first equal opportunities units in the country. It organised Peace Year, Anti-Racism Year and Jobs Year, put on rock festivals and declared London a ‘nuclear-free zone’. It displayed unemployment figures on the exterior of County Hall, where Thatcherites in the committee rooms and bars of Parliament across the river would see them every day. Livingstone was flexible in his pursuit of good PR. In 1984, when Thatcher was trying to abolish the GLC, the queen opened the Thames Barrier, the capital’s new flood defence system, encouraging media speculation that she was opposed to abolition. It didn’t make any difference. The GLC was disbanded in 1986 and it wasn’t until 2000 that London got another unified, strategic authority. Livingstone entered Parliament in 1987, along with Abbott, but they, like Benn and Corbyn (first elected in 1983), would remain in the political wilderness for years. This didn’t stop the Met’s Special Branch keeping secret files on all of them.

Abbott’s parents, a factory worker and a nurse, were Windrush-generation migrants from Jamaica. Like most of their fellow migrants, they were Labour voters and deeply aspirational. To escape the racism of the rental market, they bought a house in Paddington, which they rented out after they moved to suburban Harrow. They were thrilled when their daughter got into grammar school. Abbott describes the Windrush-generation front rooms, with their bright decor, Draylon three-piece suites, radiograms, cocktail cabinets, and displays of China ornaments and ‘flamboyant plastic flowers’, each standing on a starched handmade doily. The doilies, Abbott writes, were ‘a testament to the needlework skills of my mother’s generation, brought up in rural Jamaica’; these elaborate displays were a testament to a family’s respectability. Her book contains potted histories of important moments in Black British history and politics – usefully, since many of these are still not well known, though it would no longer be possible to study British history at Cambridge, as Abbott did, without being taught ‘a single thing about the transatlantic slave trade, or Black people living in Britain or those in the former British Empire’. Like many students, she sought out courses on US politics, where race was discussed.

Racism has been a constant feature of Abbott’s life. As a schoolgirl, she was never invited to her (white) best friend’s house, and at Cambridge she was taunted in the street by a group of boys from the Perse School making monkey noises. Abbott says that she has always responded to injustice by organising. But she also makes clear how isolating being a Black pioneer has been. The only time she ever saw another Black British student at Cambridge was in the university library: ‘We were both so startled to see one another in such a monolithically white environment that neither of us could think what to say and we scuttled off in opposite directions.’ The same thing happened when she went as a graduate trainee to the Home Office and ran into another Black employee in the women’s toilets.

Abbott writes about the most difficult episodes in her personal and political life briefly but powerfully. Her mother eventually left her father, unable to deal with his controlling behaviour and rage. Abbott has arrived at a hard-won and painful understanding of the way her father’s daily experience of racism affected him. She narrates good-humouredly the response of an older friend, Ros Howells, to her pregnancy: not wanting Abbott to be a single mother as well as the only Black female MP, Howells brokered a marriage with the child’s father. It didn’t last, and Abbott describes the complications she encountered while parenting as a parliamentarian, including the furore over her son’s schooling. She knew when she decided to send him to the fee-paying City of London School that it would be controversial; for years she had campaigned about racism and discrimination in the state school system, but it seemed the media ‘had no interest in Black children in general, though they were only too interested in this one child’. Her son, at home with a babysitter one night, heard a slew of criticism of her on an LBC phone-in and rang in himself. ‘I will always feel guilty and sad,’ Abbott writes, ‘that my 11-year-old son felt he had to wade in to defend his mother.’ She still attracts a staggering amount of bile. During the 2017 election campaign, Amnesty tracked abusive tweets sent to 177 women MPs; Abbott was the target of 45 per cent of all these tweets, many of them virulently racist.

‘You really don’t have to worry about Jeremy Corbyn suddenly taking over,’ Tony Blair told a journalist in 1996, proving that even great political instincts are sometimes mistaken. Abbott was put up as the Labour left’s token candidate in the 2010 leadership election, but was easily defeated by Ed Miliband. Five years later, it was Corbyn’s turn to stand. He was elected leader with 59.5 per cent of the vote. The bewildering pace of events in the years that followed is remarkable: the Leave vote in 2016 (a shock to many); the swift vote of no confidence in Corbyn and Owen Smith’s challenge for the leadership (an easy win, again, for Corbyn); Theresa May’s decision to call an election in 2017, the loss of her majority (another shock to many) and the disintegration of her Brexit policy; the (ultimately doomed) People’s Vote campaign formed in 2018; the breakaway of Change UK in 2019 (I had entirely forgotten about this); May’s resignation and Boris Johnson’s accession; his appallingly dishonest approach to cutting a deal with the EU; the attempt to prorogue Parliament (lest we forget); another snap election in December that year; disaster for the Corbyn project. Polling day was cold, dark and rainy. When the exit poll was announced at 10 p.m., I was in the front room of someone’s flat in Battersea. It was crammed with people who’d been campaigning for Labour in the ward all day; there was a moment of silence and then quite a few people started crying.

The Labour right’s perennial criticism of its factional opponents is that they aren’t interested in winning elections. This is obviously untrue. In 2017 Corbyn’s Labour defied all expectations to win 40 per cent of the vote (Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s fixer, had put her highest estimate at 39 per cent). The architects of Corbynism were willing to make plenty of compromises in pursuit of power: the manifesto promised to renew Trident and increase police numbers; Corbyn even agreed to fire Abbott on the eve of the vote, when polling showed her dragging down Labour’s support. Two things were crucial to Labour’s success in 2017: Corbyn’s image and Labour’s manifesto. Corbyn was patently not motivated by greed or ambition: he had an exemplary record in the expenses scandal and appeared to have no taste for power. He was anxious about running for leader in 2015 in case, as one of his sons put it, ‘he might win’. The 2017 manifesto was written by his head of policy, Andrew Fisher, who hoped that people would read it ‘and say: “Fuck, yeah, I’m voting Labour.”’ It set out big policies, including public ownership of the railways and Royal Mail, banning zero hours contracts, and higher income tax for those on more than £80,000 a year. When it was leaked to the press, it got massive coverage; it turned out that, when polled on them, a majority of voters approved of these policies. It’s not clear whether the leak was a brilliant tactic from the Corbyn camp, or a spectacular misfire from its enemies. But the manifesto ‘cut through’, as Starmer noted, ‘with some of the guys in my eight-a-side football games who aren’t much interested in politics’.

The Corbyn project fell apart over the next two years due to Brexit and the antisemitism scandal. Many Remainers blamed Corbyn for the Brexit referendum result, though there is no good evidence of his culpability. The European question has for fifty years possessed the capacity to scramble left-right political allegiances. After the referendum, Corbyn faced a nightmarish choice: alienate the large majority of Labour voters (two-thirds) who backed Remain, or the substantial minority who voted Leave – not to mention Leave voters of other stripes, whose votes would be needed if Labour was to increase its support. Labour Leavers were geographically concentrated in the Red Wall, which, under first past the post, would render their loss very damaging. The People’s Vote campaign brought hundreds of thousands of people, including many Corbynists, onto the streets to demand a new referendum on the terms of exit. By summer 2018, polls showed that 86 per cent of Labour members wanted a new referendum. By summer 2019, polls showed that Labour would lose more seats by backing a Brexit deal than by blocking one. The party’s position was made all the more difficult by Johnson’s mendacious claims about his ‘oven-ready’, ‘cake-ist’ deal. It was a conundrum Corbyn and his Brexit secretary, Starmer, couldn’t solve.

Antisemitism, however, was an issue Labour should have been able to deal with. Corbyn had campaigned against antisemitism in the past, but he had also given his support to a blatantly antisemitic mural in a Facebook post and said that some ‘Zionists’ who have ‘lived in this country for a very long time ... don’t understand English irony’. You don’t need to be a dedicated student of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to speak or act in ways that are antisemitic; a centuries-old current of stereotypes, caricatures and slurs about Jews runs deep below British culture (the same is true of anti-Black racism), and it doesn’t take much to bring it to the surface. As the longtime Corbyn ally Jon Lansman (himself Jewish) put it: ‘We’ve all got to realise that prejudice is in all of us.’ Corbyn sometimes acted quickly, suspending Livingstone almost immediately when he said on the radio that Hitler ‘was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews’. But the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) concluded that there had been ‘serious failings’ in tackling antisemitism in the Labour Party under Corbyn. According to Beckett, he was ‘horrified, and sometimes paralysed, by the fact that something so central to his sense of self – his anti-racism – was being so relentlessly questioned’. Overcoming that paralysis was a sine qua non for Labour. Starmer recognised this. During the Corbyn years, he had been asked by members of the synagogue he and his wife, whose family is Jewish, occasionally attend: ‘What’s happened to your party?’ In his acceptance speech on becoming leader in April 2020, he said that antisemitism had been ‘a stain’ on Labour and apologised unreservedly.

That Corbyn still didn’t get it was demonstrated by his response to the EHRC report later that year. Pre-empting his successor’s press conference, Corbyn issued a statement claiming that ‘the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party.’ Less than half an hour later, Starmer said in his prepared speech that ‘if ... there are those who still think there is no problem with antisemitism in the Labour Party and that it’s all exaggerated or a factional attack, then frankly, you are part of the problem.’ Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, asked Corbyn to withdraw his statement. He refused, was swiftly suspended and lost the Labour whip. A deal to readmit him seemed on the cards, but at the crucial moment, Corbyn went on holiday to the Isle of Wight and turned his phone off. Lansman judges Corbyn’s reaction to the EHRC report ‘very, very stupid’ and ‘wrong’. But the Labour right has much to be ashamed of, too. A report by the barrister Martin Forde in 2022 identified ‘mutual fear and at times loathing’ between the two factions; racism, sexism and bullying were common, and some people on both sides treated antisemitism as a ‘factional weapon’.

Abbott says Corbyn has always been ‘99 per cent absorbed’ in politics. (During their short romantic relationship in the 1970s, when she asked if they could do something non-political for once, he took her to see Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery.) He is still a political animal: he was returned to the Commons as an independent MP after this year’s election and in September spoke at a meeting to discuss the possible formation of a new left party. Labour’s now dominant centrist wing failed to oust Abbott from the Commons before the election. She had the whip withdrawn in 2023 after she wrote in a letter to the Observer that although ‘Irish, Jewish and Traveller people ... undoubtedly experience prejudice’, this was not the same as ‘racism’. She quickly acknowledged that this was misjudged. (In fact, she’s on record saying the opposite; as a Westminster councillor in 1984, for example, she wrote that her Irish constituents ‘know from their own experiences what Black people suffer’, having had to ‘cope with racism’ themselves.) By early 2024, the leader’s office wanted a trade: they would restore the whip and Abbott wouldn’t stand in the general election. In turn, she might get a peerage. But she didn’t want a deal. Ironically, without this pressure from the party hierarchy, she might have gone of her own accord. She thought seriously about it in 2017, exhausted by media attacks, racism and illness: she stayed on because she feared leaving would undermine Corbyn. But, as she told Gary Younge this year, ‘what I wasn’t going to do was have them push me out.’ She stood her ground, was readmitted to the party and retained her seat.

Unsurprisingly, Abbott doesn’t have anything positive to say about Starmer. She writes that she was told by a ‘source close to Michel Barnier [then the EU’s Brexit negotiator, now France’s prime minister] ... that he found Starmer to be rather like the Tories, in that he talked at great length and with huge confidence, while understanding very little about Europe’. Abbott doesn’t make clear whether it’s Barnier himself or the anonymous source to whom these views should be attributed. It seems unlikely to be Barnier, however: he wrote in his diary in 2018 that Starmer was the Labour figure ‘who impresses me the most for his ability to grasp in detail what is at stake in the Brexit negotiations’. He predicted that Starmer would be prime minister one day. Abbott also questions why ‘someone clearly to the right of the most left-wing Labour leader since 1945’ wanted to join Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, and suggests that ‘personal aspiration’ might be the answer. Here she’s almost certainly right. After the failed Owen Smith coup in 2016, Starmer judged that MPs would not be able to remove Corbyn, and that the next Labour leader would come from inside the shadow cabinet. This was crucial to his calculation that he should continue to work under Corbyn. As Tom Baldwin’s biography makes clear, Starmer wanted power.

Starmer​ has a huge capacity for hard work and has written a number of books, mainly doorstoppers with titles like European Human Rights Law. When he began making notes for an autobiography, however, he quickly stalled. The task of acquainting voters with the real Starmer was assumed by Baldwin, a journalist, former director of communications for the People’s Vote campaign and Labour insider. He was given access to Starmer’s notes as well as to family, friends and colleagues, and his biography is billed as ‘unauthorised but authoritative’. His partisanship is made clear in pointed asides, but he has had unparalleled access.

Starmer’s team has worked hard to make sure everyone knows he grew up in a pebbledash semi in a Surrey village, the son of a toolmaker and a disabled nurse, and attended his local grammar school. This PR offensive has not come easy: Starmer is highly protective of his family’s privacy. In public, his default has been a professional demeanour and ‘court voice’ that often comes across as wooden. His close friends say they hardly recognise the funny, engaging man they know in private; one broadcaster who’s interviewed him several times says that when the cameras roll, ‘it’s like he suddenly goes into another room.’ Even Baldwin admits he still finds Starmer a little elusive.

In his twenties, Starmer helped to write, edit and distribute a minuscule magazine, Socialist Alternatives, connected to Michel Pablo, a Trotskyite who was marginal even on the far left. Some have seen this as evidence of a ‘Marxist past’ Starmer has disavowed. The evidence is pretty thin: one self-described ‘Marxian’ who knew Starmer well at that time says he was ‘certainly not a Marxist’. Baldwin presents him as a pragmatist rather than a visionary or ideologue. But there is a framework for Starmer’s politics: human rights. He told Baldwin that from the time he first studied law at Leeds, ‘this idea of irreducible human dignity became a sort of lodestar which has guided me ever since; it gave me a method, a structure and framework, by which I could test propositions. And it brought politics into the law for me.’ He has sometimes described this as the ‘moral case for socialism’. Some in Labour probably think it isn’t a sound theoretical basis for left-wing politics, but it’s more solid than many. Benn once told a reporter: ‘Socialism came out of the Bible, didn’t it? I mean, it was the Christian message that all men were brothers and sisters.’

The desire to get things done is the furnace driving Starmer’s career. As a barrister, he flew around the world opposing capital punishment. As director of public prosecutions, one of his big projects was digitising files, to speed up the justice process and cut down errors (Starmer described it as ‘one of the defining moments in the history of the criminal justice system’). When he entered Parliament in 2015, Starmer hoped he would be working under Ed Miliband in government. Five years of opposition felt like a ‘prison sentence’. He clearly has a competitive streak; a teammate in his ‘friendly’ football games describes him as ‘relentless’ in his drive to win. But it wasn’t simply losing that got to Starmer: it was his inability to change anything. As the Corbyn project faltered, he began laying the groundwork for a leadership bid.

This was masterminded by Morgan McSweeney, who had experience battling the left in the Vauxhall Constituency Labour Party, helping to run Lambeth Council and organising against the BNP in Barking and Dagenham. In 2015 he led Liz Kendall’s doomed Labour leadership campaign (she got 4.5 per cent of the vote). In 2020, he was back for another round. Baldwin says that Starmer is not ‘hyper-political’. But McSweeney is. He predicted – rightly – that only 20 per cent of party members were diehard Corbynites, and that Starmer could win by attracting votes from among the 40 per cent who held vaguer progressive values and the 25 per cent who just wanted the leader most likely to beat the Tories. Starmer signed up to ten pledges involving more than thirty policy proposals, many of which represented continuity Corbynism (and some of which were pretty questionable: ‘Defending free movement as we leave the EU’ is like defending turkeys while serving up Christmas dinner). The three themes of his campaign were ‘radical’, ‘win’ and ‘unity’.

McSweeney was also behind the U-turn on unity in 2021. In a nine-page memo – rare for him, since he prefers not to commit things to paper – he argued that ‘prizing unity above all else leads us to look inwards and away from our voters. We overvalue its importance and this narrows our thinking and shrinks our electoral appeal.’ A ‘visible transformation’ and ‘demonstrable struggle’ were needed to convince voters that Labour was electable. After Labour lost badly in the Hartlepool by-election that year, Starmer seriously proposed standing down. He argued it was evidence he had failed. McSweeney argued it was proof of the need for his new strategy.

As the Conservatives imploded under Johnson, Truss and Sunak, Starmer repeatedly emphasised that his party represented standards and integrity against cronyism and dishonesty. When the Tories forced an investigation after he was accused of breaking lockdown rules by having a curry and a beer during an evening meeting while campaigning in Durham in 2021, Starmer promised that if he was found to have done anything wrong, he would resign. The episode, he told Baldwin, ‘got to me ... in ways I’ve never properly acknowledged. I felt angry and humiliated.’ Accusations that he knowingly misled his supporters with the ten pledges – he has ditched many of his original proposals, including common ownership of Royal Mail, energy and water, higher taxes on the top 5 per cent and the abolition of tuition fees – also get to him. Other policies from the document remain, and Starmer insists that his direction of travel hasn’t changed. But Baldwin writes that he is ‘almost monosyllabic’ when the pledges come up.

Labour’s vote in this year’s election was extremely efficient in its distribution. This is a danger for the party: quite small swings could have big implications for Labour’s majority. It’s also testament to the effectiveness of McSweeney’s operation. Benn once said that ‘elections are a platform’ and that people see them ‘much too much in terms of the outcome’. McSweeney is a grafter, not a searcher: for him it’s all about the outcome. But the electoral operation was always designed in the service of the bigger goal – Starmer’s promised decade of national renewal. Is it possible?

The first of Starmer’s five ‘missions’ for government – and the foundation on which the others rely – is to get the highest sustained economic growth in the G7. Truss’s disastrous 49 days in power showed how little scope there is to ‘free up the markets’ as a route to higher growth. She also helped bring a painful end to the long era of low interest rates that would have made it easier for the government to borrow to increase public spending. But there are ideas out there.

In the late 2010s, as Beckett writes, John McDonnell and his New Left economists came up with a raft of plans to rewire the British economy: ‘alternative models of ownership’ to change the distribution of wealth and power; the ‘Preston model’ of using anchor institutions’ procurement to keep money circulating in local economies and to promote trade unions and workers’ rights; an ‘inclusive ownership fund’ to give workers shares in their own companies; a ‘green industrial revolution’. As Corbyn’s shadow chancellor, McDonnell was pragmatic as well as radical: he thought that many voters could not or would not accept significant tax rises; he didn’t propose to wage war on business and finance, but offered them a security they lacked under the Tories; and as for high earners, he said that all he wanted to do was tax them. After the 2017 election, Beckett challenged McDonnell: was his aim still ‘fomenting the overthrow of capitalism’, as he claims in his Who’s Who entry, or was he trying to reform capitalism to save it from itself? McDonnell smiled and said that he wanted ‘a staged transformation of our economic system’.

The Labour left likes to say that the right of the party hasn’t had any new ideas since 1997. This isn’t true. As Beckett points out, by the late 2010s it wasn’t only the left calling for a new economic model. The IMF and the Financial Times feared that dysfunctional global capitalism was fuelling right-wing populism; the US started implementing Bidenomics. Academics and think tanks across the left were at work: the Foundational Economy Collective theorised the importance of the sectors of the economy we rely on every day (health, care, education, housing, utilities, food); the Institute for Public Policy Research, once a bastion of Blairism, set up a commission on economic justice whose report was praised by the Daily Mail as well as by McDonnell. Ideas about how best to reform the economy have come over the past decade from across the left.

Conventional wisdom holds that Labour tacks left after periods in government, when it prioritises socialist ideology, and then right after election defeats, which compel the party to reprioritise electoral strategy. A recent paper by Michael Jacobs and Andrew Hindmoor, from Sheffield’s Political Economy Research Institute, suggests that this is misguided: Labour moves right when the economy is doing well and there’s money to spend, then left when the economy looks to be in crisis and structural reform is needed. Structural reform is certainly needed today. Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will need to draw deeply from the reserve of new ideas to make the big changes necessary. Reeves has already made what the Financial Times called a ‘moderately radical’ move, indicating in advance of the budget that while she will ensure national debt falls, she’ll change the measure of debt she targets, allowing more government borrowing where it’s for investment rather than day-to-day spending. Labour’s first hundred days in office were dogged by controversies over ending the Winter Fuel Payment, the acceptance of gifts of clothes and glasses, and squabbles in No. 10. But the budget and next year’s spending review will show us what Starmer’s Labour Party is really made of. Barnier recalls that when he worked opposite him, Starmer was ‘always learning. He improved, day after day, year after year.’ Let’s hope so.