Keir Starmer's Reality Avoidance Field
It's Almost Like He Didn't Listen To Me
Catch-up service:
27 Notes on Growing Old(er)
Donald Trump and the End of Power
Why Are We So Bad At Grasping Difficult Things?
5 Reasons There Won’t Be an AI Jobs Apocalypse
Why Is TikTok Rocket Fuel For Populists?
We’re All Viennese Now
On July 14th - this Monday - my choir is taking part in a performance of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts, at Cadogan Hall in London. We’re performing it with a big band of top jazz musicians and a superb soloist (Nina Bennett). Honestly, it’s going to be incredible - and there are still tickets available.
Today’s Ruffian is focused on UK politics, in two parts: a piece on Starmer (free to read) and notes from a fascinating event I just attended (that part is for paid subs). If you have little interest in any of that you can skip this one and read the extra newsletter I’m going to send tomorrow - a Rattle Bag of links to everything else I’ve been reading, enjoying, and thinking about. (Doing it separately because otherwise this one would get way too long).
One year and one week ago Keir Starmer became the first Labour Prime Minister in 14 years. This is what I wrote back then, in a piece entitled “Congrats Keir, You Won, Now Change”:
In Labour’s case the psychological and cultural shift required is immense. On one side of the equation: a series of interlinked crises demanding urgent and bold action. On the other, a leader who has spent the last four years moving carefully, patiently and fastidiously. As someone at the conference put it to me, as soon as Starmer enters Number 10 he will have to drop the Ming vase and run like hell. This doesn’t mean shredding his reputation for prudence; it does mean he and his team will need to think and act very differently to opposition. They will have to take risks, be imaginative, and push for change aggressively, relentlessly, resourcefully - because if they don’t, they will be pushed back. They are now in a constant battle to govern the system rather than allowing the system to govern them.
In case you’re just catching up, Starmer didn’t change. He and his team were even less prepared for government than I imagined, not just in the sense that they didn’t have a comprehensive policy program ready to go (the Health Secretary has just announced his ten-year plan for the NHS, one year into the job, and even now it’s quite vague) but in the more profound sense I described in the piece. Labour’s team seem to have assumed they were getting their hands on the levers of a machine and that all they had to do was pull different levers to the last lot. If they were just nicer to the civil service than the Tories were then officials would spring into action and make those Missions a reality. But every bureaucratic system is a conspiracy for inertia and Britain’s civil service, which has become more bloated and less capable over the last five years, is no exception. The principal fault, however, lies not with the servants but their masters.
In opposition, Labour’s leadership was intently focused on establishing fitness to govern - understandable, given the party’s historical electoral record and the recency of the Corbyn debacle. But credibility became a comfort zone. I’m not saying that it was easy to establish - it took a lot of hard work and determination - but it was a challenge which Starmer and his allies knew how to go about: show that you’re patriotic, that you have no truck with extremists, that you care about fiscal rectitude, that you won’t raise taxes on middle England. They became so absorbed by this (crucial) presentational challenge that the bigger, scarier question of how to govern was avoided.
It is scary to take over a country in which public services are falling apart and the economy is flatlining; in which the state isn’t fit for purpose; in which voters are angry and cynical. It’s unnerving to think about who from your own party and your own tribe you’ll have to upset in order to deliver what the country needs. Better to focus on marketing, so that you don’t have to stare into this pit of snakes. Starmer never made a serious effort to imagine how his government would actually function and what it would actually do. He tried to outsource all that to Sue Gray, who, as it turned out, didn’t want to think about it either.
This was partly to do with his route to the job: he had never worked in government before becoming Prime Minister, and had only been in parliament for five years. He didn’t have much of a mental model of government. But it’s also down to his personality. Starmer is prone to what psychologists call “cognitive avoidance”: the habit of inhibiting the processing of threatening information by directing attention to something safer. Instead of confronting what daunts him he turns towards the problems he knows how to handle.1
It’s remarkable quite how much the personality of a Prime Minister determines the character of the whole government. If Steve Jobs had a reality distortion field, Starmer has a reality avoidance field. As Sam Freedman says, Labour’s policies, even the more ambitious and sensible ones, have been undercut by “a refusal to acknowledge reality”. Politicians can’t always tell the truth in public, since voters can only bear so much of it, but you get the impression that Starmer and his team don’t even discuss it among themselves. Of course, the Tories had this tendency too, but Labour aimed to be better than them. It certainly needs to be better than them. Time is running out.
A new government tends to have its maximum authority in its first year, while voters give it the benefit of the doubt and MPs are still obedient. Starmer has largely squandered this golden period. It’s as if he’s at the end of twelve years in government already, weary and aimless, unpopular with voters and his own MPs. Worse, he doesn’t seem to have learned very much from it. He gave several interviews to mark the end of his first year, and displayed almost no insight into why things haven’t gone well.
Insofar as he admitted to having a flaw as Prime Minister, it was being bad at talking his book: “There are many bits of politics that are just alien to the way I do my work. And constantly trumpeting what you’re doing is… I find it hard, you know.” This is an essentially self-congratulatory answer, and besides the point. Starmer’s core problem is not presentational. It’s not a failure of ‘storytelling’. It’s true that he hasn’t been an effective communicator, but beneath the failure to communicate is a failure to think, and beneath the failure to think is a failure of nerve.
Starmer can see the country’s problems one by one, but he can’t put them together into an analysis; a model of the whole; a map. I like Jonn Elledge’s analogy: “a man who moves through politics like a Roomba moves through your living room: without a plan, capable of mapping the territory only when he bangs into things and has to reverse.” In the absence of such a map, Starmer can declare the need for civil service reform while appointing the ultimate insider to run it; he can have a Blairite health policy and a Corbynite education policy; he can declare a ruthless focus on growth while increasing the tax and regulatory burden on business; he can make a headline-grabbing speech about immigration and lightly disown it a couple of months later (and then re-own it in an entirely unconvincing way).
Roomba mode was on full display during debates about transgenderism - not a core electoral issue but a revealing one - while in opposition. He edged hesitantly and slowly towards a sensible position, sometimes moving sideways or backwards before going forward again, and always in reaction to signals from his environment rather than from his own mind - he never actually appeared to have thought it through himself or to have a strong internal feeling about it. The same has been true on the bigger policy questions.
His most sympathetic observers, like Tom Baldwin, praise his pragmatism and his empathy for individuals. But an absence of analysis doesn’t make you pragmatic, it makes you stupid, and empathy is not a substitute for strategic thinking. The simplest of frameworks for decision-making improves the quality, speed and consistency of decisions. As a fan of the game, Starmer might have noticed that even football managers have philosophies these days, since otherwise they just become captive to short-term results and opposition tactics.
Starmer is not a stupid man, so why has he been acting like one? He has talked about how slow he is to place trust in colleagues. My sense is that this mistrust applies even to himself. He is fearful of his own mind - of thinking and arguing his way to a contentious, vulnerable position and then planting his flag on it. Something about this exercise makes him panic and look for other things to talk about, like why school kids should watch a fictional drama.
You can hear his repressed panic in the constrained voice, the hurried dismissal of challenging questions, the monotonic repetitions.2 Except in the trivial PMQs sense, he is always on the defensive, never on the attack. He lets others, like Wes Streeting or Rachel Reeves or Morgan McSweeney, say or do the difficult things, and only decides whether or not to back them afterwards, depending on how it went down. That’s not pragmatism, and it’s certainly not leadership. It’s cowardice, rooted in fear.3
It is not too late to change. For all the noise, Starmer is still relatively secure as Prime Minister, and his government still has a large majority, however fragile it now looks. He and they can still do things. Voters’ preferences are fluid these days, and his unpopularity may be partially reversed. Importantly, he is still streets ahead of Farage and Badenoch on suitability to be PM.
But for things to go better he has to make the kind of mindset shift I outlined last year. He has to confront the predicament - his own and the country’s - and go on the offensive. He has to operate in crisis mode before it’s forced on him. That means deciding on specific strategic priorities and going to unreasonable lengths to deliver them. It means generating conflict and courting controversy - intentionally rather than accidentally. It means engaging his own MPs in dialogue and argument. And it means overcoming his anxieties about all of the above.
It also means accepting the truth about Britain: that its decline cannot be reversed, nor future threats averted, by way of managerial fixes. From our ominously deteriorating fiscal position, to discontent over immigration; from abysmal social care to a barely functioning justice system, to the imperatives of defence, housing, and infrastructure, our problems are too deep and knotty for mere “competence”. Progress will require a swathe of risky, complex reforms which the Prime Minister will have to commit to ferociously, because otherwise they will disintegrate at first contact with multiple points of resistance, institutional and political.
The country has its own reality avoidance problem, after all. The right thinks we can get growth without immigration; the left thinks we can pay for everything by taxing the rich. Voters hate being told there are trade-offs and don’t believe in them; we want change but too many of us want it only for others. In a sense we got the Prime Minister we want: an ordinary guy with no pretensions who cares about individuals and hates politics - and doesn’t want to face up to the truth. Unfortunately, that’s not the Prime Minister we need.
Leaders can discover volition and purpose on the job, and Starmer still might. I just don’t know how much worse things will have to get before he does. In dismissing the mess over welfare reform as a trivial point of process, he showed us he’s still in denial, to an almost impressive extent. Perhaps only an urgent threat to his position will force a mental reset: a leadership challenge or an imminent fiscal crisis. Sometimes the only cure for fear is fear.
You might have noticed that in the passage from last year that I quote at the top of this piece I mentioned a conference. That was the annual Civic Future conference on government and politics and growth, from which I’d just returned. Last week I went again and found it hugely stimulating, as I always do. After the jump, I’ve put together a few of insights into the State of the Nation I picked up while I was there, together with my own thoughts. If you haven’t signed up to a paid sub yet, now’s the time, it’s painless and cheap (about the cost of one and a half flat whites a month, at least if you’re in London). Paid subscribers get the best of the Ruffian and the satisfaction of knowing you make this whole thing possible.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Ruffian to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.