Why is Keir Starmer Like A Roomba, And Other Questions

This week: fine, I will think about British politics again if I must. Also: the partition of Germany that never was; and Charley goes to New Town.

I have, as noted, had rather a strong urge to look away from politics of late. This is understandable – everything is awful, and in contrast to the way in which everything was awful in the period before the British general election of July 2024, it’s extremely hard to imagine even a theoretical route by which things might get any less awful any time soon.¹ This, though, is a problem given the nature of what I do for a living, and I’ve just had a holiday, so really I’ve run out of excuses. Let’s check in with the state of play in Westminster.

It would be a mistake, of course, to imply that things for Keir Starmer’s Labour party are going well. It would be a mistake, too, to imply anything other than that they are going quite catastrophically badly. Following the partial restoration of the winter fuel allowance for richer pensioners, and the decision to drop his opposition to a national inquiry into grooming gangs, this week the Prime Minister has u-turned again, this time on large chunks of the government’s flagship welfare bill. The idea that the cost of the welfare system is becoming unsustainably large, and something must be done, is persuasive; the notion that it’s people with disabilities who rely on government assistance to work are the ones who should pay to reduce it is not, and is indeed abhorrent. And so, once again, the government has argued that there is no alternative, only to be forced into finding one. Terrific.

I don’t think the “third u-turn in a month” thing is a problem in itself. In every case, there have been pretty compelling reasons behind the choice; and we have extensive polling evidence to suggest that, while u-turns are the sort of thing that excites bored lobby reporters, they don’t bother the voters even slightly. This makes sense if you think about it for even half a second, and re-frame the question as “Would you like the government to keep driving straight into this wall, Y/N”.

Nonetheless, it definitely feeds into a sense of rudderlessness. A government that only last year won a 174 seat majority should be able to impose its will on the country and its backbenchers alike. The fact that it can’t – that it was in serious danger of losing a key vote, in large part due to the action of select committee chairs – does not bode well. Neither do the wagons being circled to defend chief of staff Morgan McSweeney; or the fact it now seems genuinely possible that Starmer – again: he won a 174 seat majority – will not be Prime Minister at the time of the next election.

And once backbenchers have rebelled once without the world collapsing around them, it becomes much more difficult for the whips to persuade them not to do so again. This is why most competently-run governments put a lot of work into making sure they never get that far.

In biographer Tom Baldwin’s interview with the PM in last week’s Observer, Starmer makes a momentarily compelling case that his record shows he doesn’t make the same mistakes twice: “If there’s one thing about me, it’s that I learn.” Maybe. But even ignoring the mistakes he clearly hasn’t learned from², I can’t shake the sense that the rudderlessness comes directly from Starmer: that the Prime Minister is reactionary, less in the common sense of traditionalist and conservative than in the implied one of “a person who acts less than reacts”. The unselfconscious nastiness of the “island of strangers” speech, followed by the seemingly genuine horror when people noted the echoes of Enoch Powell, suggest 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.

The Prime Minister relaxes in Downing Street, probably. Image: Piperpet/Wikipedia./CC BY-SA 4.0.

The government failed to persuade anyone to back its welfare reforms for the same reason: they are so incoherent, hitting with little regard for either need or employment status, that it is transparently obvious that the only argument for them is “look we need to save money somewhere”. That would be a difficult case for a Labour government about to throw tens of thousands of people into avoidable poverty to make at the best of times. To do it immediately after agreeing to protect welfare payments to comfortable pensioners makes it impossible.

Starmer claims he learns from his mistakes. And sometimes he does: his failure to build relationships with, and leverage over, his own backbenchers is an unforced error that it’s possible to imagine him learning from. But the lack of personal politics that means he’s yet to offer any sense of the country he wants to build, or how his policies will move us towards that – and which means that five years into his leadership it’s still impossible to imagine anyone describing themselves as a “Starmerite”? That feels like a whole different level of problem. He can learn from his mistakes; he can’t change who he is.

And if you don’t know where you’re going, it’s a whole lot easier to find yourself lost.

Map of the week: The parallel universe partition of Germany

Germany is a country that has spent a lot of time not existing. The state in its current form will be 35 in October, making it still too young to run for US president – or, if you prefer, only slightly older than Glastonbury’s own Charli XCX. Working back from there, it spent four and a half decades split by the Iron Curtain, seven and a half as a country, and nearly a thousand years as the Holy Roman Empire, a decentralised-polity which you can argue was…

a) not something you could refer to simply as “Germany”,

b) only occasionally something you could refer to as “a state”, and

c) essentially never both (a) and (b) at the same time.

I digress. (This is exactly why you should never let me start talking central European history.) My point is that the idea of breaking the Third Reich into less threatening pieces at the end of the Second World War was not some mad, out there notion. It had been broken into pieces a lot more often than it had been, in a meaningful sense, one thing.

Nonetheless, it’s a bit of a shock to be confronted with the Morgenthau Plan, first proposed in a 1944 US government memo entitled Suggested Post-Surrender Program for Germany. Here’s the map: