Early in the morning of 5 July 2024, Labour leader Keir Starmer addressed his party staff and supporters in the Tate Modern, as the scale of their landslide election victory became clear, and declared that “the fight for trust is the battle that defines our age”. A few hours later, Starmer – by now the Prime Minister of the UK – stood in Downing Street and gave a sense of how he intended to win back that trust: with “a return of politics to public service” and by showing that “politics can be a force for good”.
One year on from those speeches, the media is filled with annual reviews that give the government… mixed notices, to say the least. These certainly haven’t been helped by the first year anniversary landing in a week where the dramatic vote on the welfare bill seemed to bring together the various strands of Labour’s first year in office all at once: the primacy of fiscal responsibility, the story the administration is telling about the choices it is making, the electoral risks to both its left and right, the approach to communications and party management.
Stepping back from that immediate crisis, it is possible to discern from this first year how Starmer and his team are hoping to tackle that enormous trust deficit in British politics and reinstate the idea that government can be a force for good. It is essentially a story of long-term bets: of initiating a series of (seemingly quite technocratic) reforms in the hope that they pay off with tangible change in people’s lives by the time of the next election.
That has been the other, much quieter story of the month just gone: for the first time in a long time the UK now has ten-year strategies for infrastructure, industry and the NHS plus a multi-year public spending settlement that includes over £100bn of new capital investment. Within those long-term plans are several things FGF has been calling for over the past 18 months and which we strongly welcome. These range from pension reforms that should unlock billions to invest in Britain’s creaking public realm and its most promising young companies, to Local Growth Plans that empower our city-regions and ensure economic prosperity is spread right across the country, to the prospect of more progressive public-private partnerships – like those the Welsh Government has developed – being used to build new social and economic infrastructure.
There is a tension of time horizons here. It is undeniable that the Labour government faces real challenges right now: sluggish economic growth and the cost of living pressures that people feel as a result; public services creaking as the effects of years of atrophy coincide with new and growing pressures; that continuing loss of trust in our institutions; and a fragmented political landscape that saw five political parties receive more than 10% of the vote for the first time ever in May’s local elections. Those challenges are exacerbated by the ‘always-on’ culture of 24-hour news and social media, and a political and commentator class that have grown used to the last decade of constant upheaval: snap elections, leadership contests, prime ministerships outlasted by lettuces…
Set against this are the facts that tackling the challenges the UK faces by definition requires taking a multi-year, if not multi-decade view (the opposite of what Starmer has criticised as “sticking plaster politics”) and that this government has more space in which to take that view than is often assumed. We are still only one year into a parliament that should ultimately run its course. As a country we haven’t had a situation where one Prime Minister led a majority administration for a full term for 20 years. In the intervening time we’ve all grown accustomed to ‘permacrisis’ and the assumption that a government or leader could fall at any minute. While the world is undeniably different in 2025 than it was in 2005, it is still the case that this Prime Minister has more licence to think long-term and strategically than his immediate predecessors.
Navigating this tension of time horizons is at the heart of the government’s much-vaunted ‘mission-driven approach’: five national missions that set ambitious, stretching targets over the next decade, yoked to six Plan for Change milestones that make sure the delivery of the missions is tangibly felt along the way. As our Director Nathan Yeowell has argued, FGF continues to believe that the principles of this mission-driven approach – clarity of purpose, a focus on outcomes, an emphasis on partnership working that engages the whole nation, licence to innovate and experiment along the lines of the Cabinet Office’s ‘Test, Learn and Grow’ initiative – are the right modes for government in the mid-21st century. But the missions need to be committed to, revised where necessary, and then diffused throughout the system. It’s a fundamentally new way of doing things and half measures won’t cut it.
That point about diffusion throughout the system is vital. What is starkly apparent after a year in office is that Labour Ministers have inherited a state apparatus that is not set up to deliver what they want. While the easy temptation is to blame this on the inertia of the civil service ‘blob’ or the inexperience of 20-something special advisers, the truth is more challenging: it’s a systemic problem caused by years of upheaval, including the 1-2-3 of austerity, Brexit and the pandemic pulling government fundamentally out of shape. This has overloaded the centre, muddied roles and responsibilities and – combined with all the political upheaval described above – drawn everyone towards the shortest-term time horizon and away from the strategic.
The paradoxical effect of all of this is that Starmer has both more and less time than it appears. He has less time because that crisis of trust is real, immediate and worsening: as other countries have shown, progressive governments absolutely cannot afford to become portrayed as defenders of a status quo that is so evidently not working for people. But he has more time because the only way out of that trap is to use the stability of a triple-figure parliamentary majority effectively and carve out space to develop and execute a proper long-term strategy. If the wiring of the state is not set up to allow that, then that has to change; Starmer needs to do what he did with the Labour Party and ‘turn government inside out’, and as soon as possible.
As this government enters its second year, this is its major task of governance: acting fast so that it has time to think slowly.
