Starmer can’t afford to be a Tory tweaker

The Labour leader has doubled down on his five ‘missions’, and his reshuffle puts his election team in place. But now he needs to get radical, writes Andrew Grice

Something’s gotta give. It will – after the election (PA Wire)

The Labour spin on Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet reshuffle was that his new team will deliver public sector reforms if the party wins power. But what would the changes be, and how could they happen when an incoming government would have little or no money?

Sometimes “reform” seems a convenient soundbite to deflect legitimate questions about how a cash-strapped Labour government would further the party’s traditional goals of good public services and social justice. Even some of Starmer’s natural allies worry that he has put down fewer ideological roots than Tony Blair had done a year before the 1997 election. They dismiss the widespread perception at Westminster that the reshuffle signalled a Blairite takeover. As one MP told me: “Keir has no real ideology or politics. He just wants hard work, performance and loyalty.”

There are some clues to be found about Starmer’s thinking on reform in an essay he wrote in 2016, a year after becoming an MP. That he chose to write about public sector change when the Fabian Society told him he could choose any subject suggests that his commitment to it is real. Drawing on his five years as director of public prosecutions, Starmer called for a more preventative approach (for example, investment in public health and early intervention to stop young offenders ending up in prison). He wanted to end the “silo approach” in Whitehall to ensure “much better connections between services such as health, housing and criminal justice”.