Was this his finest hour? Crisis has certainly revealed a different—if not quite Churchillian—side to Sir Keir Starmer, one that is surprisingly deft and purposeful. In Washington the prime minister removed Britain from the cross-hairs of Donald Trump’s tariff onslaught, charming the president with a letter from King Charles. In London he sought to corral European colleagues around a plan for peace in Ukraine. In attempting to mediate the toxic relationship between Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, and Mr Trump, the stiff upper lip which has been a liability at home is suddenly an asset. Even Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has been uncharacteristically agile in exploiting Russian assets to aid Ukraine.
Sir Keir’s grand plan may well fall apart. Mr Trump has suspended arms shipments to Ukraine and brushed aside suggestions that America could provide the military “backstop” that Sir Keir says is essential for an Anglo-French peacekeeping force. Yet this has been a transformative week. In a few days Sir Keir has sketched a new role for Britain in the world. It must now deal with an America that remains indispensable, but which has become unreliable—something Sir Keir wisely refuses to say publicly. Marginalised after Brexit, Britain is emerging as a leader in Europe’s task of shouldering its own defence. That should also transform his government’s domestic agenda, because it requires a jump in defence spending to levels last seen in the 1980s.
Sir Keir Starmer finds a roleLabour may be about to waste its best chance of economic success
What a contrast with the drift that has hitherto characterised the Starmer government. In search of a project, Sir Keir has tilted at slogans (who remembers “securonomics”?) and cooked up a thin minestrone of “missions”, “foundations”, “first steps” and “milestones”. He has squandered a titanic parliamentary majority on small-stakes fights. Even Sir Keir has seemed not to know what the point of Sir Keir is.
Now he knows. But will he rise up to meet what he calls “the test of our times”, or will the weight of it crush him? The danger is that he tries to shield voters at home from the hard choices that flow from living in a world in which America will no longer underwrite European defence. His foreign mission could aggravate his purposelessness at home. Instead, the rebuilding of European security must galvanise him and become the organising logic for a radical domestic agenda.
To see how Starmerism-as-usual has run its course, consider Sir Keir’s announcement on February 25th that defence spending would increase from 2.3% to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, and then to 3% in the early years of the next decade. That was hailed as a “generational response”; in reality, it was barely a start. Yet even finding this modest sum required drastic choices. Sir Keir raided the overseas-aid budget, a source of pride for the Labour Party, prompting the resignation of a minister.
The British people, said Winston Churchill, have a unique appetite for bad news, and the worse the better. The truth Sir Keir must impart is that Britain cannot pay for rearmament by cutting departmental budgets without voters noticing. The first candidate should be the welfare bill. The share of working-age Britons claiming health-related benefits is forecast to rise from 8% to 12.5% in the decade to 2029. That is far more than in other rich economies, in part because in-person assessments all but ended in Britain during the pandemic. Labour has promised reform, but has yet to say what it intends.
The government also needs a new realism about taxation. In the election campaign Ms Reeves foolishly promised that she would not raise taxes on “working people” (meaning VAT or income taxes). But if taxes have to go up, she must jettison that promise and choose broad, efficient measures such as VAT, rather than a grab bag of fiddly moves.
Above all, putting defence on a sure footing calls for radicalism in tackling Britain’s chronic lack of economic growth. The government talks up the prospects for blue-collar jobs that rearmament will bring. It is neat politics, but such jobs will be relatively few in number, and creating them will depress the rest of the economy through higher taxes or less government spending elsewhere.
The best route to higher growth would be to dismantle the planning regime, a relic of post-war statism that throttles cities. Sir Keir advertised that he saw breaking the hold of NIMBYs as a vital step, but he is likely to fluff his reform—tinkering with the restrictive planning system rather than replacing it. In the search for savings, the government should resist cuts to infrastructure budgets, which are easy to impose but which would suppress long-term growth. Labour should also suspend or scrap its new business-unfriendly employment laws.
Sir Keir’s renegotiation with the European Union must reflect the new imperatives. The continent needs to be more resilient, with schemes such as joint defence procurement, energy trading and co-operation on sanctions and military operations. At least the prime minister will have Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, on his side. It would be self-indulgent to bog down talks by relitigating the disputes of the Brexit years—on fish and visas, say. Some in the Labour Party hoped that a second term in office would be the time to debate economic reintegration with Europe; better to start now.
Or is it Keir Hardly?
A change in direction of such magnitude may be hard to imagine, especially for a prime minister who has so far cleaved to familiar ideas and ducked big arguments. After the cold war, voters enjoyed a peace dividend, as government budgets were directed from howitzers to hospitals; throwing that trend into reverse will be painful. But many things the state has done in recent years, from bank bail-outs to the coronavirus furlough scheme, were unimaginable until they were inescapable. The crisis in Europe ought to lead the prime minister to see a new role for his country. Making Britain battle-ready will not be popular and it is fraught with political peril—Churchill is a fine example of how voters can punish even their greatest foreign-policy hero. But it must be the making of Sir Keir. ■
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