Keir Starmer Drops the Pretense and Promises Pain for Britain

It was in the quaintest of settings, the sun-soaked “rose garden” of Downing Street in London, that the new prime minister took to the lectern to address his public. “I will be honest with you,” Keir Starmer said, affecting that exquisitely boring tone of his, designed to dull the listener’s senses into barely noticing that what he says tends to be bullshit, “there is a budget coming in October, and it’s going to be painful.”

It was a historic moment: the prime minister, in a rare lapse from the norm, had plainly told the truth.

Since entering office two months ago, Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have been hinting at bleak times ahead for the British public. The economy, they tell us, is in a far worse state than anything they could have predicted, and it is the fault of the previous Conservative government. Such is the dire state of things that “tough decisions” must now be taken.

What those tough decisions will be remains to be seen, but the government has offered us some clues. A range of limited tax increases on the wealthy seem likely, but so, too, do cuts to public spending. The government has already withdrawn a social payment to help retirees pay for their out-of-control household fuel costs, which will affect millions of struggling elderly people, while it has also decided to keep in place the two-child benefit cap, which restricts child welfare payments to the first two children of most families. The policy has made child poverty in the U.K. far worse, but Starmer, who when running to become Labour leader in 2020 suggested he’d like to get rid of the limit, has opted to keep it; he has even flexed his authoritarian muscles by suspending seven of his ministers who defied him on the issue.

That Labour has inherited an economic mess from the Tories is undoubtedly true, but that is, in large part, down to the party’s commitment to extreme austerity. Implementing more of the same, as Labour looks set to do, is not going to halt the country’s deterioration.

The British social welfare state has been dismantled to a huge extent since David Cameron’s government first imposed austerity in 2010, and poverty has consequently soared. Local councils have been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, libraries and youth clubs have shut down, while some schools are left on the verge of literal collapse. The National Health Service, once the crowning jewel in the U.K.’s welfare state, has been trapped in a perpetual crisis since the Tories took power under Cameron, with more than 330,000 excess deaths recorded between 2010 and 2019 — and that was before COVID hit, a crisis from which the health system has never recovered. Austerity, in a very literal sense, kills people.

If Labour is serious about undoing the damage of the long, bleak period of Tory rule, it must confront the obscene levels of inequality within the U.K. As living standards for working people have plummeted, life for the super-rich has never tasted sweeter. The country’s billionaires have accumulated ever greater sums, with one report claiming they’ve enjoyed a 1000% increase in their wealth between 1990 and 2022. During that same period the number of British billionaires swelled from 15 to 177.

Britain’s wealthiest people should be taxed much more severely — which hardly seems the most radical demand — but the state is actually in the business of subsidizing them. No other European country today is as generous to its richest members than the U.K., which was among the most equal of all developed nations during the 1970s, but has since become one of the most unequal, behind only the United States.

Taxing the wealthy would help to generate some of the funds needed to restore Britain’s welfare state, but it isn’t the only option at the government’s disposal. It could, as the economist Grace Bleakley has argued, also borrow the funds it needs to invest. “As long,” Bleakley wrote in Tribune, “as that debt is used for productive purposes — like educating the workforce, expanding physical and social infrastructure, and promoting decarbonization — it will be recouped over the medium- to long-term.”

Starmer, though, hopes to generate funds for public spending by first growing the British economy as a whole. Putting aside the question of whether or not it’s wise to aim for perpetual growth on a crisis-plagued planet with finite resources, staking a country’s public services on it today seems, even on its own terms, very risky. We live in an increasingly unstable world defined by extreme weather, pandemics, war and ecological breakdown, each of which bears the potential to offer up shocks and derail the growth Starmer vaguely envisions.

Should the prime minister’s fantasy of rebooting the late ’90s and its high levels of growth fail to materialize, he will cut public spending in other places. As the Resolution Foundation pointed out before the election, in order to meet its manifesto pledges to fund areas like education, health and social care, a Labour government would, in the absence of imposing wealth taxes, need to deliver around £18 billion of cuts in areas like transport, justice and security. Those “tough decisions” to which he constantly refers are very likely to mean austerity.

As the leader of a party bearing the term “labour,” Starmer will make some token concessions to workers when necessary, but he will do nothing to fundamentally challenge the oligarchic power which today rules over Britain. Starmer’s Labour is riddled with corporate lobbyists from some of the most destructive industries on the planet, and it is in their interests that he serves. If that means piling the pain onto everyone else, so be it.