Speaking this week at Port Talbot, the site of a recently closed steel plant, Nigel Farage took credit for the Labour government’s decision to reverse its cuts to the winter fuel allowance. “We have made the political weather on this one,” Farage crowed, reminding his audience that he had called for the benefit to be reinstated. On the same day, the Reform UK leader pledged to reopen the Welsh town’s blast furnaces — despite the fact that they are filled with hundreds of tonnes of formerly molten iron, now cooled into a rock-hard mass.
Farage later conceded that restoring the furnaces may not be possible, though perhaps new ones could be built. Either way, the episode neatly captured the surreal state of contemporary British politics. After all, there are still four years to go until the next election, and Labour has over 400 MPs, while Reform has just five. As Farage’s promises regarding the steel industry demonstrate, his party’s economic platform consists almost entirely of unworkable gimmicks. And yet, he is quite right to say of Keir Starmer’s government that “Reform are now leading much of their agenda”.
If there was an underlying purpose in Rachel Reeves’ spending review this week, it was to confront the rise of Farage and his party. Since the local elections six weeks ago, Starmer has tried to stake out tougher positions on immigration and integration, while attacking Reform’s economic absurdities. The prime minister has given speeches devoted solely to countering Farage, and has told MPs that they have “a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins”. Reeves’ spending review served as the financial complement to Starmer’s political crusade.
For Reeves, who addressed Farage a number of times in her own speech, the decision to reverse course on the winter fuel allowance was obviously driven by Reform’s local election success. She also coughed up £15 billion for transport investments, targeted at regions where Reform is a threat, and provided Labour with some rhetorical ammunition on immigration with extra cash for Border Security Command and a pledge to end the use of asylum seeker hotels by 2029. Higher defence spending will be funded with a 40% cut to foreign aid.
One can argue that the Government is foolish to build up the Reform threat so much when the next election is still so distant, but it would be wrong to think that this is some sort of knee-jerk reaction. Contra accusations that Starmer lacks a clear direction, there have long been signs that, behind his tepid personality, he has embraced a historic mission of sorts. His purpose is to defend the remnants of Britain’s Blairite settlement from the on-going revolt against elites, and in favour of national sovereignty. Starmer has filled his government with New Labour figures, and is himself wedded to the technocratic liberalism of the New Labour era which nurtured his political career. He wants to conform to supranational legal structures, empower Britain’s institutions to enforce doctrines of equality and rights, and generally maintain the rule of progressive lawyers and officials. In order to protect these ideals, he has to see off the forces hostile to them.
In the immediate aftermath of last year’s election, a report in the Times suggested that this mission was already taking shape. It noted that, in the northeast of England, you can drive for an hour through seats where Reform came second to Labour. Spurred by campaign manager Morgan McSweeney, who would soon be promoted to Starmer’s chief of staff, the Government’s response would essentially have three strands. Populist rhetoric would make disaffected voters feel represented by Labour; crime, health and immigration — “areas where [voters] see or viscerally feel the price of government inaction” — would be soundly managed; and economic improvement would be made manifest in people’s lives, a strategy Reeves calls the “everyday economy”. This, by-and-large, is the agenda which has come back into focus since the locals. The spending review was a reiteration of the third prong, promising, as Reeves put it on Wednesday, that “renewal” will be “felt in people’s everyday lives, in their jobs, and on their high streets”.
As a theory of how to tackle populism, the formula appears to be a fairly standard centre-left one: some “flag shagging” may be necessary to address the tribal needs of voters, but fundamentally, higher living standards and a stronger state will make them good social democrats. Yet to continue giving Starmer the benefit of the doubt, he may have a deeper sense of how material and immaterial factors, matters of welfare and emotion, interact. For he has surely realised that British politics is increasingly becoming oriented around the fundamental question of citizenship. Not citizenship in the narrow sense of who gets to have a passport, but in the broader sense of what it means to be a member of British society; the rights and responsibilities it entails, and the relations, between individual, state and civil society, that it ultimately comprises.
“Starmer has surely realised that British politics is increasingly becoming oriented around the fundamental question of citizenship.”
Much of Reform’s popularity stems from the simple assertion, made salient by globalisation and particularly immigration, that citizenship requires boundaries to be meaningful. If the state expects citizens to pay its taxes and follow its laws, it cannot make its resources and rights available to anyone in the world. Its first responsibility must be towards the security and welfare of British people, and it must show a preference for the culture and norms of the country as the majority of its citizens understand them. This is not enough to constitute a proper model of citizenship, but if there is a perception that the state is not maintaining the boundaries needed for citizenship even to exist, it can be politically successful. Starmer realises this, which explains many of the positions he has taken in recent months: criticising uncontrolled immigration, talking about the need for rules in society, and tightening requirements in areas such as English language proficiency.
But Starmer has also inherited from New Labour a more substantial model of citizenship, one that is much misunderstood. You will often hear, especially on the Right, that Blair primed the country for multiculturalism by reducing British identity to a collection of nondescript “values” like tolerance and fair play. In fact, Blair’s revolution was grounded in a much more sophisticated and comprehensive redrawing of the social contract. It was, indeed, intended to crack open older and more bounded understandings of British society, not just by redefining identity but by marinating public life in a range of progressive narratives and principles, a project assisted by sympathetic NGOs and by cadres of new graduates in the professional classes.
Crucially, though, there was another component in this scheme, essential for winning over the public, and that was public services. Improving public services was central to New Labour’s electoral pitch in 1997, and from that date until 2010 spending rose sharply, increasing by an average of 4.4% each year with a focus on health, education and transport. As for the quality and quantity of public services — more difficult to measure, of course — the Office for National Statistics estimated an increase of about one-third between 1997-2007. But this was not simply about improving material living standards or voter satisfaction; public services were a vehicle through which a new image of Britain could be sold to citizens.
Immigration is a case in point. In the Blairite vision, people would embrace new arrivals if they were able to walk into shiny hospitals, schools, and community centres and be greeted by smiling teams of multiethnic staff, before receiving high-quality support. This is still the image of Britain emblazoned on every public-facing brochure and webpage, and the notion that immigration serves the purpose of staffing public services remains the most commonly heard case for it.
Similarly, via education, bureaucracy and broadcasting, public services provided opportunities to promote cultural change, whether by encouraging certain attitudes to language or presenting Britain as an amalgam of distinct communities. Meanwhile, the authoritarian side of Blairism — the growth of surveillance, anti-terror programmes and new criminal offences — approached the same task from the opposite angle, advancing the role of the state as a protective if menacing force capable of maintaining order in a changing society.
There are parts of Britain, increasingly likely to vote Liberal Democrat, where this vision has been really quite successful: good schools, hospitals and infrastructure underpin a way of life that is socially liberal and cosmopolitan. Here we see modern Britain “at ease with itself”, as the cliché would have it, a world that peacefully minds its own business. But these areas are generally quite wealthy. Throughout much of the country, by contrast, the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent years of austerity eroded the foundations on which the New Jerusalem was supposed to be built. To make matters considerably worse for Starmer and Reeves, more recent Conservative governments botched Brexit and lost control of the country’s borders. What remains of the Blairite model of citizenship, conceived as a system of managed change, are incoherent and disconnected pieces, with none of the security or prosperity needed to anchor them: social justice campaigns that seem to spring up from nowhere; a police force both unreliable and strangely aggressive; incomprehensible concessions to international law.
If there is a discernable purpose in the Starmer project, it is to shepherd these fragments and painstakingly restore them to a more coherent whole. The urgency with which his government has awarded public sector pay deals, while insisting on the need for growth, shows an elemental desire to rebuild the progressive state by getting public services functioning and funded. The problem illustrated by this week’s spending review, however, is that the government simply lacks the resources to do anything more than plug some of the gaps left by the state’s steady decay. The golden geese of New Labour’s financialised economy are not coming back, and since investors demand high interest rates from the government, the Treasury now spends more than £100 billion each year just on debt interest. For comparison, Reeves’ winter fuel payment cut was predicted to save £1.5 billion annually.
But if Labour lacks a vision for citizenship without healthy public services and a generous state, then so does Reform. Farage’s purely opportunistic economic policies, comprised of lavish, largely unfunded tax cuts and giveaways, show a failure to grasp the seriousness of the moment. He may think that the problem of citizenship is just one of reasserting boundaries, but he will soon find that, for much of the public, it is also defined by material benefits which he cannot provide.
