When Keir Starmer’s government finally arrives on the threshold of the next general election, due in 2028-29, Labour’s hopes will not rest on the battlefields of Ukraine, however well-judged Starmer’s diplomacy is proving to be in that conflict right now. Labour’s long-term fate will instead be determined here at home, in the way all elections almost always are.
As so often, the outcome in four years’ time will be decided by whether voters feel more secure then than they did in the past. If they do, they may vote Labour. If they do not, they may turn to the Conservatives and to Reform UK. The government’s preoccupation with this crossroads explains why Downing Street wants the prime minister’s speech on the civil service on Thursday to be seen as a defining choice of direction.
In his speech, Starmer is expected to set out plans for the most radical restructuring of the British state in decades. The plans are said to be extensive, challenging old assumptions of the right and the left, and ranging far beyond the old argument about the size of the state that dominated British politics in the 40 years after Margaret Thatcher came to power. Many previous reform strategies, most recently from Michael Gove, have fizzled out. With his large majority, however, Starmer is particularly well placed to turn his proposals into reality.
Starmer’s central contention is that, although the civil service today is larger than ever, it is far less effective and trusted. His spotlight ranges well beyond Whitehall. More than 5 million people are now employed in central and local government service, including the NHS: around a million more than in 2000. Partly because of Covid, four times as many work in NHS England and the department of health compared with 2010, when waiting lists were shortest and public satisfaction highest.
Cutting numbers, however, is only one of the expected Starmer plans. The prime minister will also announce new incentives to get “failing” civil servants to quit, a thinning-out of top jobs in Whitehall, a slowdown in outsourcing from government departments to regulators, a reorganisation of NHS England, and a big boost for data roles and AI.
The advance billing of Starmer’s address on Thursday as a speech on civil service reform may have served to obscure its wider significance. The reality, though, is that it is about something truly epic. It is about whether Labour can make 21st-century British government work at all.
Until the speech itself is delivered, the key text for understanding what Starmer thinks he is doing remains the 1,500-word letter that he wrote to cabinet ministers last month. That letter, which clearly reflects the approach of the No 10 chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was a call to arms for the remainder of this parliament. It said the old ways have failed and are too slow. Politicians have become “complacent about the role of the market and the state”. The public is “hungry for change and disruption”. The letter ends with a demand for “wholesale reform” to provide security and renewal.
Today’s intervention needs to be understood in that ambitious context. It is meant as big-picture stuff. It is not solely about changing Whitehall, civil service numbers or AI, though it is partly about all of that. At its root, though, the speech is about the imperative to change how government works in the new technological world. This was something that Dominic Cummings attempted from the centre-right after 2019. The aim this time is from the centre left, to make the state better at doing good for those who rely on it – which, in one way or another, is most of us.
There should be no dispute that this is necessary work. A YouGov survey last autumn found that just 6% thought UK public services were in a good state, with 74% judging them in a bad one. Bad management was seen as the number one cause, not lack of spending.
Part of this is down to Brexit, which, far from cutting red tape as pretended, has actually increased it. Covid provided another extreme pressure. Yet, with civil service numbers now more than 115,000 higher than before Brexit, there is no compelling sign that more civil servants leads to better outcomes. Better performance management in the civil service is a no-brainer when the public finances are tight, as they are today.
Government sources are adamant that – despite the “project chainsaw” label others have given the initiative – it is wrong to equate what Starmer is saying with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” in Washington. “We are not Doge. We are not wielding a chainsaw. We are not anti-state,” one said. “This is a centre-left Labour government. It believes in the power of the state to make lives better. But the state has to change. Civil servants need to realise that they will never have a more civil-service-supporting set of ministers than they do today.”
This is the line that both Starmer and McSweeney take. The influential cabinet minister Pat McFadden also made these arguments on his weekend media round. But the test of any policy and any speech is whether it can be put into practice as smoothly as possible and whether it produces desirable results for citizens. Here, the government faces big problems.
Not least of these is the sheer amount of publicity given to Musk and to Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, for their iconic slash-and-burn, chainsaw-brandishing approach to government. Milei and Musk are opposed to the state, while Labour says it is not. Yet it can be all too easy to equate them, as even the Labour Together thinktank, which is close to McSweeney, has now done.
Even if the parallels are fundamentally false, as McFadden argued this weekend, such comparisons can stick. They can be a gift to campaigners against the policy, including in the unions. These are deeply emotive issues, and for good reasons.
Nevertheless, everyone, including the unions, also knows that the world has changed since the 20th century. The private sector is being transformed by new technologies bringing new forms of product manufacture, delivery, work and consumption. The public realm cannot sit by and pretend it is unaffected, or that there is some magical way of recreating the past.
Starmer’s letter to the cabinet last month was run through with two ideas: the case for disruption of old approaches, and the public’s craving for better security. Disruption and security are not natural bedfellows. Starmer’s challenge is to prove that they can be. If he succeeds, Labour can look forward to the next election with something like cautious optimism. If he fails, the future will surely belong to others.
