HE NEEDS TO CHANGE

What is Keir Starmer's fatal flaw? He believes in nothing – and is proud of it, argues Isabel Hardman, who takes a closer look at what he needs to do to make his position less perilous

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"I came in for one simple reason: that I wanted to change the lives of working people for the better. And I don't believe in anything else." Last week, as Keir Starmer tried his best to celebrate a year in government, he fell once again to boasting that he didn't believe in anything. For the prime minister, it is a virtue that there is no such thing as “Starmerism”, as it means he’s not weighed down by dogma. He went on to say that he didn’t believe in performative politics or rhetorical speeches, because it was the change that mattered.

Of course, it is the change that mattered, but Sir Keir is still talking as vaguely as the cover of his manifesto about “change” without being able to flesh it out. Last week’s events suggested that he doesn’t really know. The government had to gut a bill that it had claimed was about welfare reform, but which was dominated by Treasury-driven cuts to benefits.

He was launching an NHS plan which, while difficult to disagree with in its broad brush principles, felt rather as if it had been taken out of the bottom of a chest freezer in a dusty garage owned by New Labour and reheated.

The plan offered little detail on how the government plans to implement something that reformers have discussed for decades: redirecting the NHS towards a more balanced focus on preventive and community medicine, rather than its current emphasis on acute care. Neither the welfare “reforms” nor the NHS plan contained big, stunning new ideas that no one had thought of before. The NHS’s problem isn’t due to a lack of ideas — it’s the repeated failure to implement any over many years (PA)