Lowri Griffiths on Labour’s First Year, Keir Starmer’s Communication Style, and Why Political Fatigue Is a Luxury Not Everyone Can Afford

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

By Lowri Griffiths | North London Life & Commentary

The person I sat next to at a dinner party in Crouch End last weekend — a secondary school teacher, very funny, voted Labour with genuine conviction in July 2024 — said something that I’ve been thinking about since: “I’m not disappointed, exactly. I knew it would be like this. I just didn’t know I’d feel like this about knowing it would be like this.” I wrote it down on my phone under the table, which is what I do when someone says something exactly right.

Keir Starmer has been Prime Minister for less than two years and the Labour movement is already performing its ritual re-evaluation of whether the thing that was supposed to happen is happening. The ritual is as old as Labour governments. Wilson went through it. Blair went through it twice (once more gently, once very badly). The question is always the same: is this Labour governing, or is this something else in Labour’s clothing?

What Has Happened

The NHS waiting list has shortened, modestly, through measures that are working slowly. The planning reforms are moving forward and will eventually produce the housing numbers that Labour promised and that the planning system has previously prevented, if the reforms are implemented as proposed, which requires sustained political will against sustained local objection, which is the condition that all planning reform requires and that all planning reform finds difficult to maintain when the local objectors include people in marginal constituencies. The two-child benefit cap has been lifted, which is real and material and was the right thing to do and which produced political pain that Labour absorbed without reversing course, which is a data point worth noting.

What has not happened, or has happened more slowly than promised: economic growth at the rate that the fiscal projections require; the public sector pay settlements that would stabilise the NHS and teaching workforce; the social care reform that has been pending for so long that it has its own mythology; and the general sense that the government is moving with urgency proportionate to the problems it inherited, which were large and which a government elected to address has an obligation to address at a pace that matches their scale.

Starmer’s communication is the other thing. He communicates like someone who has been advised to communicate carefully and who has taken the advice too completely. The careful language that serves well in cross-examination does not serve well in a prime ministerial broadcast. The country did not elect him for precision; it elected him because the alternative was worse, which is a mandate that requires careful management but also requires the projection of something beyond careful management. My previous political writing includes a more detailed analysis of what Labour’s communication strategy is trying to achieve and whether it’s working, which was more charitable when I wrote it than it would be now.

The Fatigue Question

The teacher at the dinner party can afford to be tired. Her mortgage is manageable and her job is secure and her children are at a good school. Political fatigue is a luxury available to people whose lives are not directly dependent on the specific policy outcomes being delayed. The people on the two-child benefit cap waiting list could not afford fatigue. The people on NHS waiting lists could not. Political fatigue is the privilege of the stable, which is why North London dinner parties produce so much of it and which is why I try to remember, writing here, that the view from Crouch End is not the view from everywhere else.

Labour has three years. That is a long time and a short time simultaneously. Use it well. The teacher is watching. So am I.

For UK politics without the party line, see The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/