Plus ça change… what do Keir Starmer’s ‘national missions’ tell us about the Labour Party?
The thinness of Labour's mission-based approach is frustrating, and risks repeating the mistakes of the post-2008 era. But there are grounds for optimism too
Lots of things can be said about Keir Starmer’s embrace of a mission-oriented approach to policy. Accordingly, lots of things have been said about Keir Starmer’s embrace of a mission-oriented approach to policy! Yet there has been little discussion of the political purpose behind the adoption of missions.
In his book Divided They Fell (which I will discuss further below) Sean McDaniel details the Labour Party’s struggle (and that of France’s Parti socialiste) to construct a coherent alternative to neoliberalism and austerity in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. We can, on the one hand, see Starmer’s adoption of ‘national missions’ as an attempt to provide such coherence, as the UK’s economy turmoil has continued to deepen.
On the other hand, it is possible to see the rather thin version of a missions framework which characterises Starmer’s latest relaunch as an example of Labour’s ongoing struggle to articulate a coherent alternative to the UK’s dominant economic policy paradigm.
The end of growth
Let’s begin by taking Starmer’s national missions at face value. There are several limitations.
First, with the partial exception of the mission to ‘make Britain a clean energy superpower’ – which encompasses, among other things, the ambition of zero-carbon electricity by 2030 – most of the national missions do not themselves establish clear guides to policy action.
Instead, they consist of vague promises to ‘reform’ various public services and the criminal justice system, in order to achieve outcomes such as ‘cutting health inequalities’, ‘stop[ping] criminals getting away without punishment’, and ‘preparing young people for work and life’. (In fairness to Labour, the party also committed to ‘set[ting] out measurable goals’ for the health, crime, and education missions ‘over the coming months’.)
Second, the growth mission – ‘secure the highest sustained growth in the G7’ – is problematic for several reasons. From a delivery perspective, this mission could of course be achieved even if the UK economy continues to stagnate, as long as other G7 economies perform worse (especially given ambiguity over how ‘sustained’ might be defined). Missions should always focus on actions we can take.
Furthermore, despite the disclaimer that the ambition also encompasses ‘good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country making everyone, not just a few, better off’, the invocation of ‘growth’ is not appropriate for an approach which maintains that the economy should be steered towards delivering socially useful outcomes. Growth in conventional terms may be a means, but never the end – and pursuing growth for growth’s sake has helped to cause many of the problems which a mission-based approach might address.
Nothing of value
Related to this, and third, Labour’s understanding of missions does not appear to encompass a strong, progressive account of public value: a pre-requisite that should have been considered non-negotiable. A missions framework is based fundamentally on the notion that the public sector creates value, by addressing challenges that can only be addressed collectively.
Missions of course mobilise the private sector to deliver on social objectives, with public policy used to shape purpose-driven business activity. It is entirely reasonable to question a missions-based approach on the basis that public purpose and profitability are not unproblematically compatible, and that UK public authorities currently lack the ability and inclination to reorient private economic activity towards progressive goals.
Nevertheless, it is clear that missions at least envisage radical change in the public and private sector. Labour may have mistaken practicality for principle. Labour’s approach is founded not upon a critique of capitalism, or its outcomes, but only of government. In a recent New Statesman piece, Starmer explained that missions – by rightly establishing long-term policy ambitions – were part of his efforts to ‘persuade’ the business elites gathered at Davos that, under a Labour government, the UK would be ‘open for business’.
Local difficulty
Fourth, and despite its critique of government, Labour’s missions framework does not itself challenge excessive centralisation in the UK. As Nick Kimber explains, there is a danger that ‘national’ missions serve to reinforce centralisation.
This is partly because central government – even if reconfigured – will ‘own’ the broad-based missions laid out by Starmer. He expects to be judged against them, and will inevitably seek therefore to charge the policy domain he has most control over – Whitehall departments – with delivering them.
Furthermore, much of the rhetoric around Labour’s missions has emphasised the importance of using ‘taxpayer money’ sensibly: a long-running theme for Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. In this context, will a Starmer government be comfortable in providing the fiscal autonomy that local government requires to determine how to support missions in their jurisdictions? Even if we accept the validity of central government establishing the what of missions, local government should be a big part of the how.
Half measures
This is not to suggest that Labour does not have a progressive agenda in many areas of social and economic policy, or is unable to develop one.
Missions are not the be-all and end-all: the May and Johnson governments both adopted a missions-based approach (to industrial strategy and regional policy, respectively) without any serious intent to commit to the sustained policy action or public investment that the missions required.
Labour is in some danger of falling into the same trap, but the party has outlined a series of mission-like ambitions in areas such as industrial policy and energy policy, alongside (or underneath) the headline mission areas that Starmer recently publicised (albeit with lots of confusing overlaps and inexact terminology). These could, in practice, allow a more holistic understanding of public value, and a more muscular version of market-making, to emerge in practice.
Why, then, did Labour need to plop the vague ‘national missions’ on top? The pre-existing sub-missions and other policy ambitions had not ‘cut through’ to public consciousness in any meaningful sense. Perhaps Starmer felt that a simpler way of communicating a mission-based approach to the electorate, even if fairly vacuous and borderline misleading, was required?
If there was a strategic communications plan behind the missions announcement, it was not a very good one. For instance, why would Labour promise to ‘halve’ violent crime, as specified by its ‘making Britain’s streets safer’ mission? This mis-step was compounded by a more detailed briefing subsequently released, which promised to ‘halve the level of violence against women and girls’ (a commitment Starmer actually repeated in a speech last week). This would of course be an incredible achievement in practice. Yet to tell the electorate in advance that your goal is only to halve sexual violence is, at best, unfortunate. Halving NHS waiting lists, in contrast, is reasonable: nobody expects drive-thru hip replacements, or whatever. But to passionately extol that you are content for only tens of thousands of rapes to be committed while you are in charge is baffling.
Labour got to this odd place because its missions are about too many different things:
An attempt to round out the Keir Starmer persona (with a sense of purpose), while reinforcing one of his existing electoral assets, i.e. his image as a competent bureaucrat (pursuing realistic targets)
An attempt to provide a blueprint of a Labour government (how the UK will change in the years ahead), without committing now to a range of very specific policies (an approach which harmed Labour in 2019)
Above all, an attempt to outline a coherent narrative for Starmerism, while remaining ambiguous on key ideological issues around the state/economy relationship
It is a mess, but not necessarily an unusual mess. Opposition parties get very little space to articulate who they are, and how they might govern, and it is normal to expect such initiatives to attempt to kill several birds with one stone. The third point above is the one that has received the least attention in recent commentary, although it is by far the most important rationale for the missions framing and, at the same time, the explanation for the limitations of this framing as presented by Labour.
This brings me to Sean McDaniel’s research. McDaniel sees public-facing policy narratives as a fit between institutional intra-party dynamics, political parties' ideational landscapes, and the wider political economy, with political and ideational path dependencies acting to constrain the flow of fresh ideas. McDaniel urges us to focus on ‘the supply side’ of politics. This means understanding political parties not simply as responding to the preferences of the electorate (or the segments of the electorate that will help them to win power) or even to the expectations of economic and media elites who shape the terrain parties operate in, but rather as complex and ‘sticky’ entities which adapt slowly, and imperfectly, to changing circumstances.
The fall
The story McDaniel tells in Divided They Fell is not focused on Starmer or Starmerism, but rather Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.
Miliband may have narrowly won the leadership election on a soft left platform, but his ability to construct a new strategic direction for the party, offering an alternative to austerity, was constrained by his inheritance of a party machine which had enjoyed electoral success while largely accommodating neoliberalism. After 2010, ‘the continued intellectual and sociological domination of New Labour within the party rendered it difficult to set out a clear critique of the pre-crisis neoliberal order for fear of tarnishing the party’s own record in government… and over the course of the Parliament its strategy increasingly fell back on well-established strategic and programmatic ideas developed under New Labour.’ This flawed approach ultimately opened the door to the party’s capture by Labour’s hard left.
In France, McDaniel’s second case, the fact that PS were out of power at the time of the financial crisis made it easier to forge a critique of financialised capitalism, which helped François Hollande to win the presidency in 2012. Yet Hollande and his supporters from the party’s centre and right had long established themselves as ‘modernisers’, based on their experience of the apparent failure of François Mitterand’s socialist experiment in 1983, and had few strategic or intellectual resources by which to devise an effective policy platform in government. The PS moderates retained control of the party, but were unable to construct a coherent alternative to neoliberalism and austerity, quickly losing electoral ground to new coalitions formed by politicians from the party’s left and right (Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Emmanuel Macron, respectively), as well as France’s far right.
The circumstances around Starmer’s Labour are clearly a continuation of the circumstances of the immediate post-crisis period, rather than simply being comparable to the earlier period. Centre-left politicians continue to seek a durable alternative to neoliberalism. In some ways they have been empowered by the failure of austerity, in the UK and elsewhere, to restore economic growth, and there is a nascent ecosystem of centre-left policy thinking visible within some think-tanks, academia and, to a lesser extent, the media, encouraged by the Miliband and Corbyn leaderships.
Adaptation has been stymied, however, by failure of the left to win or retain power across Europe, and indeed the electoral failure of a harder left Labour leadership in the UK. The Labour Party does not have a singular diagnosis for this failure, but it has certainly emboldened those on the fiscally conservative and economically liberal Labour right, which has long been the parliamentary party’s dominant faction.
I think this tells us three things about Starmer’s national missions. First, the Labour left - following the financial crisis, austerity, Brexit, and COVID-19 (and the imprint of Corbyn’s unexpectedly strong result in 2017) - remains too strong to ignore. To manage his party, Starmer needs a defining narrative which speaks to a progressive purpose, rather than appealing simply to managerial competence. Second, the Labour right is more cautious than ever about the left influencing policy, and has acquiesced to a thin version of a mission-based approach insofar as it is perceived to signal a pragmatic approach to delivering a set of fairly uncontroversial principles. As Starmer remarked in his speech launching the missions in February:
I’m not concerned about whether investment or expertise comes from the public or private sector, I just want to get the job done.
By extension, and thirdly, Starmer has accordingly been more successful than his recent predecessors in constructing a political identity which placates just enough of the labour movement to keep the Labour Party intact. But his success in internal party management has come at the expense of constructing either an effective communications strategy, or a plan for government - undermining the strength of a missions-based approach at the very moment it is adopted.
It remains the case that Labour is likely to win the next general election (although a functioning parliamentary majority is far from certain). Yet as McDaniel warns in a follow-up piece for Renewal:
[T]he experience of the French centre-left should remind Labour of the challenges that lie ahead if they do re-enter office. Winning the next general election is simply the first hurdle. Getting the right strategy in place to govern will be essential for ensuring the French experience is not repeated.
The final chapter of Divided They Fell outlines a series of challenges which any centre-left party will need to address, including adapting the economy to climate catastrophe and its associated impact on production and migration, and increasing state capacity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There is little in Starmer’s national missions that is relevant to such challenges, or that is suggestive of policy action at the scale and intensity required to address them. It is clear that Starmer is currently seeking to discipline the Labour left - which is where most of the new ideas required are being generated - in advance of a general election. But it is less clear whether this is an agenda driven by electoral considerations, which will therefore be relaxed once power is attained, or instead an agenda which will be pursued more ruthlessly once an electoral victory further strengthens the leadership. (Of course, one of the lessons of McDaniel’s research is that we perhaps spend too much time dwelling on party leaders’ individual characteristics, at the expense of the institutional dynamics of the parties they lead.)
Labour’s new narrative is similarly open-ended: Schrödinger’s missions, if you like, simultaneously progressive and conservative. It is easy to foresee a situation whereby the missions are invoked as a rationale for limiting policy action, as only interventions which contribute in a very direct sense to the missions are justified, and indeed a rationale for further private sector involvement in delivering public goods (as long as ministers maintain oversight of targets derived from the missions). One of the few specific policy pledges, i.e. achieving zero-carbon electricity generation by 2030 (noted above), only accelerates the Conservative government’s existing timetable by a few years, and in fact represents a deceleration of the timetable set out by the National Grid in 2019.
Equally, as it becomes clearer that achieving most (or all) of the missions will be difficult without rethinking key aspects of how our economy is organised, it could be that the missions-based approach provides a rationale for Whitehall opening up to radical policy ideas, and furthermore a culture in which state actors become more confident in insisting that the private sector serves the public good. (As George Dibb points out, Starmer’s initial speech promised ‘a massive role’ for business in delivering missions, but also warned he would not tolerate private sector rent-seeking, or socialising risks while privatising profits). In this sense, ambiguity may be frustrating but ultimately helpful if it allows for interpretations of mission imperatives to harden over time.