On Saturday Keir Starmer will celebrate his first anniversary as prime minister. Well, when I say ‘celebrate’, that’s perhaps overdoing it. Perhaps ‘mark it’ is more accurate, because he hasn’t got a huge amount to celebrate, as various of the Sunday papers aren’t slow in pointing out.
He is the most unpopular prime minister ever after a first year, and his personal approval rating is -54. It’s easy to see why. He is what Tony Benn would have called a weathervane, rather than a signpost. He swings with the political wind and his default reaction when the political going gets tough is to U-turn. He is the polar opposite of Margaret Thatcher. In 1979 Thatcherism may not have been fully formed, but voters knew what her instincts were and where she was heading. They knew she believed in something. The opposite is true of Starmer. His allies say it is the mark of a strong politician who is willing to admit they’re wrong and do a volte face and say sorry. Some people may see it like that. Most will not.
Starmer’s strongest claim to success over the last year has been in foreign policy. Take the appalling Chagos deal out of the equation and he can legitimately claim some positives. Against all the odds, he seems to be the European leader Donald Trump most likes and respects, and that has enabled several wins for Starmer, particularly on trade. He has done three trade deals, although none of them are exactly stunning. He has been totally staunch on Ukraine, although less so on Israel, where David Lammy’s emotional outbursts have essentially removed any semblance of influence over Netanyahu we may have had.
The latest U-turn is over welfare reform. It comes to something when you have a majority of 170 but your backbenchers force you into a position which exemplifies your own political weakness, and raises questions about your long term prospects as Labour leader. Everyone agrees that the welfare system as currently constituted isn’t viable or tenable in the long term, but any attempt to take away a benefit is inevitably going to be fiercely resisted by those affected, vested interests and a wide coalition of Labour MPs. The Number 10 political machine has cocked up well and proper.
I was reading Jason Cowley’s column in today’s Sunday Times in which he said that one in four adults of working age are disabled. That can’t be right, I though to myself, but incredibly it is, according to Chat GPT. The figures comes from the House of Commons Library. I did some more research on the figures from comparable European countries. Again, according to Chat GPT, the figures range from 5-8 per cent in the larger western European economies. It is possible, of course, that their definition of disability is much more strict than ours but even so, surely no one seriously believes that 25 per cent on adults are disabled, whatever the definition is. In addition, too many people assume that anyone with a disability cannot work. This is utter nonsense. Of course there are many disabilities which preclude full time, or even part time work, but too many people make too many ill-informed assumptions about disability and there need to be a much wider debate about it. But is any politician courageous enough to lead it?
