Starmerism Means the Wholesale Transfer of Power From Parliament to Civil Servants, Judges and Quangocrats

Keir Starmer is not a politician by training or inclination. He was drafted into civilian office late in life and immediately lowered into a stately place on the front benches.

In this way, Starmer is part of a long tradition. Political systems in trouble often lose faith in their native class of civilian leaders, and turn instead to a distinguished outsider who seems to stand above the factions.

These people are not ‘political’ – politics has failed. These are figures of unity, and of command. The senile Field Marshal MacMahon; the senile Field Marshal Hindenburg; the policeman Starmer; the police spy Sue Gray – harder, simpler people for a harder, simpler rule.

But there is a reason why most governing classes try to avoid the open rule of its bureaucrats, spies and major generals. Social orders need to maintain a mythology of some kind – that power does not simply flow out the barrel of a gun. Whatever else the next few years may hold, it does not ultimately bode well for Blairite society that it must now have recourse to people like Starmer.

Much has been said about Keir Starmer’s ‘Pabloism’, and of his youthful sojourn in a work camp behind the Iron Curtain. All valid things to raise. What should be remembered, though, is that this general tendency – the collected fissile elements of Marxism Today – has now been in power for over a quarter century and is showing its age. Whatever radical or subversive edge it may have had is many years gone. It is also, in its way, unduly flattering. New Labour was always proudly philistine. The sneering conformism, the monomaniacal obsession with football. This was never a ploy to distract from more chic ideas, as some have said. The two were always one and the same. ‘Pabloism’ in practice from 1997 simply meant the kind of chivvying ITV morning show sensibility that has come to define the era; that eccentricity is suspect, that everyone has to cheer for England, and that Diana Spencer was the People’s Princess.
Forget class, certainly. Forget, even, the Authoritarian Personality, or “all that is solid melts into air”. What we’re faced with in 2024 is a stodgy public moralism that owes much more to Ant & Dec than to Michel Pablo. And more than anything else, it’s a public doctrine that was put in genuine danger from 2016-20, placing it under a psychological state of siege from which it has yet to emerge, and which Starmer’s victory will do nothing to allay.

Starmer the man is the most apt symbol of this new, baroque self-seriousness. This is a person who really does think that a studio audience would laugh at him because his father was a toolmaker. He speaks to an established order that has, in its paranoia, lost whatever capacity for subtlety or irony it may have once possessed. There is instead a deathly earnestness, and a fear for the future. Shadows move on the walls – divisive ones. Look at the front cover of Starmer’s manifesto. He is flinty-eyed; wearisomely resolute. The whole picture is tinted grey. Even Theresa May in her full pomp would have probably baulked at this. Keir Starmer is a dark and brooding man for a dark and brooding age.

Starmer and the class he represents believe that time is running out for them. The Financial Times speaks of Starmerism as a last chance saloon for the Third Way. If Mr. Trump re-enters the Oval Office, and if current political trends in continental Europe persist, then the Starmer ministry will soon be the last government of its kind in the Western world.

It will retain its distinct character, though. New Labour’s overriding belief was a horror of centralised power in London (let it never be said that this project was in any way ‘Metropolitan’), and the idea that there are natural laws, or human rights, that majorities cannot abridge. With Brexit, these ideas took on a new urgency. Britain’s EU exit was, among other things, a reassertion of popular sovereignty and executive powers. And so, in 2024, the quangos, devolution, and the rule of the courts are now treated as the best way to prevent anything like Brexit ever happening again. It’s a simple, despairing idea. No one can be trusted to use power, and so the sceptre of state must now be smashed once and for all lest anyone try to pick it up. Absolutely no one will be responsible for anything under such a system; the only sovereign power will be codes of ethics and values, enforced by the courts.

This is the meaning of Starmerism: a frantic charge for the guns to destroy the unitary parliamentary state before any of its rivals can wrest control of it. In the man itself it will find a suitable commanding officer. Sir Keir has no settled views on economic or foreign affairs. He is essentially apolitical; essentially philistine. His only political belief is that politics should stop existing. Like many politicians drawn from the security forces, he is old and his career is behind him; he wants, essentially, to render this last service to the nation and then retire.

There is nothing mysterious or evasive about Starmerism at all. It has always been very open about its basic programme: to reduce Parliament and Downing Street to constitutional ciphers and end majority rule.

This is the hard point around which the party’s entire manifesto revolves. For all the talk of growth, the economy is here completely suborned to the bigger constitutional battle. The economic idea of Starmerism is that no politician should be permitted to take economic decisions. All “fiscal events” are to be submitted to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) for its approval, which will create an effective veto. Economic advisory bodies are split, merged, and closed all the time, but such is the hostility to any kind of executive power that new institutions like the ‘Industrial Strategy Council’ are to be put on an actual statutory footing.

The Lascalles Principles, previously obscure, have now been invoked at least twice in the last Parliament to prevent a dissolution; they will no doubt now become an accepted constitutional fact, and will stop any future prime minister from calling an election on a controversial economic measure, for fear of giving the markets a fright. Ensuring good fiscal decisions by making bad ones illegal – such is the accumulated financial wizardry of Team Starmer.
Immigration and energy will follow a similar course. Starmer has pledged to “strengthen” the Migration Advisory Council (MAC). Given how loathe Rishi Sunak has been to ignore its recommendations, we can only assume that a beefed-up version of the MAC will have almost complete discretion over Britain’s immigration policy. Great British Energy, like NHS England (created by the Coalition’s health reforms), will simply take over this area of policy. It will be able to ignore direct orders from ministers, just as NHS England ignored Brandon Lewis’s order to stop hiring DEI consultants.

The military is also be put at the disposal of international law, rather than the civilian government. It is yet unclear what shape the ‘Prevention of Military Intervention Act’ will take, but it will almost certainly require the executive to make a ‘lawful case’ for any military action it undertakes. Similarly, the Legacy Act which protects Northern Ireland veterans from prosecution is to be repealed.

Starmerism will massively expand the scope of rights, chipping away at even the theoretical basis for opposition. The planned Race Equality Act will prioritise minorities over white Britons in the awarding of government contracts. The new Government also plans to activate the ‘socio-economic duty’ in the Equality Act, meaning that all public bodies (including government departments) will have a legal obligation to reduce socio-economic inequality. This will open any kind of economically liberal agenda up to legal challenge, or at least to legal resistance from the civil service. That this made it into the manifesto also hints that the ‘Social Rights’ detailed in Gordon Brown’s A New Britain may yet resurface: these would include full access to NHS services – and welfare payments – to newly-arrived migrants.

And Starmerism will finally banish the spectre of Civil Service reform, so long mooted. Instead, the Civil Service will carry out its own reform of the executive – or, as Sue Gray put it, moulding Downing Street “into [Whitehall’s] way of working”.

Starmer will adopt the recommendations of the Institute for Government’s recent Power with Purpose report. These include finally abandoning the conceit that ministers give orders to civil servants, replacing it with a system of formal bartering between Whitehall and the executive.

This will, for one, mean the creation of a Department of the Civil Service: Whitehall will at last acquire a constitutional existence, and will no longer simply be a set of employees that the state happens to have hired. Further, any incoming government will have to agree on a set of “Priorities for Government” with a panel comprised of civil servants, the departmental secretaries, and the Head of the Civil Service. However, the Head of the Department of the Civil Service will be empowered to “ensure that policies and budgets take delivery considerations into account” – in other words, the formal right to torpedo the policies of the elected government on entirely subjective grounds of ‘workability’. (See this article for a much more detailed description of the Institute of Government’s proposals)

Parliament and ministers will be policed by a new overarching Ethics and Integrity Commission with its own independent chair; its brief will, in all likelihood, be to enforce the vague and genuinely risible Nolan Principles. As they have done for the previous three years, these processes will simply be used as a way to wear down, harry and expel political opponents. In the face of constant frivolous investigations, parliamentary privilege will cease to exist in any meaningful form, as will effective cabinet government. Tellingly, the only department that will not have a corresponding select committee to monitor its “standards and ethics” will be the new Department of the Civil Service.

On the Union, Starmer plans to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. That the SNP has since fallen into complete confusion, that the almost total defeat of Scottish nationalism has never required any “reimagining of Britishness” or federal reorganisation, leaves him cold. His Government plans to strengthen the Sewel Convention, meaning that Westminster will be barred from striking down legislation on devolved matters, as Rishi Sunak did in January 2023. Scottish and Welsh nationalism has always relied on the implicit patronage of Westminster, and as this resumes their fortunes will revive.

Elsewise, the plan is for more devolution all around, crowned with (eventually) a chamber of the Nations and Regions to replace the House of Lords. The devolved administrations and metro mayoralties contain what really are some of the most malign figures that 21st Century Britain has to offer. Having no tradition of regional or municipal autonomy, those who volunteer to fill out their ranks are mainly those who wish to torment or rob their fellow creatures: the ultimate big fish in small ponds.

Mark Drakeford thought seriously about banning the sale of tea and coffee to teenagers. The City of Liverpool Mayoralty has collapsed after a series of scandals. Tower Hamlets has, mysteriously, lent £87 million to its sister councils. Thurrock Council is £655 million in the hole to the solar panel impresario Liam Kavanagh. The money intrigues of Nicola Sturgeon and Vaughan Gething are well known. Britain’s rulers are absolutely resolute in their efforts to empower these people further, seeing in this collection of freaks, thieves and informants the most effective way to break up any sense of a unitary body politic in Britain.

At a higher level, the new ministry will establish a Council of the Nations and Regions in which the devolved governments and mayors are to be consulted on all matters of policy. This Council – this Round Table of Insolvents – is the true ‘Starmer Class’, a visible sign of a governing establishment that must move downmarket to maintain itself in power, just as Starmer and Gray have been fetched from the back office to effect a kind of rough restoration of order.

With Starmerism, a certain kind of Westminster world will also come to an end: the world of tabloid mischief, the Red Lion, and backstairs intrigue. Fleet Street, especially its centre-right organs, has long fancied itself as an impish foe of the powerful. This is an important part of British political mythology; the Lobby, as we all know, “holds power to account”.

But it is totally unprepared, I think, for the regime that is about to enter Downing Street. It will likely pick up the thread of the Leveson press regulations. The Nolan Principles will do it for the milieu of the late-night Commons vote and The Strangers’ Bar. Stella Creasey will be the symbol of the world of Westminster under Starmer, not Matt Chorley or Chris ‘Chopper’ Hope. Previous governments suffered the press’s antics. This one will accuse it of disinformation, and it will do so with the full support of people like Alastair Campbell and Adam Boulton.

One canary in the coal mine will be GB News, which will come under relentless attack from an empowered Ofcom. Another is the likely closure of the Sun, which will shortly have to make a big cash settlement for besmirching the good name of Huw Edwards, another plodding enforcer in the Starmer vein. (This will be the culmination of a decades-long effort. Future historians will find it strange that Britain’s governing class could not even suffer the existence of a proletarian rag.)

Starmer’s programme will not formally abolish the powers of parliament. So long as it remains sovereign, everything is ultimately recoverable. What it will do, however, is put even any reforming government in a quasi-revolutionary position. Upon coming to power, a Right-wing government would face an immediate constitutional crisis in which actual authority was contested and civil servants would be unsure who to obey. Its legislative programme would be declared substantially illegal, and salvo after salvo of HR and ethics investigations would be launched in its direction. With a strengthened OBR, the new government would struggle even to pass a budget. Politics is impossible under these conditions. It is already largely impossible now. Anyone who would lead an opposition to Starmer must be willing to assert the unqualified power of the crown-in-parliament. There must be no institution that they would be unwilling to dissolve, no person they’d be unwilling to fire. Keir Starmer would make every political conflict a constitutional one, and, eventually, he must be answered in kind.

Stop Press: In his Telegraph column, Charles Moore homes in one one aspect of Starmer’s constitutional proposals: reform of the House of Lords. It’s far from perfect, he says, but much, much better than what Labour wants to replace it with. Well worth reading.