Keir Starmer needs to come clean on domestic and foreign policy costs

Good morning. Last time I sent this email, Keir Starmer had just enjoyed his best set of political headlines since his “things will get worse” Rose Garden speech.

Since then, Westminster has received two reminders of just how deep and difficult the crisis he faces is: Donald Trump’s attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House, while Anneliese Dodds, an early and longtime supporter, has resigned as international development minister over the £6bn in cuts to the UK’s aid budget. Starmer also racked up another diplomatic success with his summit at Lancaster House yesterday.

Some thoughts on the policy and political challenges he faces in today’s newsletter.

Paying the bills

The big picture is that Europe has more than the required means to defend itself from Russian aggression — but it has two problems. The first is whether it has the time; the second is whether it has the political will. Although Europe has more than enough money to adequately cater to its own defence, for the last 35 years it has assumed both a degree of joint intra-European co-operation and has looked to the US to provide knowhow and support for things such as mass military logistics.

Even when the Anglo-French military alliance has nominally “gone it alone” without American support — such as the two countries’ intervention in Libya or the fight against jihadist groups in the Western Sahel — they have relied on US air bases to refuel.

One reason for Europe’s approach — and why Keir Starmer and some of his fellow European leaders are saying things like “I do not accept that the US is an unreliable ally” — is it knows that maintaining enough ambiguity about what the US may or may not do is a vital part of buying time for it not to matter how absent an ally the US is.

Although the numbers are large — Bruegel, a Brussels-based think-tank, suggests the number could be at least €250bn across the continent — they are within Europe’s collective means. But are they within Europe’s collective will? I don’t know. (Read Europe Express for the continent-wide perspective.) But here in this corner, while there is a vanishingly small constituency for avowedly pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine sentiment in the country as a whole, there are still big questions about whether or not the British electorate is really willing to pay for it in the end.

To get defence expenditure to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, Starmer picked what is probably the easiest big-ticket cut you can make to UK government spending. Foreign aid is not popular in the country as a whole, though it is vitally important to many Labour MPs and to a good-sized chunk of Labour voters.

No one thinks that 2.5 per cent is adequate for the challenge facing the UK and the challenge that Starmer, in his diplomacy and rhetoric, has taken up. But, if pieces are already falling off the government when you try and touch aid spending, good luck with anything else.

One problem, and Dodds highlighted it in her resignation letter, is that the government keeps doubling down on its spending promises even as it reconfirms its self-denying ordinances on tax. The government promises there will be no austerity, and I’m sure will hide behind the usual sophistic arguments about spend as a share of GDP. But let’s be serious: what people understand by austerity is “the government stops doing something that it was doing previously”. The government has already experienced plenty of verbal brickbats for pulling out of worthy but second-order schemes, such as the advanced mathematics support and the Latin in state schools programmes. Now it is inflicting a reduction in state spending on the world’s poorest of a kind that never happened under the coalition.

Big blows to the government’s growth strategy — the loss of the exascale supercomputer computer in Edinburgh and the AstraZeneca vaccine plant in Speke — are, again, the result of austerity, of this government deciding to spend less than the last. Thus far, Labour has managed to avoid having that spun as a breach of its promise not to return to austerity. But the problem is that it comes at the cost of people simply thinking the government is incompetent — that it loses out on pharmaceutical investment or cuts specialist maths provision not because it is tightening its belt, but because it is simply confused.

And all the while the government continues to make verbal commitments — such as the six “milestones”, and Starmer’s “coalition of the willing” — that can’t possibly be met. Starmer has rightly recognised that the biggest and most important task of his premiership is navigating the UK through the biggest change in the global order since 1945. But that recognition hasn’t yet fed through to how he talks and acts on domestic policy and public spending, and the government is surely heading for a nasty collision with voters once that becomes clear.

Now try this

Last week, I mostly listened to Jocelyn Pook’s peerless soundtrack to The Wife, while writing my column.

Top stories today

• One-month truce | The UK and France are to lead an attempt to create a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine that would include an initial one-month truce with Russia.

• £119mn | The final cost of HS2’s notorious “bat tunnel” is expected to be 20 per cent higher than previously thought, at £119mn in today’s prices, figures obtained by the FT show.

• ‘Rogue employers’ | The UK government should toughen its reforms to workers’ rights, specifically regarding zero-hours contracts, to prevent businesses from exploiting loopholes in the legislation, a cross-party committee of MPs said on Monday.