You have to ask: is Keir Starmer the best Tory in contemporary politics? Is he not just the heir to Blair (minus the charisma) but to Margaret Thatcher? And is his Irish Svengali, Morgan McSweeney, channelling Dominic Cummings? Only today the PM has abolished NHS England, pretty well the quintessential quango, declaring: “I don’t see why decisions about £200 billion of taxpayer money for something as fundamental to our security as the NHS should be taken by an arms-length body, NHS England”. It looks like a return to the NHS reforms instituted by Andrew Lansley – yes, a Tory.
Further, can you imagine any Tory leader from Cameron to Sunak doing what the PM announced today… getting to grips with the Blob? Michael Gove tried and failed. Other Tories simply presided over an ever expanding civil service. As Sir Keir writes in the Daily Telegraph – note, the house journal of the Tory party – today, “the Civil Service has grown by 130,000 since the referendum and yet frontline services have not improved”. He is accordingly announcing a target to cut the administrative costs of regulation by a quarter.
I mean, if you didn’t know who was writing the following, who would you think was the author? “For too long … there’s been a tendency to avoid difficult questions by sweeping them under a carpet of regulation. To outsource and delay decision-making and avoid accountability. For any challenge faced, for too long the answer has been more arms-length bodies, quangos and regulators which end up blocking the government…” That’s pure Tory-speak from the PM’s Telegraph article. It brings to mind a famous Tory Party conference in Mrs T’s day when two ministers, one being Peter Lilley, produced a giant pair of scissors and, grinning maniacally, cut through some evil-looking red tape: well, that’s Sir Keir for you.
As it happens, I’m not particularly keen on the PM’s chosen solution, to dispense with anyone who can’t handle AI, or who could be replaced by it: I’m certainly not in favour of his ends, to steamroller through local objections to new housing. But like it or not, this approach to Whitehall – mass job cuts - reminds me of no-one so much as Dominic Cummings, who would like to replace much of the civil service with tech entrepreneurs like our American friend with the chainsaw. Granted, what the PM says and what the PM does are different things: the Government has, it seems, created 27 new quangos since coming to office and abolished just one. He’s talking tough on immigration yet seems set to preside over still-huge levels (which go a long way to accounting for the housing shortage). But it’s the intention that’s interesting.
I cannot think of any Tory premier who would have been this bold in addressing the ever greater size of sickness and disability payments
Could there – I just ask – be anything more quintessentially Thatcherite than cutting overseas aid in order to fund increased defence spending? In the Telegraph article he declares: “I have announced the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War”. For good measure, he’s bolstering the economy by investing much of the £13.4 billion in homegrown defence industries. If this were a Tory PM, we might think it bold; from Labour, it is the most brazen case of stealing Tory clothes since Tony Blair talked about being tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.
That’s before we get to £6 billion cuts in welfare spending, of which most may come from cuts to controversial Personal Independence Payments, PIPs, introduced in 2013. Those pips are going to squeak. I cannot think of any Tory premier who would have been this bold in addressing the ever greater size of sickness and disability payments. The bill for 16- to 64-year-old on incapacity benefits which are-means tested, and for disability benefits, which are not, was about £48bn in 2023-24, and is forecast to rise to almost £76bn by 2030. It’s simply not sustainable.
That’s why the PM is launching a Green Paper on reforming the system and, bluntly, obliging people who are citing mental health issues as a reason for not going to work to find a job. If you want to see the context for all this, watch the brilliant Channel 4 documentary by Fraser Nelson, former editor of The Spectator, on excessive welfare dependency, and crucially, the reaction of Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary, to his findings.
So…cutting back the size of the state, slashing bureaucracy, reducing overseas aid and massively increasing defence spending … what would you call that if it weren’t done by a Labour PM? In today’s Spectator, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer, [Lord] Charles Moore observes, “If [Labour] leads industrial recovery based on defence and security, tackles the flawed basis of large areas of welfare spending and sweeps away planning restrictions to build more, it will have confronted problems which the Tories evaded for years”. He thinks it may succeed.
The problem for the Labour Left is that there is nowhere to go if they don’t like the agenda. For Kemi Badenoch, the problem is more acute: how do you oppose a government which is so much more Tory than the Tories?
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
