The return of competence and why it matters

What a difference a week makes. Not so much because of policy changes, though there have been some crisp announcements, including discarding the stupid, illegal and immoral Rwanda policy and lifting the ban on new onshore wind farms. And certainly not because Britain’s many problems have been solved; on the contrary, we have repeatedly been told how slow and difficult fixing them will be. But that, actually, does begin to point to the difference. It is a sign of reasonable, adult, and honest politics.

The return of basic competence

That is what is new, and it was manifested again and again this week. Smoothly, methodically, a cabinet was constructed. It is peopled largely by those who have been shadowing their portfolios for a while and who have already given careful thought to them, or who have been immersed in them by dint of having chaired the relevant select committee. Outside the cabinet, but in important ministerial posts, there was a peppering of non-political experts, Sir Patrick Vallance for the science brief, James Timpson for prisons. As a ‘government of all the talents’, this is far more convincing than Boris Johnson’s recruitment of David Frost or, further back, Gordon Brown’s appointment of Digby Jones, blowhards both.

These are all, for the most part, serious, competent people, for all that many are untested in government. That, and the lack of drama accompanying the process, might be thought of as the bare minimum, and it’s not as if Starmer has not had plenty of time to plan for it. But it is far too long since even this bare minimum has been the norm. Recall Johnson’s first cabinet, selected solely on fealty to Brexit. Recall the mess of his 2020 reshuffle when, rather than be subjected to the absurd demands of Dominic Cummings, Chancellor Sajid Javid resigned. Recall how, at their first meeting after his 2019 election victory, Johnson forced his new cabinet to chant the dishonest promises he had made.

As for competence and fitness for office, recall the almost endless list of recent Tory ministers who failed those tests. It is hardly necessary even to give examples, and certainly impossible to list them all, let alone to identify the worst. I suppose Chris ‘Failing’ Grayling might be the most compelling candidate for that title and, in case there was any danger of forgetting him amidst so many others, that danger was removed by his inclusion, at Sunak’s behest, in this week’s Dissolution honours list. It was a final, graceless, shameless spit in the country’s face from the outgoing regime.

Recall, too, the prodigious churn of those ministers over the last few years. Of course, it remains to be seen how Labour fare in this respect, but, as Catherine Haddon of the Institute for Government argues, the composition of this new cabinet suggests that Starmer has begun by putting an emphasis on continuity and stability, alongside competence.

Repairing some of the Brexit damage

So - methodical, undramatic, competent, stable. The same words apply to Starmer’s first press conference and first appearance in the House of Commons, and to Rachel Reeves’s first speech as Chancellor and her launch of the National Wealth Fund. And these words alone show the stark contrast with what has characterized recent political life. We simply haven’t seen anything like this for years. More particularly, these words also represent one reparation of the damages of Brexit. For, as I outlined early on in the election campaign, a large part of the chaos and incompetence they replace was directly attributable to Brexit. It's worth emphasizing this point because, of course, it is familiar territory that Brexit itself is not going to be reversed by this government. Yet this does not preclude addressing any of the harms associated with it.

Governmental competence at home is one example, but so too is repairing Britain’s international relations and reputation. Thus Foreign Secretary David Lammy immediately travelled to Germany, Poland and Sweden saying “it’s time to reset our relationship with our European friends and allies”. Reset from what? Self-evidently, from the damage of Brexit. And a re-set to what? An ambitious security pact, encompassing not just defence but also energy, climate change and irregular migration. On the latter, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper discussed border security issues with her counterparts in EU countries and Europol. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds is already talking about seeking improvements in the trading relationship with the EU, and already getting positive noises of potential support from the Irish Taoiseach. And Nick Thomas-Symonds, who has the pivotal post-Brexit role of Minister for European Relations, had an immediate and positive conversation with Maros Sefcovic.

Meanwhile Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn immediately hosted a meeting with Northern Ireland’s First and Deputy First Ministers, promising an improved relationship with Westminster. Starmer himself went on a tour of the devolved nations, also seeking a ‘re-set’ of relations, and emphasizing Britain’s commitment to the Good Friday Agreement when in Belfast. He then headed to Washington, where alongside the NATO summit he met some European leaders with the avowed intention of “forging closer UK-EU relations” and had a bi-lateral meeting with President Biden. There are to be further meetings with the Irish and French leaders in advance of the meeting of the European Political Community, which is being hosted by the UK.

I’m not suggesting that all of these things are solely to do with repairing Brexit damage, but there is no doubt that the way Brexit was done with almost no regard for the devolved administrations did great harm to, and caused a new and specific resentment within, the relationships between those administrations and the London government. There’s certainly no doubt that Brexit opened a particular crisis in Northern Ireland’s politics, with consequences for the UK’s relationship with the US, and especially with Biden. Equally, Brexit did great harm to the UK’s relationship with the US generally, so much of which had been predicated on the UK as a bridge between the US and the EU, and tellingly, it’s reported that Biden suggested to Starmer that improving UK-EU relations now would help to reinstate that role.

Re-setting the UK-EU relationship

There’s no cause to get carried away by all this. These are very early days, and most of what has happened is ritualistic, or at least diplomatic, politeness – though how could it be anything else, yet? The hard politics of, especially, re-setting the relationship with the EU has still to be done. On that, there is no shortage of wise advice available to the new government, none wiser than that in the excellent open letter written to Keir Starmer by Charles Grant, the Director of the Centre for European Reform. It contains important insights about both the possibilities for what could be agreed with the EU and the domestic politics of delivering it. There are similarly insightful suggestions as regards, specifically, a security pact from the Royal United Service Institute.

What unfolds from now on for the UK-EU relationship is going to be a very complicated story. The trade expert David Henig has usefully pointed out that there is not going to be a single ‘re-negotiation’, but a whole swathe of “inter-linked discussions” about different policy areas, undertaken via different institutional mechanisms, and involving different actors. It will be a big task to hold all of this within a coherent strategy. But what we have seen this week, and, like the cabinet formation, it has been done quickly, methodically, and undramatically, is the broad direction of intended travel, which is towards rapprochement. In that respect there has already been a decisive break, certainly in tone, and potentially in substance, with the last eight years of Tory government.

Moreover, it is a break being enacted without internal opposition in the governing party in the sense that, whilst the latest polling shows that the vast majority in that party want to go further than the government seem to be proposing, none want it to go less far, or to pursue a more antagonistic relationship. That, too, is a clear break with the Tory government, which faced fury from within at any step to improve things (or even at seeing a better relationship as being an improvement). Conversely, whilst there have been squeals of outrage in the pro-Brexit press and from some Brexiter politicians, another difference that has come this week is that, suddenly, their voices seem all but irrelevant.

The legitimacy of Labour’s mandate

Although the speed and energy with which this has re-set has begun have been impressive, the basic approach to this (and other policy areas) has not come as a surprise. It is exactly in line with the promises Labour made during in the campaign and had signalled for months, if not years. It is the platform that won them a huge victory. Yet the other theme of this first post-election week has been a buzz of commentary and criticism suggesting, both explicitly and implicitly, that Labour may have won a majority but do not have a legitimate mandate to govern. The point, of course, is that the vote share was so small compared with the size of the majority.

I discussed this briefly in my previous post, written in sleepless haste early on the morning of the day after the election. It poses some genuine questions about the case for electoral reform, but they are being weaponized in misleading and sometimes dishonest ways. And whilst we are very fortunate indeed that there has been nothing remotely like the attempts to derail the handover of power that accompanied Biden’s presidential victory, these insinuations about the legitimacy of Labour’s win are a very distant echo of them.

As I said in that post, the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system is difficult to defend on rational grounds (though not impossible). But it is the system we have, and, within that system, Labour won the majority it did. More than that, it did so having recognized exactly what was needed to win within such a system, namely to achieve the greatest possible ‘vote efficiency’, so that, rather than piling up huge majorities in some constituencies, Labour sought, and gained, smaller majorities but in more constituencies. That was also associated with a policy programme, including that related to Brexit, which lost some of the votes they would otherwise have received in seats where they could ‘afford to’, whilst gaining votes in seats where they needed more in order to win. There’s nothing illegitimate in that, and in a sense it broadens support for the government, whilst also making it more shallow.

Nor is there anything illegitimate in voters choosing, as it seems they did in large numbers, to vote tactically for whichever party had the best chance of defeating that party such voters least wanted elected, rather than voting for that party which they most wanted to win. I did it myself. It has always happened to an extent, and it happens in other countries’ voting systems, too, as the recent French election demonstrated. If it did so more on this occasion, then that is partly because of the level of hostility to the Tories, and partly because it is now easier to identify how to cast tactical votes effectively. This also means that, in itself, share of vote does not tell us everything about voters’ preferences. They have adapted their votes in the light of the FPTP system, so it doesn’t follow that, under a Proportional Representation (PR) system, they would vote in the same proportions.

Moreover, and it was clearly the case in this election, voters’ willingness to choose one party is partly about their view of the other party that may let in, as well as of the one they hope it will keep out. To be more concrete, as I pointed out last week, tactical voting against the Tories (especially by those who voted LibDem in previously safe Tory seats) will in part have been informed by the fact that they were not put off by the prospect of a Labour government. And on top of all that, some who did not vote Labour, and some who did not vote at all, will have made those decisions in the expectation that Labour would win without their votes. That may be part of the reason why the percentage of those who decided which way to vote on polling day is higher for the other parties than for Labour

So for all of these reasons, the outcome of the election, for all the gross disparities it has created, is not illegitimate, since it is a result of the system which we have (and which has produced similar disparities in the past), and the decisions made by voters in the light of how it works. You can only win according to the rules, and if you do, then the win is a legitimate one. That is a quite different issue from whether the system itself is a good system and there have long been very serious doubts about that. So, by all means, let’s have a ‘public debate’, perhaps a Royal Commission and even, heaven help us, a referendum, about changing the electoral system. But, in the meantime, it is quite wrong to use those doubts as a way of casting doubt on the legitimacy of this particular government.

Farage’s opportunism and his opportunity

Of course, the reason this is being raised so widely now is only partly to do with the Labour vote share. It is also because of Farage’s complaints that Reform’s share of the seats is so much less than its share of the votes. That isn’t new. Almost the same thing happened with UKIP in the past, for example in 2015, when they achieved one seat on the back of 12.6% of the votes, compared with Reform’s five seats from 14.3% of the votes at this election. (It has also happened to the LibDems for decades, and they, like Labour, found a way to maximize vote efficiency this time, in their case by focusing everything on a relatively small number of constituencies, a large number of which they won, in this case making their share of the vote very similar to their share of the seats.)

That this problem isn’t new doesn’t make it less of a problem. But, whilst UKIP complained about it before, Reform are doing so more vociferously (and now with support from some Tories) as they now have ambitions to government, rather than being primarily orientated towards leaving the EU. This is actually a key new development in the UK political landscape, since it is the first time a populist party has had such an ambition, no matter how distant the prospect. UKIP really had no aspiration beyond pressurizing the Conservatives over Europe. Reform want to replace them and, given the parlous state of the Tory party, that isn’t entirely inconceivable.

As for Farage, we can be quite certain that, but for the fact that it doesn’t favour his party, he would be insisting that “the fine British tradition that has served our great nation for so long should not be set aside for some ‘continental’ jiggery-pokery. It has given us strong government! Do we really,” – and here he would give his peculiarly repellent, man-of-the-people, gurning chuckle – “want to be like the Italians? Really?” He might well also point out that we have had a referendum on whether or not to keep FPTP and decisively voted to do so, and the will of the people, once disclosed in this way, can never be revisited.

Strictly speaking, all that is irrelevant to the case for replacing FPTP with some form of PR, as Ian Dunt has persuasively argued this week, which stands or falls on its own merits regardless of what anyone thinks of Farage. There is a counter-argument, which is that there is a democratic case for a system which makes it hard for extremist parties to gain representation. But no one should be under any illusion that Farage is driven by the desire for a disinterested debate about political theory. He sees that there is an opportunity within grasp, and he is correct.

What is at stake?

There are many excellent blogs, even if they now mainly go under the name of ‘newsletters’, competing for too little reading time (making me especially grateful to the many readers who continue to read this one), but one I always make time for is Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine. That’s not because I always agree with it, though I often do, but because it is wide-ranging, intellectually sophisticated, and well-written. In this week’s post, Carr criticizes as “premature” and “not a little lazy” those commentators who have “hailed Labour’s victory as a defeat for populism”.

He's right. At best, it’s a breathing space. More to the point, as commentators as diverse Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times (£) and Fintan O’Toole in Foreign Affairs have observed, this government could represent a ‘last chance’ for Britain to hold back populism and demonstrate the efficacy of ‘centrism’. If it fails, it is all too easy to easy to imagine Farage’s siren call that, now, both Conservatives and Labour have been found wanting, and it is time to ‘try something different’.

By sounding innocuous, it will have an insidious appeal well beyond Reform’s core vote. It was very noticeable during the campaign how rattled Farage was when Reform candidates and activists were exposed as racists or, in other ways, disgraceful. As with RN in France, the strategy is to try to present a ‘respectable’ front, garnering respectable voters, whilst dog-whistling to the less respectable, but it is a strategy with inherent tensions: if the whistle is sent in the wrong register, then the humans can hear it. (This isn’t, by the way, “sneering and name-calling” at those who vote for populist parties, one of several things I was accused of this week in a rather peculiar, unprovoked attack made on me this week. It’s analysis.).

During this breathing space, two things could, and hopefully will, happen. One is that the realities of being in parliament, and claiming an aspiration to govern, will take their toll on Reform. They may find it more difficult to manipulate the House of Commons than they did the European Parliament. Farage is in many ways their greatest asset, but he is notoriously difficult to work with and, to my eye, his narcissism, which is the cause of that, is growing. There are already signs of internal arguments, and there will be greater media scrutiny of their policies, their funding, and the peculiar structure of the party itself. Much also depends on what happens to the Tory Party, of course, something I’ll come to in future posts.

The other, somewhat related, hope is that the combination of energy and unfussy competence which Labour have begun to show this week will continue, and will bear fruit – demonstrably and fairly quickly. Populism likes to define itself as anti-Establishment, anti-elite, anti-Woke, and anti-globalist. But amongst the better ways to define it is as being anti-competence. Competence is the one thing it cannot deliver, and one of the best ways of countering its appeal.