A clown government elected on a seriousness ticket

People voted for Starmer because they wanted grown-up government. He should respect the mandate.

Photo by Debasish Lenka on Unsplash

The government spent this week outlining a series of morally depraved proposals on asylum seekers. Each day another vicious, spiteful announcement. Each day, another step towards the ravine’s edge.

Stripping asylum seekers of their jewellery when they arrive. Deporting children. Keeping proven refugees in a state of perpetual administrative limbo for decades, so they can never put down roots or have any sense of security. The sort of thing someone proposes when they have lost any lingering sense of decency or moral vigour.

This series of interventions was treated as a rare moment of success for the government. “Shabana Mahmood’s asylum crackdown landed exactly as officials hoped in the media bloodstream,” the Politico newsletter reported. The government had managed to control the news agenda, which apparently is what matters now. It won supportive front pages in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph.

The core thing to understand about these policies is that they will not work. Indeed, they are not even meant to work. On a basic logical level, it is obvious that they will not. Mahmood claims they will deter people arriving in small boats. But the policies are not as severe as the previous Conservative government’s Rwanda plan, or its refusal to process asylum claims at all. That did not deter arrivals. Why should the new policies do so? They won’t. In all probability, Mahmood knows they won’t. She doesn’t care.

You can see the practical ambivalence about all this in the lack of detail. The government has no real idea of how it would go about seizing people’s jewellery. It cannot describe how it would assess assets or forcibly secure them. There is no value threshold. But then, the jewellery proposal is not designed to work. It is probably not even really designed to be implemented. It is designed to be heard.

The policy is eerily reminiscent of the Nazis, who stripped Jews of their belongings at the camps. It also has a faint echo-memory of abuses during border disputes, such as Partition. It has a kind of fascist shimmer, a sense of cold-hearted bastards doing cold-hearted things, of people who have built walls around the parts of themselves which were once home to universal human feeling. That is not considered a defect. It is considered an advantage.

Apart from being immoral, Mahmood’s policy agenda is empty. It resolves nothing. It fixes nothing. And it therefore means that this interminable debate will continue, becoming ever more poisonous by the year.

What happens when we look at other areas of policy, at the things the government is expected to be getting on with? What happens when we look at social care, or prisons, or hospitals, or all the other things which we have forgotten to talk about due to our inflexible obsession with the immigration issue?

Here we find a similar fundamental quality. Unlike immigration, there is no sense of poison. Ministers do not feel the need to self-define as watercolour Nazis when it comes to hospital appointments. Nor is there such a focus on communication. But there is the same sense of foundational ineffectiveness: of policies which do not exist, or have not been properly thought through, or have no plan for implementation, or which simply will not work.

This week, the Institute for Government (IfG) published its Performance Tracker 2025. It is an invaluable appraisal of government performance across the policy landscape. It offers one of the clearest tests of Labour performance and the state of the public sector.

It found solid progress in just one policy area, which is children’s social care. This is one of the instances where the government actually set out a clear plan for reform - creating new regional care cooperatives, controlling profiteering, emphasising early intervention, supporting families, reducing residential care reliance and improving data sharing, all of it backed by a fairly generous funding settlement in the spending review. “The plans,” the IfG concluded, “represent a serious attempt to move the system in a better direction”. Nice, reassuring words. If only there was more reason to use them.

There is some limited progress in other areas. The government took urgent action to address the prison crisis when it came to power, using an emergency measure to release some prisoners after 40% of their sentence. It then commissioned two substantial reviews, by David Gauke and Brian Leveson, on addressing the prison population problem and case backlogs, and accepted most of the recommendations. The ensuing sentencing bill is now making its way through parliament.

And yet even here, the IfG is unconvinced. They found that the current proposals “will certainly not be enough to get prisons out of their permanent state of crisis and support meaningful performance improvements”. Further reforms are expected in a police white paper, which was initially promised for last spring. It’s nowhere to be seen.

On the face of it, health seems like an area of government clarity. There’s a ten year health plan, which aims to provide community-based, preventative and digital care. Performance is trending upwards in hospitals, more GPs have come online and fewer hospital staff are leaving their jobs. The dashboard contains numerous indicators flashing green. But when you look a little deeper, this policy area starts to become disturbing.

Health secretary Wes Streeting announced that he would abolish NHS England, merge its functions into the Department for Health and Social Care, and reorganise Integrated Care Boards. That alone is an immense act of structural change. The NHS England decision was announced suddenly last March, with little clarity about how it would be delivered - symptomatic of a lack of thought in opposition about what the government wanted to do.

There is little evidence that the government has considered how those plans will interact with its other reform initiatives, such as the decision to introduce major structural changes to local government by phasing out district councils. Doing this at the same time as merging NHS England and changing the Integrated Care Boards will be immensely disruptive. It will consume the next four years. “Large swathes of staff in the NHS and local government will spend most of this parliament thinking about how to make this transition and whether their job is safe, rather than how their service can work more effectively,” the report found.

In other areas, public services are being actively worsened by the Labour government’s behaviour. Take adult social care. We have a good understanding of the problems in this sector. But instead of doing anything about them the government has commissioned yet another review, due to report in 2028. That means any difficult conversations about funding would take place just before the election, when it is least possible to have them. They have essentially decided to perpetuate a culture of nothingness. They have ensured that nothing can happen this parliament and that nothing is likely to happen in the next parliament either. Another lost decade.

That would be bad enough, but the government’s obsession with immigration means it is also committed to ending the care visa route, which provided the largest source of staff in recent years. What are the consequences of that? Staff shortages. What are the measures to address these shortages? There aren’t any. There are plans for fair pay agreements, but none for how to implement them or the funding consequences of doing so. If they were to work, they would entail higher wages, which would have to come from users or local or central government. But there is a refusal to even concede this point by ministers.

It’s now been 16 months since the election. It’s 40 months until the next one. The government is running out of time. It is pissing it away.

It is unforgivable that so many areas of policy enjoyed no planning at all in opposition, with the party basically coming in and trying to work out what it wanted to do once in government.

It is unconscionable that the government still does not have a clear philosophical or political position to provide consistency to its behaviour. It is currently pushing for devolution in some departments - like the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government - and centralisation in others - like the Ministry of Health and the Home Office.

But most of all, it is unpardonable that Labour is spending time promoting hateful policies which it knows will not work, instead of doing the actual work of government which the country requires.

This is the classic Westminster madness, the prototypical bullshit pantomime: full of noise and activity and bluster and nothing underneath it.

We have spent the last few weeks discussing whether Rachel Reeves will break her election commitment on tax. And yet there is an equally important mandate which is never mentioned: the overall purpose of the government. Starmer went to the country on a seriousness ticket. He pledged grown-up government - competent, unflustered, diligent, with a sense of social responsibility. This was the encapsulation of his appeal, which voters then supported in droves.

He specifically did not pledge to pursue a rabidly anti-immigrant policy agenda. He has no mandate for that. He did not pledge to provide vacuums in place of policy initiatives, or back-of-a-fag-packet ideas which he knows are ineffective, or half-conceived system-level reform without a clear plan for implementation. He has no mandate for that either. In fact, quite the opposite.

There have been worse governments than this - of course there have. But there might never have been one which was quite so deceptive. Tony Blair promised to govern as a dead centre prime minister, with a conservative view on economics and a wish to increase equality of opportunity. That’s what he did. David Cameron promised to pointlessly and illiterately slash spending. That’s what he did. Boris Johnson promised to govern as an amiable and cynical clown. That’s what he did, to the cost of tens of thousands of lives. I might not like it. I might wish to Christ it had never happened. But you can’t accuse him of mislabelling the prospectus. He positioned himself as a clown, the country elected a clown and then we were governed by a clown, as demanded.

Starmer presented himself as a serious man for serious times. What did we get? More clown.

But still. They won the grid. The proposals “landed exactly as officials hoped in the media bloodstream”. So well done them. Round of applause. Maybe that’ll save them when the country next goes to the polls. But I very much doubt it.

Odds and sods

This newsletter is available as a podcast at the top of the page, or you can subscribe on Spotify.

My i newspaper column this week was on the update to the immigration stats and when we might start asking ourselves about why people leave Britain, rather than merely why they arrive.

This week saw the third and final episode of Origin Story’s history of the Labour party, covering Michael Foot to Keir Starmer. It’s an absolute beast of a thing, which encompasses two of the big Sliding Doors moments of the post-war era - the 1992 election defeat and the death of John Smith. Subscribe on your preferred podcast app, or watch it below.

Culture pick this week is Game, a tight, nasty and very fucking weird British thriller which just came out in cinemas.

It won’t be for everyone. Its opening half hour is an incredibly claustrophobic experiment in entrapment which makes you feel every second of it. But it then shifts into a deranged sequence of events which really have no direct cinematic comparison. At certain points, the screen is filled with psychedelia, humour and threat, as if the filmmakers are intent on making the maddest potion they can conceive of and setting it loose in the world. You will never know what it is about to do. It is functionally impossible to predict. And in the middle of it is the Sleaford Mods frontman Jason Williamson, as this bundle of paranoia, madness and good-old-boy humour - a film-stealing bit of weirdness and menace. This was a reminder of what people can do when they are utterly committed to their sense of creativity and authenticity. A short, vicious, lunatic delight.

Right, that’s your lot - fuck off.