Seven unrelated thoughts about Labour's first year in power

A torrid week in Westminster made it a uniquely inopportune time to celebrate an anniversary. What the hell is going on?

Photo by Kelly Common on Unsplash

McSweeney played a pivotal role winning the election and there's no point claiming otherwise. There's this growing argument taking shape among progressives about Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. They say that Labour was going to win the election anyway. The Tories were toast. McSweeney just happened to be director of campaigns at the time. He isn't a guru, he's just the bloke that went to the fruit machine at exactly the right moment.

It's bollocks, which grossly underestimates the series of events which are required for parties to win power, and specifically for British left-wing parties to win power in this country, where the vast majority of the press is out to kill you. Yes, the Tories need to behave catastrophically in government. Yes, they also need to deliver a piss-poor election campaign. But the final piece of the puzzle involves a functioning and merciless opposition.

Jeremy Corbyn would not have won that election. Rebecca Long-Bailey would not have won it. And whichever withered old Stalinist they'd hire to work as their campaign director wouldn't have won it either.

McSweeney spent years freezing out Corbyn-types from the candidate selection process. That was laborious, tireless work. If it had not taken place, the election campaign would have been filled with news stories about how this candidate wrote something anti-semitic on Facebook in 2017 or that one once tweeted about how wonderful Hezbollah was in 2012. No-one notices the scandals which do not happen during a campaign, nor the work that went into making sure they never took place.

McSweeney and Keir Starmer worked diligently on defence, crime and the economy, making sure that they defeated or at least neutralised the Conservatives on their key areas of strength. How many Conservative voters were won over? Very few. But they got Middle England to relax about Labour, which allowed it to vote Lib Dem or simply stay at home.

People often comment on how low Labour's popular vote was - at just 33.7%. It is low, but then it always is. David Cameron got 36.8% in 2015, an event which passed without anyone questioning its validity. The low share is proof of a highly professional campaign. Under first-past-the-post, parties do not win on popular support. They win by ensuring they secure the most efficient distribution of the vote. That means that you avoid stacking up votes in seats you've already won or performing strongly in seats you never will. Instead, you try to win each seat by as few votes as possible, because every additional vote is wasted resources. This is a mad system, which values geographic location over popular choice, but it is the system we have and the one that Labour clearly optimised for.

Those who say anyone could have won the election, or that the Tories lost it rather than Labour winning it, or that McSweeney deserves no credit for it, are utterly blind to what this process entails. He performed an extraordinary job. It makes total sense that Starmer would want to keep him in a key position.

Downing Street is a shitshow. McSweeney's performance at the election was exceptional, but his position in Downing Street is now obviously corrosive. The fault isn't really his. It is Starmer's for positioning him inappropriately, or for allowing him to insist he be positioned inappropriately.

There was initially a rather elegant symmetry to the operation when Labour came to power. McSweeney was in charge of the politics, ensuring each decision would work in the next election. Sue Gray was in charge of operations, of managing the office and getting things done. Evidently it was less like a serene yin-yang and more like Two-Face arguing with himself in a Batman comic. It proved catastrophic and fell apart.

The cure was worse than the disease. Starmer made McSweeney chief of staff. As a result, we got an administration that is pure undiluted politics. It seems mad that this should have happened, given Starmer is himself pretty apolitical and comes from a civil service background. I certainly didn't expect it. I predicted a government of the civil service. What I failed to understand was the extent to which an apolitical prime minister might overcompensate. That he would be so acutely aware of his vulnerability on this element that he would put the political operator in charge of everything.

What happened to the 'missions' which were supposed to define this government and get results? They have disappeared, or become lost in the Cabinet Office undergrowth. No-one ever talks about them. Instead we get the daily news shitshow, the typical Westminster frenzy of fuck all. You can visibly see Downing Street responding to what's in the papers, whether it's Farage, or net zero, or what some bloke said up on stage at Glastonbury.

There was a telling quote in the Statesman this week, in which "a No.10 source" said Alastair Campbell "wouldn't last two minutes in Morgan's job" and was "utterly clueless about the sentiment and state of the country". It's telling specifically because Campbell did not have McSweeney's job. He was director of communications. The fact that the 'No.10 source' cannot clearly distinguish between these roles is extremely revealing.

The other revealing element is quite how angry and tribal it is. Is Alastair Campbell really the guy you're pissed off with? Exactly who is it that's supposed to stand up for this government? It's obviously not the left, which is completely alienated. It's not the right, which is increasingly lost in a toxic whirlwind of race politics. And now apparently it's not centrists either, because they're too wet. So who the fuck is it exactly? Who is left standing?

When Downing Street lacks a functioning operational command, it turns into a power-play asylum. That is clearly what is happening there. Just look at that quote about Campbell. Look at the briefings this week. Angry, vitriolic, paranoid tribal shitposts. Every day, they sound more and more like Dominic Cummings.

You can get to a terrible position by a series of reasonable steps. We can understand every decision Labour has made. In many cases, we would have made the same one. But they have led, remorselessly, over the cliff edge.

The first decision was that winning the election took precedence over all other considerations. Nothing else mattered. We were in our second decade of Tory rule. In that time they had devastated the country and pitted the electorate against each other. They'd fucked us, over and over again. It was essential, above all else, to get them out.

This meant neutralising every possible threat to Labour's victory. Chief among those threats was the clear Tory intention to fight an election campaign against Labour tax rises. Labour responded to this attack in two ways. First, by pledging there would be no tax rises on employee national insurance, income tax or VAT. And second by supporting the Conservatives when they introduced tax cuts, even though it was perfectly obvious it was unaffordable.

This was the original sin. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt took advantage in the most cynical way imaginable, announcing two separate national insurance cuts in one year ahead of the election. I'm sure he felt it was a tremendous wheeze. All jolly good fun. But that devastated the country. He knew Labour couldn't oppose it. He knew it would leave the nation's finances ruined. He did it anyway.

The second decision was on the fiscal rule. A tremendous amount of nonsense has been written about Rachel Reeves' fiscal rules, acting as if she is some kind of austerity chancellor. In fact, she specifically opened up the rules so she could borrow to invest, which she is doing at impressive scale, addressing years of national stagnation.

But there has to be some kind of demonstration of discipline, so she also introduced a fiscal rule which said that day-to-day spending would be met by income. This was sensible. Those who want to get rid of it should have a little think about how the bond markets have behaved recently. Look at the reaction to her Budget. Look at the reaction to her behaviour in the Commons this week. They are paranoid, sketchy, sweaty, dosed-up and unreliable. She needed to show resolve.

The combination of the pledge on tax and the fiscal rule has served to absolutely ruin the chancellor, even though both decisions were perfectly understandable on their own terms. They mean that she is living her life within the razor-edge of her fiscal commitment. The lack of tax rises removed the buffer. Without it, she's in constant danger of breaking her rule. Anything can fuck the sums. Literally anything. The interest rate on bonds, the introduction of tariffs, the rebellions against benefit reform. A billion here, a billion there - preposterously tiny numbers in the world of state finances - and it utterly fucks her sums. When that happens she's left searching around for cuts, which is how she got into the benefits problem in the first place.

That doesn't excuse the benefits decision - it was crap, which made no logical or moral sense, pursued in a fundamentally dishonest way. But every step that got them there made sense on its own terms.

Politicians should be able to recognise when a mistake has happened and correct it. No matter how generous we want to be to Starmer and Reeves, politics requires that you recognise an error. That is now the case with Downing Street and taxation.

McSweeney should not be chief of staff. The teams in No.10 are not working well together. There is plainly little effective communication between the centre and the departments. There is no viable delivery mechanism. There is little evidence of long-term strategic thinking. Fixing the heart of the government is the precondition of fixing the broader operation. He should be in a role where he gives an electoral assessment of policy, not where he defines it.

Similarly, one of the big three taxes has to go up - national insurance, income or VAT. Reeves needs a buffer, a safe zone, between rules and performance. We can't go on dancing on the razor's edge.

The bond markets are insane. They are hysterical and utterly gullible, reacting with excessive horror when Reeves seemed upset and then rallying with excessive confidence when Starmer did a podcast saying it was fine. Those guys are pure vibes, a jumble of collective imbecile functions. They might as well respond to the romantic storylines on Eastenders for all the good they do. Being dependent on them is like being chained to a mad dog.

But that is Reeves and Starmer's fault. This is what happens when you leave yourself insufficient fiscal room, so that the slightest movement can ruin your plans. We should not be in a situation where the merest whiff of a fluctuation causes a crisis.

There is no magic 'wealth tax' option in which only the top one per cent pay. They all capture someone they're not meant to - little old Dierdre on a state pension with a £1.3 million family home in the home counties. Whenever you design the tax to exclude people like her, you radically reduce the amount you can secure. We should seek ways to tax wealth, but we should be honest that there is no way of getting the money we need without an increase in the big three. Anything else is a left-wing fairy tale - the insistence, Johnson-like, that we can have all the nice things without the bad things.

It was a mistake not to take the advantage offered by that initial shock following the Donald Trump tariffs and announce a tax rise then. It could have been presented as a crisis initiative, unfortunate but necessary. That passed us by and the razor's edge continues to cut and slice, bleeding the government out. This will keep on happening until they do the thing they know to be necessary.

There is danger here. Raising tax will be treated as an unholy betrayal by the press and the Tories. Demoting McSweeney will create a potentially powerful enemy. But these dangers are less severe than the current drift.

Who knows? Things really might be OK. As depressing as this all seems, there are reasons to be cheerful. The possibility of a significant improvement in our circumstances is underpriced.

Sterling is at its highest level in nearly four years. It is one of the top-performing currencies of 2025. Partly this is a result of the weakness of the dollar, but it is also part of a journey of recovery since Truss in which international investors have regained some of their confidence in the UK's political and economic stability.

The doom-laden prognoses of the last year mean that unexpected growth figures raise eyebrows by acting as a counter-narrative. The 0.7% growth in the first quarter of 2025 beat expectations. Consumer spending is pretty good. The UK just signed deals with India, the US and Europe. Inflation is largely under control. The Bank of England will probably end up easing interest rates again later this year. The government is funnelling money into capital projects as part of its investment initiative. There is a tentative sense of gradual forward momentum. It is possible that the fundamentals are turning in the UK's favour.

I'm not saying this will happen. I am saying that it is much more likely than people give it credit for. The intense press hostility towards Labour and the government's own mistakes have created a climate of doom that is not commensurate with the actual conditions in the country.

If it does happen, things will become much easier. This week's Labour rebellion was the product of a stagnant economy. When the economic pie is a fixed size, every slice you give to one person must come from someone else. Politics becomes zero-sum. When the pie is growing, you can hand it out more freely, without taking from anyone else. Politics becomes win-win.

Labour is doing good things. They are not spoken about and they do not fire up progressive hearts, but they are real and we might at some point decide to recognise that they are happening. In the future, living under some ghastly reactionary government, we will look back on them and wonder how we could have been so complacent when living under a progressive one.

Britain's deal with the EU has dispelled the paranoia and hatefulness the Tories showed towards the continent during the Brexit years. An upcoming Anglo-German deal will feature a mutual assistance clause in the case of a threat to either nation. A new industrial strategy has been published which identifies eight key sectors with the highest potential growth and delivers on their main asks with a degree of planning and medium-term thinking which is vanishingly rare in British governance. Abortion has been decriminalised.The use of prison sentences is being reduced under a more liberal criminal justice policy. The endless series of strikes which brought Britain to a standstill under the Conservatives were quickly resolved. MPs have voted for assisted dying, giving people autonomy at the end of their life regardless of their income. Workers rights are being significantly expanded, including sick pay for the lowest earners, day one parental leave rights, a Fair Work Agency to prevent rogue employers undercutting lawful competitors, improved access to flexible working, and tightening the rules on tips. Net zero targets are now genuinely attainable, with their consequent advantages to the economy and national security, through GB Energy funding. Most importantly, there is the capital investment, set free by Reeves' loosening of the previous fiscal rules, pumping desperately needed cash into defence, transport, energy, and business.

I'm not going to pretend that everything's going terribly well. Plainly it's not. But the consensus view that Labour has wasted its time in power is wrong and simple-minded.

This all feels strange. It's very difficult to live in this period. There is plainly much to admire about people like Reeves and Starmer. Indeed, the vast majority of ministers are serious, impressive politicians. In many cases, they are genuinely good people.

It would be nice to blame everything on the press and its indecent love affair with Farage, but that's simplistic. The honest truth is these guys fucked up all over the place. Starmer cannot be in a situation where he’s suggesting that he did not properly read a speech he was giving on immigration. I do not know what series of events led to the chancellor crying in PMQs this week, but whatever it is that is a Class-A, top-drawer political fuck up right there which should never have been allowed to take place.

It's head-spinning. They do a good thing, they do a bad thing. They behave responsibly, they say something dreadful. They decriminalise abortion one week and then fall apart on benefit reforms the next. And all the while, it feels like we're on this tiny shrinking island, with the populist sharks swimming ever more closely to the shore: Trump, Farage, all the most mendacious bastards, grinning their lifeless dead-eyed smile, every statement an exercise in self–interest, every policy choice an expression of division and ignorance.

It's not easy. I think I hate it. Emotionally, I think I would rather have a government I despised, or at least one which was consistently disappointing so that I could experience predictable feelings about it. But we are where we are. In a terribly muddled world, wobbling on the edge of the abyss, alternating between panic and complacency.

Online, there is only hysteria: the people who think Starmer is the devil and the others - fewer in numbers - who will go to absurd lengths to insulate him from blame. Those of us who truly want this government to succeed must engage in specificity. We should be precise about what is going right. We should be precise about what is going wrong. And we should be precise about how we think it should be improved. This week showed that concerted political effort can influence the administration and force it to change course.

It's been a year. There's four more to go. They need to do a damned sight better than they're doing right now. Those who wish the best for them, and for the country, should be clear and explicit about how that can be achieved.

Odds and sods

OK so big news. Well, objectively not remotely big, but subjectively big if you follow this newsletter. The audio version of this column - the Striking 13 podcast - is now available to all subscribers, paid or unpaid. Everyone now has access to a profoundly amateurish recording of me reading out what I've just written, correcting it as I go and occasionally shouting at my dog. I'm lying about the last part. I would never shout at my dog. He is a Very Good Boy.

I always liked the simplicity of the offer on here, that people who give money get absolutely nothing in return and do it out of the kindness of their hearts. It was irritating me, for a reason I couldn't quite put my finger on, that I had put the audio behind a paywall. So I checked with the paid subscribers and got the OK for releasing for free. They're lovely.

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Click here to listen to the Striking 13 Podcast. From now on, every newsletter will have this at the bottom. If you want to hear the column, rather than read it, just scroll down and hit the link.

Couple of pieces in the i newspaper this week - one of Labour's first year in power in case you want to read even more about that and one on the benefits vote.

This week I watched Brightwood, a micro-budget indie horror about a couple who go for a run in the woods and become lost in…. Well that would be telling I suppose. But I guess it's a combination of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Blair Witch Project and Groundhog Day. Is the metaphor a little on the nose? Maybe? I dunno, I think horror trades in fairly on-the-nose metaphor. What I do know is that I spent an entire film not knowing what would happen next, that the two actors did a properly good job, and that the whole thing was suffused with a genuine sense of angst-ridden existential discomfort. There's something so impressive about a film being able to summon up so many feelings from two people in the woods, with basically zero budget and the bare minimum of equipment.

See you next week.