Don’t let the particulars of the Starmer crisis distract from its deeper causes

Well if nothing else, Sir Keir Starmer has partly falsified my analysis of his government. I have previously argued that Labour’s travails, cathartic as they might be, are simply a product of the doom spiral in the public finances, and that any future government is likely to end up almost as unpopular, almost as quickly.

But say what you like about Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage, I think – and I don’t want to jinx it – they would both manage to resist the temptation to somehow give Peter Mandelson a fourth opportunity to leave government in disgrace. So that’s something.

Nonetheless, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of assuming such things are the root of the problem. It is always tempting for people trying to avoid confronting big, systemic problems to latch on to relatively trivial particular ones as explanations instead. Yet as the last ten years have had ample opportunity to demonstrate, a government that the public broadly supports can actually endure quite a lot of particular scandal.

The real problems remain, and two stories this morning highlight them. First, the ongoing row over student loans, with one former director of the Office for Students cropping up in the Times to suggest they should be replaced with a graduate tax. Second, the increasingly acute crisis in local government finances, with dozens of councils warning they face bankruptcy over SEND obligations and Reform UK’s discovery that they can’t cut anything.

Both of these issues are manifestations of the same root problem, which is politicians hiding the spending implications of their policy preferences with creative accounting. Shifting statutory obligations onto councils allows Westminster to set welfare policy but hide the cost implications on local government books, whilst selling mortgages to teenagers (‘student loans’) has allowed successive governments to postpone a reckoning with the unsustainable bloat in tertiary education.

Solving either of these means making difficult decisions. In the case of SEND and other statutory responsibilities, it means either actually devolving policy to councils, so they can decide for themselves what resources to commit to it, or bringing direct financial responsibility back to Westminster. In other words, either creating a postcode lottery in special needs support or blowing a multi-billion pound hole in a new government’s budget.

Student loans are even thornier. A ‘graduate tax’ is popular with sector apologists and other supporters of the status quo because it is essentially the same system – i.e. shaking down people for life for a decision they made at 18 – but dressed up, they hope, more presentably. It would still leave younger workers facing usurious marginal tax rates and a higher overall tax rate than many of their older, higher-earning colleagues.

But any move towards a more sensible system of public support for higher education would involve there being much less of it, and it being offered far more selectively. The great merit of the student loan system, politically, is that it has spared politicians the need to make decisions about which degrees, at which universities, and for which prospective students are actually a ‘public good’ deserving taxpayer support; sector apologists know this is a powerful argument against spending restraint, and are quick to punch the bruise of “Who doesn’t deserve education?” if anyone tries it.

Yet if there were easy and popular solutions to Britain’s problems, they would have been solved by now. Government in this country has been boiling down for some time to a collection of very painful choices. What’s changed is that the accumulated costs of putting those choices off have now reached the point of unbearable pain themselves.

In a way, it isn’t fair. Starmer, Rachel Reeves, and those mutinous Labour backbenchers are only really trying to do what all their predecessors have been doing: patch up something that gets you through the next couple of years and hope for the best. It is simply their misfortune that the future eventually arrives, and the tomorrow into which previous governments shunted all these problems is the today they – and perhaps, at some point, we – have to govern.

Faced with that grim prospect, we must take our pleasures where we can. So pass the popcorn, please – I think Morgan McSweeney’s on.