Labour and the Fear of Stability

There is something magnificently Labour about finally crawling back into government after fourteen years in the wilderness, inheriting an economy held together with expired cable ties and optimistic Treasury spreadsheets, beginning - just beginning - to show signs of stabilisation, and then immediately deciding the real priority is to start plotting against your own Prime Minister because the vibes are off.

One can almost hear the ghost of the SDP gently clearing its throat in the distance.

GDP ticks upward for the first quarter. Inflation starts easing. The adult supervision, while hardly thrilling television, appears to be functioning. Britain has not exactly become Singapore-on-Thames overnight, but the ship has at least stopped making the alarming noises associated with bulkheads separating. And Labour MPs, rather than quietly allowing the machinery time to work, have collectively decided this is the ideal moment to start crawling over one another like rats in a sack looking for a leadership election.

The challengers are not even united. That is the funniest part.

Streeting increasingly gives the impression of a man who has rehearsed his first conference speech as Prime Minister several hundred times in the shower. Rayner appears to be maintaining the traditional deputy leader role of hovering just behind the mutiny with the careful expression of somebody wanting the benefits of regime change without technically being seen climbing through the palace window. Andy Burnham is being discussed as a sort of northern saviour figure despite already losing to Starmer once and currently occupying one of the safest and most influential jobs outside Westminster.

And Burnham’s route back appears to involve a by-election in terrain where Reform UK has just been stomping around in steel-capped boots kicking chunks out of the old Labour vote.

Excellent plan.

Because voters famously adore carpet-bagging politicians suddenly developing a spiritual attachment to a constituency the precise moment there is a leadership opportunity available. Nothing says "man of the people" quite like a carefully choreographed Westminster insertion operation involving an MP nobly sacrificing themselves in the hope of perhaps receiving a consolation seat in the House of Lords later. Assuming, of course, the whole thing does not detonate in their faces first.

And that is before one gets to the central absurdity of the entire exercise.

What exactly changes?

This is the bit nobody seems terribly keen to explain. The Treasury arithmetic does not magically disappear because the person at the dispatch box has different hair. Britain still has weak productivity, ageing demographics, strained public services, high taxation, welfare pressures and markets which remain deeply allergic to politicians pretending money is a fictional concept.

So whichever poor soul takes over still arrives at precisely the same conclusion: if you want visible improvement quickly without detonating borrowing costs, you end up squeezing welfare, restraining spending or finding taxes somewhere.

At which point the very same Labour backbenchers currently hyperventilating about Starmer will rediscover their moral objections to arithmetic.

One suspects some MPs imagine there exists, hidden somewhere in Whitehall, a secret room labelled "Good Policies We Chose Not To Use". A replacement leader merely has to find the correct key and Britain immediately transforms into a Scandinavian social democracy with Italian weather and German productivity.

Sadly the real state of the nation is less Nordic utopia and more "provincial leisure centre changing room after a flood".

Meanwhile Reform watches all this with growing delight. Because Reform does not need detailed governing plans. It merely needs the governing party to resemble participants in a committee room coup at a failing golf club while ordinary voters worry about mortgages, rent, energy bills and whether the GP surgery will answer the telephone before retirement age.

Labour’s genius has always been its ability to confuse emotional discomfort with imminent collapse.

The economy is weak? Replace the leader.

The polls wobble? Replace the leader.

Voters are impatient eighteen months into repairing fourteen years of drift? Replace the leader.

Never mind whether the replacement has a coherent alternative. Never mind whether the public even wants another Westminster psychodrama. Never mind whether changing captain during the first signs of calmer water might be politically idiotic.

No. The important thing is that MPs feel restless.

It is all very British. Not in the Churchillian sense. More in the sense of a parish council launching a bitter procedural dispute over the village fete while the church roof quietly catches fire in the background.

And Keir Starmer, for all his faults, should probably do the one thing Labour MPs historically struggle to do themselves.

Hold the line.

Because if the economy continues to improve, even modestly, this entire episode may end up looking less like democratic renewal and more like a group of MPs trying to change drivers while the car had finally, after fourteen years, started moving again.