The three reasons why Starmer's first year as prime minister has been a failure

First thing to address here: some of you might quibble with the whole premise of this article. Sure, Starmer’s found it tough, but who wasn’t going to after 14 years of Tory failure? My retort to that would be to say that clearly people were not up for giving the Labour Party any benefit of the doubt or time to mess about. They wanted results and they wanted them quickly. You can say that’s unfair, but it is the reality. A YouGov poll out this week puts the government’s approval rating at minus 52, with only 14% of respondents approving of the government’s record so far. You can argue people are being unfair - I don’t think you can argue that they don’t disapprove. In a democracy, electoral results are everything. By that yardstick, the first year of this government has been an overwhelming failure.

I think there are three reasons for this. I’m going to be cheeky here and say, if you want to know what those three reasons are, you will have to watch the video above, where I go into reasonable detail on each. For the rest of this article, I will expand on one of the reasons: Starmer’s lack of vision.

This gets thrown about all the time in the mainstream media, the idea that Starmer lacks vision. It’s become a cliche. Yet even though it is ubiquitous, I don’t think it ever gets articulated clearly why this matters so much. Compare Starmer to Thatcher and Blair. Thatcher had a vision: reduce the size of the state and bring taxes down. To do this, nationalised industries will have to be closed down. The City will have to be deregulated in order to attract more foreign capital and let the market work its magic.

Blair felt that in a time of global wealth, taxes could be kept low while public spending remained high. The idea was to get those two things to work in tandem as much as possible, with the public spending meant to spur on the market to ever greater growth. Devolution, taking power away from London and spreading it better throughout the country, will help in this mission along.

You can disagree with either of those strategies. You can hate them in fact, and indeed, hate Thatcher and/or Blair for pursuing them. But you can’t argue that they aren’t reasonably clear and easy to understand, at least in broad strokes.

What would the equivalent of Starmer’s version be? I will attempt to give it my best shot here. Govern a bit like a combination of the Tories and the Labour Party and hope that mix somehow or other works out in the end. That’s as good as I can do - and I don’t think that even adds up as a strategy. As in, I don’t think it even counts as the start of a vision. What does Starmer want the country to look like in four years’ time? What would success look like? I don’t know. A year on, I have no idea.

I will end by asking this: can Starmer turn the ship around? Obviously, I don’t know for certain either way, but what I do know is that six months ago, I would have said yes, I think on balance of probability, Starmer will turn things around sufficiently to give him a good shot at winning the next general election. Today, I say no, I don’t think he will be able to do that. The welfare bill was a total disaster and exposed how dysfunctional Number 10 must be for something like that to have fallen apart so spectacularly. I don’t see how Starmer fixes that. I think the fault may lie with the man himself.