Starmers Labor know the type of Britain they want, but just don't know how to build it | Martin kettle

After five months in power, Labor knows where it wants to take the country; but he doesn't know how to get there. In this, and despite radically different priorities, the Labor government resembles the Conservative government that preceded it. Boris Johnson finally realized he couldn't make modern Britain work the way he wanted. Today it's Keir Starmers' turn.

Starmer's change plan speech at Pinewood Studios last week was an acknowledgment of the problem. The British government, Starmer said, is broken. It was a striking admission, but also true in many ways, including prisons and social services. Starmer responded by announcing five-year targets in key policy areas: the economy, housing, health, policing, early years and energy. But that wasn't enough. Starmer's response falls short of the problem he faces.

It is easy to say that this failure is simply explained by a lack of ideological purity. Many conservatives certainly thought Johnson was not right-wing enough. Many in Labor make the equal and opposite charge that Starmer is not left-wing enough. But these assertions were and remain lazy. They don't explain anything useful or true.

Johnson's failure and Starmer's difficulties are not caused by a lack of commitment to their respective causes. Nor are they caused by a lack of personal determination, and certainly not in Starmer's case. Instead, although there are other factors, the biggest and most important cause is the broken and unmodernized nature of the British state.

In some of our neighboring countries, the state of the state debate is a very familiar aspect of politics. France has a political tradition which still regularly affirms the importance of the republican state as the incarnation, among other things, of its post-1789 anticlericalism. In Ireland, the state is frequently invoked in public debate, this time reflecting the the country's independence from Great Britain over the last century.

Britain, by contrast, almost never discusses the state of the state, from the monarchy and the House of Lords at the top, to the bureaucracy of Whitehall and the postcode lottery further down. The word State seems almost taboo, avoided either because it is suspicious of intellectual or as equivalent to communist or fascist. As a result, we never think about our health. I cannot recall a single significant speech by a government minister on the British state in modern times. That’s why this week’s speech by influential minister Pat McFadden was so striking.

McFaddens was headlined as a speech on state reform. This in itself was quite unusual. But the word State also appears there 11 times, always in a significant context. The reference that received the most media attention was the suggestion that the state should think more like a corporate start-up, leading to comparisons between McFadden's approach and that of Dominic Cummings in Johnson's time. But the most significant observation is that the state cannot afford to be left behind.

This is a real and present danger. In some ways, this has already happened. Ministers cannot pull levers and know that their wishes will be granted. Part of this is a lack of skills. Some are the result of deliberate decisions that have reduced the state's capacity to act effectively in areas such as health, welfare, training and criminal justice. National security has also been reduced. The imbalance between national, decentralized and local administration is destructive. More than any other recent event, Covid has revealed the extent of the damage. At a time when the security of the nation demanded the highest response from the state, it proved insufficient.

Yet the state is also more than a set of mechanisms and institutions, important as these undoubtedly are. That’s more than Whitehall, more than the civil service and certainly more than the public sector. In some ways, it is perhaps best to view the state in human and national terms. We are part of it, whether we work for the government or not. It helps keep us united and increases our security, and we can exercise our freedom because of it, not in spite of it.

McFadden's speech did not extend into this Hobbesian or Spinozanian territory. But at least he identified the problem as the need to reform the state. It has also taken a holistic view of what the state actually is, sometimes eliding the concepts of state and country in a way that is surely part of any necessary response. And, to his credit, he made an admission far too rare for a politician: he didn't understand all of this from start to finish.

Starmer keeps repeating how vital it is to save the idea that politics can improve lives. He is right on this point. Yet asking civil servants to work harder and more creatively will not achieve this. Even if that happens, neither will achieving milestones in policy implementation. If in doubt, he can ask Rishi Sunak to remind him how useful these items are.

Starmer’s premiership calls for a much stronger, richer and more confident national narrative. Despite the globalized economy, the nation-state remains the fundamental driving force of politics and government in every nation on the planet. The success or failure of each national government depends on the state of the state, not only in terms of security, but also in economic, social and even cultural terms.

Watch this week's spectacular events in Syria. Syrians have not identified with Assad's state. But if they can identify with the state that will replace it, then immense changes will be possible. A comparable phenomenon, although on a much less dramatic level, is also true in Britain. McFadden's speech wasn't exactly a landmark event. But it opened the door to a better way of doing politics than the Starmer government has managed so far.