Morning Call: Gove’s lessons for Labour
The former cabinet minister on what Starmer is getting right and wrong.
Good morning, it’s George. Keir Starmer warned in his speech this morning that the NHS needs to “reform or die”. He spoke of three major shifts: moving from an analogue to a digital health service, transferring care from hospitals to communities and focusing on prevention rather than merely cure (I wrote recently about Starmer’s embrace of the “preventative state”).
Delivering reform while maintaining political support is one of the biggest challenges for any government. Below I look at what Labour can learn from perhaps the most significant reformer of the last 15 years: Michael Gove.
To enjoy our latest analysis of politics, news and events, in addition to world-class literary and cultural reviews, click here to subscribe to the New Statesman. You’ll enjoy all of the New Statesman’s online content, ad-free podcasts and invitations to NS events.
Michael Gove might seem an unlikely role model for Labour. The former cabinet minister became something of a pantomime villain for the party during his time as education secretary. Yet as I reported earlier this year, Gove’s approach was studied by Labour in opposition as a model of how to deliver transformative change. His school reforms were introduced with ruthless speed after the Conservatives entered power in 2010 and have endured.
What, then, does Gove make of Labour’s opening months in office? We got a chance to find out last night at an IPPR event in the Conduit, central London, entitled “Insurgent government: how to combat rising populism?” (The think tank’s head Harry Quilter-Pinner wrote recently for us on how to “govern like Gove”).
Gove, who appeared alongside panellists including Josh Simons MP, the former director of Labour Together, praised the new government’s determination to reform the UK’s anachronistic planning laws.
“Marginal issues aside, I think that Angela Rayner and Matthew Pennycook [the housing and planning minister] have made the right arguments overall,” he said. “I’d quibble with some of the detail but I think they’re absolutely right to do that [reform planning].”
During the Q&A session, I asked Gove two questions: was Starmer’s government too gloomy and was it right to means-test winter fuel payments?
On the latter, Gove supported the proposal put forward by the consumer champion Martin Lewis. “Of course it’s sensible to withdraw winter fuel payments from the very rich but pension credit is an inadequate way of targeting it,” Gove told me. “The payments should also be extended to people in council tax bands A to D.”
This, as it happens, is the compromise that some Labour ministers privately believe Rachel Reeves should embrace (pension credit guarantees an income of just £11,300 a year). But as I write in this week’s cover story, the Chancellor is in no mood for turning.
To my first question, Gove gave a lengthy and fascinating answer: “Too gloomy? Yes, I do think that,” he said. “I could quibble with some things the government has done, I could approve of others but overall one of the concerns I would have were I a Labour MP – and of course I’m not – is that Keir Starmer’s gospel of ordinary hope is more ordinary and less hope.
“I completely understand, both from his character and from what we [the last government] did, that he thinks extravagant promises and some of the rhetoric he would associate with Boris, some of the execution over the 44 days of Liz Truss, would mean that the last thing he wants to do is to indulge in hyperbolic boosterism and catastrophic ideological excess.
“But at the same time there are some remarkable things about which this government can, not boast, but channel: having a majority in each part of the United Kingdom and so on. While Starmer is understandably allergic to promises that can’t be fulfilled, I do think that there needs to be an extra level of poetry in what he says.”
The fact Labour won a majority of seats in England, Scotland and Wales – the first time any party has done so since 2001 – was hailed by Starmer at his first No 10 press conference following the general election. But, as Gove suggests, this has not yet been developed into a wider narrative about the UK’s past and future.
He went on to praise Gordon Brown as someone who was “absolutely devoted to successful policy implementation but also capable of soaring rhetoric. You see that in what I think was one of the best speeches made by a British politician in the last 25 years: the speech he gave during the Scottish referendum in Glasgow. Keir Starmer can’t be Gordon Brown but he needs to recover some of that.”
Labour privately recognises that Starmer’s party conference speech on 25 September needs to offer a more optimistic vision than his gloomy Rose Garden address (“things will get worse before they get better”). The question, to adapt Gove, is whether it will be more hope and less ordinary.
George’s picks
This week’s leader on what Rachel Reeves should do in the Budget.
Kevin Maguire reports that Ed Miliband was working on a lower energy tariff for “elderly, vulnerable and low-income households”.
Alison Phillips writes her column on Paul Marshall’s “Napoleonic campaign” to challenge Rupert Murdoch’s supremacy.
Katie explains what David Lammy and Antony Blinken did not say in Ukraine.
John Gray explores JG Ballard’s apocalyptic art.
Skills are critical to the Government’s mission. Multiverse, the UK’s first EdTech unicorn, is investing in improving apprenticeships.
The Growth and Skills Levy should be: 1) Employer-led: putting employers at the forefront of addressing skills needs. 2) For Everyone: supporting the ‘right to reskill’ in the age of technological transformation 3) Easily Accessible and 4) Excellence-driven, offering high-quality, job-specific training.
Read Multiverse’s new report, based on work with 1,500 employers and 16,000 apprentices.
Mailshot
NYT: Report finds England’s health service is in deep trouble
Times: Office for Budget Responsibility warns public debt could soar to 300 per cent of GDP
BBC: Inquiry hears Lucy Letby hospital failings “magnified by denial, deflection and delay”
Guardian: UN condemns humanitarian law “violations” after Israel strike kills six Gaza school staff
Charles Blow: Trump met his match
Daniel Immerwahr: Yuval Noah Harari’s apocalyptic vision
Helen Lewis: How Joe Rogan remade Austin
Marc Morris: William the Conqueror wasn’t such a bad guy
Tim Adams: When Gauguin met Vincent
Queen Elizabeth statue derided for looking more like Mrs Doubtfire
And with that…
My thanks to Barney Horner and George Monaghan.
Have a great day, Will Dunn will be with you tomorrow.
George — @georgeeaton
It is good to hear that Gove approves of the restrictions on WFA. This was always low hanging fruit for any brave chancellor.
Gove may well have been ruthless in the execution of his reform of Education but where is the evaluation of his reforms? He ignored highly respected Educationists views. He introduced curriculum reforms that looked to the past and were wholly unsuited to the needs of pupils in the future. He dispensed with qualifications that suited a significant cohort of older pupils and their prospective employers. How many of his rolled out Academies and Free Schools were significantly better than the institutions they replaced. Evaluation on the same criteria please. They had many freedoms - exclusions, not attending to the needs of SEN pupils- and strategies that their non Academies counterparts were denied. Teacher shortages? He and his advisers presumably had the benefit of an exclusive education, not available to the majority of pupils within the UK.