In The Name of God, Go!

The end draws near on a Starmer government that merely presided over a broken system

Towering Columns

For The Times, Patrick Maguire calls time on a Starmer Ministry that has been sustained by the collective denial of The Cabinet.

It is not just that ministers are giving up on Starmer. His premiership has always been sustained by a collective suspension of disbelief, so they did not have very much to give up in the first place. What is different, and new, is that they no longer feel they owe the prime minister the courtesy of hiding it. It is not as if he is in the habit of putting his colleagues first, so why bother defending the indefensible? Starmer cannot sustain the fiction of his own authority alone. When cabinet ministers are privately despairing to the chief whip of their leader, as at least one did this week, the die is cast.

But these ministers cannot conscientiously object to the political consequences of their inaction, just as Starmer has for six long years. Soon they will have to act. As one cabinet source says: “It’s all f***ed in fast forward.” So unbearable is the status quo for a critical mass of ministers that a new consensus is taking shape: that, once the scale of electoral devastation his leadership is wreaking on the Labour Party is made clear next month, Starmer should be made to set out a timetable for an orderly transition, with a new leader in place for conference.

It would be a fittingly mild flavour of regicide for Starmer’s Labour Party: procedural, bloodless and probably too late. But it suits all players. For Miliband, Angela Rayner and Louise Haigh — the soft-left powerbrokers who hold the whip hand over the prime minister — it buys time to chart Andy Burnham’s course back into the Commons. It spares any one ambitious minister, not least Streeting, the fate of James Purnell. And it would permit the prime minister himself another six months or so of gladhanding on the international stage.

In The Spectator, Patrick West writes that the flag of St George has become a symbol of resistance to rampant cosmopolitanism.

In recent times, the flag has unquestionably assumed more political connotations. But contrary to Starmer’s assertion, one that reflects a mindset endemic in metropolitan circles, it has not been hijacked ‘to spread hate’. It has been deployed in great numbers by a class of people in this country who feel they have been consistently ignored, denigrated and traduced over the past thirty years. There would be no proliferation of St George flags on lampposts, pavements or on the front of houses and pubs today had not the English people been remorselessly insulted and belittled by a cosmopolitan Anywhere class, and one in hock to a lopsided version of multiculturalism.

This is an echelon that is untroubled by the sight of Palestinian flags fluttering on street corners, one which enthusiastically celebrates cultures, all except the indigenous one of England. This is an entitled class which is apt to smear without distinction anyone with old-fashioned, sensible or moderately conservative views as ‘far right’.

While it’s true that the St George’s flag is sometimes flown by xenophobes and racists, for the majority of English people who aren’t of this persuasion it has become more a symbol of resistance and defiance. It’s a flag used to convey discontent with a detached class that has ignored their plight and dismissed their concerns, to one which continues to parrot platitudes about diversity while turning a blind eye to its manifest defects, to a ‘two-tier’ Keir who seemingly cares about some sections of society more than others. In that regard, Starmer is unwittingly correct. The St George’s cross has become a symbol of ‘unity’. It has united under one banner great swathes of the populace who don’t like him or how his people have treated them.

For The Critic, Henry Hill questions whether Starmer has truly failed given the lack of any governing project.

And on one level it is a stupid question. He is failing. What follows is not an exercise in clickbait contrarianism. The statement “Starmer is failing” strikes me as just as intuitively correct as it does everyone else. But on another it is a very interesting question indeed. Because if Starmer is failing … at what?

Seriously, what is he trying to do? One could say “governing”, I suppose, but that is so broad as to be rather a cop-out and when you try to define governing, it isn’t obvious that he’s actually attempting it. The Government’s agenda has devolved into a Labour backbencher’s Christmas list, individual enthusiasms — hiking welfare, hiking the minimum wage, hiking taxes, hiking regulation on housing and employment — pursued without any apparent reference either to the national finances or to the Prime Minister’s stated intention to go “hell for leather” for economic growth.

Perhaps the Starmer project, whatever it was, has simply failed already, buried when mutinous backbenchers broke the back of his Chancellor and forced a u-turn on welfare cuts? But this confuses cause and effect. The Prime Minister lost control of his MPs so quickly because he hadn’t prepared them for unpleasant realities, nor furnished them with a plan which might justify pain today with glory tomorrow. Absent any programming, his historic majority simply reverted to factory settings.

For The Spectator, Tim Shipman highlights the growing militancy of civil servants in response to calls for reform.

Insiders say the collapse of confidence of the civil service in the government goes back to when Starmer, in his first months, denounced civil servants wallowing in ‘a tepid bath of managed decline’. One said: ‘It was straight from the Boris playbook. Beat people up then try to tell them to reform.’

From the start there was disappointment. ‘Civil servants were optimistic about Labour,’ a former official says. ‘They were sick of the chaos. But quite quickly it was clear the government had no idea what it was doing.’ Even a Labour politico agrees: ‘The biggest problem is that Starmer didn’t know what he wanted civil servants to deliver.’

Officials did not conceal their disdain. One political aide says: ‘Some in the higher echelons of the foreign office regard themselves as Jeeves to the government of the day’s Wooster. And there are civil servants at all levels who make it clear you are just passing through. You can see it in their eyes. They’re like the Taliban: “You have the democratic mandate, but we have time.”’

The view of Starmer is astonishingly negative. ‘He can’t get the basics right of governing,’ says a former mandarin. ‘The senior leadership of the civil service are particularly acute at observing how well power is being wielded. They might not like it, but they’ll respect power being wielded. What you have is a prime minister who can’t set political direction. He can’t take his party with him and use his majority. And he won’t take difficult decisions. This guy delegates to a fault. He is becoming very well-known in Whitehall as the man who wants to avoid taking responsibility for decisions. He’s the man with invisible fingerprints.’

In The Telegraph, Kemi Badenoch calls on the Attorney General to resign in the wake of fresh allegations over the prosecution of Iraq War veterans.

So now we know. Keir Starmer’s closest ally in Cabinet and chief legal adviser led a witch hunt against brave British soldiers. Thanks to The Telegraph, we can see how Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, disgracefully sought to profit off the misery of decorated war heroes, using Iraqi militants claiming to be farmers, and hounded decorated war heroes through the courts for years. British soldiers were put through hell by Hermer and his team, before finally being exonerated in 2014. Hermer’s close associate Phil Shiner was struck off over the case. There was no censure or punishment for Hermer…

Of course, British soldiers should fight within the law. But hounding our veterans through the courts will have a chilling effect on our ability to recruit people to the Army. It is a brain-dead strategy at a time when the priority should be growing our Armed Forces.

Former Labour defence secretaries are pleading with the Prime Minister to increase defence spending. The long-awaited Defence Investment Plan is nine months late. But the Government seems to have no trouble finding time to harass our soldiers. These are serious times Britain is living through. War in Europe and in the Middle East.

It’s not just Labour. The Greens want to leave Nato and scrap our nuclear deterrent. The Liberal Democrats seriously think that more borrowing is an option while bond markets are wobbling. Reform hasn’t even bothered to appoint a defence or foreign affairs spokesman. The Conservatives’ shadow attorney general, Lord Wolfson, is representing veterans in the Supreme Court for free. That is the difference.

For The Times, Juliet Samuel writes that ideological complacency from officials has let Chinese interests to penetrate the British state.

It surely cannot hurt that Chinese companies hire our political elites and officials on wonderful salaries. Huawei at one point had in its pay the government’s former chief information officer (John Suffolk), a former head of the Foreign Office (Simon Fraser, via his PR firm Flint Global) and the former head of UK Trade & Investments (Andrew Cahn). A former No 10 chief of staff and Foreign Office director, Eddie Lister, helped China buy its mega-embassy site in London while being paid by the buying and selling side.

But these appointments don’t exist in a vacuum. Around them is a friendly network of legitimising organisations focused on promoting “links” and “engagement” with Beijing, chief among them the Great Britain China Centre. The GBCC is a Foreign Office-funded quango that holds snazzy receptions, takes MPs and retired judges on junkets to meet Chinese officials and “trains” civil servants on Chinese matters. It “partners” with Beijing institutions like China’s Supreme People’s Court and Ministry of Justice. This is a regime, lest anyone need reminding, that keeps hundreds of thousands of people in labour “re-education” camps, locks up petitioners in psychiatric hospitals and faces credible allegations of organ harvesting. What better way to “engage” than with a “legal roundtable”?

But what makes the GBCC particularly instructive of the Foreign Office’s attitude to risks posed by China is its choice of “honorary president” from 2015 to 2022: one Peter Mandelson. It was a job that gave Mandelson excellent networking opportunities. He was convening events in ministries and banks to introduce Chinese officials to British lobbyists, meeting executives from Chinese state-owned companies, leading delegations to China and so on. In other words, he was using the convening power and funding of the British state to build his contact book.

Wonky Thinking

The Centre for British Progress has published new research on the adoption of AI and has found the UK is keeping pace the United States so far. However, the research has also found that the diffusion of AI has already started to have an impact on the jobs market, particularly in software development.

UK workers currently use AI across 385 distinct work tasks, roughly 2.1% of the 18,429 unique task statements identified in the O*NET database. These tasks range from the granular to the broad: drafting and proofreading legal opinions, adapting teaching materials to different types of learners, or tailoring sales scripts to specific customers are all distinct ONET entries. The same number for the US is 1,563, a considerable gap that largely reflects the size of the US economy. Countries with a larger number of users have more tasks that cross the threshold for inclusion in the dataset. This means raw coverage figures are not necessarily informative of the degree of adoption, because we cannot fully adjust for the size of a country.

Therefore, while the gap between the US and UK appears significant, in practice it is narrower than it appears: when the comparison is restricted to tasks adopted in at least ten different countries, both the UK and the US cover all of them. When expanded further to tasks identified in at least five different countries, the UK is second, with 94% of those covered. The UK largely matches the pattern of adoption for advanced economies across task types, but doesn’t have enough users performing less common tasks, to a significant extent because of its smaller population relative to the US…

Software illustrates the pattern in a microcosm. Employment in the computer programming sector (SIC 62) grew by 18% between 2019 and 2025, roughly three times the economy-wide rate of employment growth, while output grew even faster, at 36% over the same period. But both series turned down in the second half of 2025: employment fell 4.5% from its March peak, and GVA dipped from its Q2 high. While the sector remains well above its pre-pandemic level, the timing coincides with both a broader technology-sector correction and the introduction of tools like Claude Code that can automate large amounts of tasks.

Vacancies have fallen from their 2022 peak, and the overall composition of IT roles has shifted toward higher-level tasks. On the whole, the sector appears to have inelastic demand: AI-driven cost reductions are expanding the market for software rather than shrinking the overall workforce, albeit less slowly than output growth. These trends may have partly reversed more recently, a development which coincides with the release of, but there isn’t yet enough data to suggest either that it is a causal pattern nor a persistent one.

This data point is likely the strongest kernel of evidence of any displacement effects of AI, but it is complicated by that decline coinciding with a reduction in the GVA of the sector. We should be mindful not to overanalyse a single data point that may well be revised in subsequent releases, but it is clear that the data point that would most clearly signal the beginning of the displacement of output cannot be cleanly reconciled with an account of increasing productivity leading to higher output and lower employment.

For the Future of the Left, Blue Labour thinker Jonathan Rutherford writes an essay asking the simple question: what comes next after the collapse of the liberal market order which has been governing Britain (and the world) for fifty years?

We are living in the aftermath of the liberal market order which has been the governing consensus for over three decades. Its ideology and policy solutions no longer work in the emerging new world order characterised by great power rivalry and the rise of China. Its style of government, technocratic and incremental, has only reinforced the failing status quo in the West. In the United Kingdom, the Labour and Conservative parties which upheld this consensus are now trapped in the past. Their vote share is collapsing. A generation of politicians, schooled in a managerial politics, is unable to enact the change the country needs. They flounder in an unfamiliar and threatening world as the old multinational British state fragments.

Britain led the world in liberalising its national economy, deregulating the financial markets in 1986, and opening up to global flows of capital. In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organisation. With its vast pool of cheap labour, the manufacturers of western capitalist economies transferred their investments and factory production to the Guangdong Province and the Yangtze River Delta. The effects of globalisation lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty while laying waste to the old industrial heartlands of American and Britain. President Trump and the rising power of China emphatically brought liberal globalisation to an end. The so-called liberal rules-based order so celebrated by the Financial Times and The Economist is an illusion.

The war in Ukraine, and now the energy crisis caused by the Iran war have exposed Britain’s continuing dependence on global supply chains and its vulnerability to global capital flows. For Britain, indebted to the bond markets, there are no easy routes to national economic recovery and no political party willing to make the case for them.

We can identify political, economic and cultural elements of this change, but we do not yet have a way of describing the emerging world we are living in.

Post-industrial, postmodern, post-Marxist, post-liberal: these explanatory frameworks do not describe what is here now and shaping the future. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers calls this kind of liminal state a ‘boundary situation’, which pushes us to the margins of our living experience and forces into consciousness the open-endedness and instability of the world.

Podcast of the Week

Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau discuss on UnHerd’s Econoclasts podcast the state of Western Europe’s dependence on US and Chinese technology as well as Russian oil and gas. They argue that these geopolitical and technological weaknesses will force European countries to make a new deal with Russia in order to secure access to cheap energy supplies.

Links

The United States considers dropping support for the Falkland Islands.

British workers were hit by heavier tax rises than in any other rich country last year.

The Bank of England says that stock markets are overvalued and set to fall.

Business costs jump by 5.4% in wake of Iran War signalling higher inflation to come.

Internal Green Party projections say that migration could increase to five million a year under their policies.

Catholics now outnumber Anglicans two to one amongst Gen Z and millennial churchgoers.