Keir Starmer's Kali Yuga

The slow heat death of social democracy

This article was first published in CapX. Everything I publish elsewhere is shared here, as a gift to the nation. But if you want the full picture, become a paid subscriber. It’s just a few quid a month; such is the price genius is reduced to.

Eventually, all governments run out of steam. No leader, no matter how powerful, no matter their past achievements, can stave off the inevitable.

Political scientists in America refer to the natural development of political fatigue as the ‘six year itch‘. After six years in office, the public’s growing dissatisfaction with the president, their party and their agenda, coincides with a midterm election during which the president’s party typically experiences significant losses in congressional seats.

While unconstrained by term limits, British prime ministers are subject to the same effects; even the most effective among them begin their decay between 6-8 years. Only the truly extraordinary can last more than a decade, and even they do so bloodied. Age wearies them, and the years condemn.

Historically, this temporal rhythm is accurate – but in recent years, the cycle of political decay has accelerated significantly. As I have written previously for CapX, the problem of ‘shallow sovereignty’ – that governments appear to rule, but cannot act – is speeding up the sequence significantly. Driven by ‘an unstoppable coupling of aggregating complexity and speed that overwhelms political deliberation, planning and control’, political decision making is now overwhelmed by the sheer volume of problems requiring urgent attention. In such conditions, even the most able leaders are reduced to crisis managers, and the lifecycle of a prime minister – the rise, dominance and fall – is being compressed into ever-shorter spans.

Despite having been in post for less than a year, and despite being delivered to power in an election with a massive majority, it appears Keir Starmer is already approaching the Kali Yuga of his government.

Setting out to tackle Britain’s almost exponentially increasing welfare bill, Starmer had laid out a package of cuts worth £4.6 billion. But just a few weeks after refusing to change course on a growing rebellion among backbench MPs on tightened eligibility for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and health-related Universal Credit, he has caved to welfare rebels and agreed claimants will keep their benefits, with only new claimants receiving the lower amount. The Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts the Treasury will lose around £1.5bn of the original £4.6bn welfare cuts package. The climbdown – his third high-profile U-turn in a matter of weeks following reversals on cuts to winter fuel payments and finally accepting the need for a national inquiry into grooming gangs – only serves to confirm the growing sense that Starmer’s Government is vulnerable to pressure. Smell-o-vision may never have succeeded, but the rancid stench of death has begun to pervade his every media appearance.

What we are witnessing, however, is not just the slow, buckling implosion of the Starmer ‘project’ (if it was ever coherent enough to be called one) but the slow heat death of social democracy itself.

Starmer’s cuts were as much to show willingness to tackle Britain’s systemic spending problems as they were about reducing the welfare bill itself – which is set to rise to £67bn by 2029-30. But this technocratic rationale has collided with political reality. In some parts of the country – particularly Birmingham, London and Bradford – the number of households claiming UC is over 50%. The huge number of claimants seems an indictment of Britain’s worklessness crisis; but, as John Burn-Murdoch has pointed out, the UK may not be in as much of a crisis as the numbers suggest. That’s because studies have repeatedly shown that ‘the waxing and waning of health-related benefit caseloads is almost always driven primarily by changes to incentives and stringency in different parts of the benefit system, rather than by changes in people’s health’. In other words, the numbers reflect the rules, not the population.

Labour are now trying to reform a system that, in Birmingham Ladywood – a seat held by Shabana Mahmood by just a few thousand votes – provides a direct source of income to 57.4% of the population. Given the sheer number of claimants Starmer’s proposed changes would impact, many Labour MPs have been motivated to rebel by the sheer number of votes they fear losing at the next election.

While our politics – and our politicians – were once driven by moral purpose, economic ambition and long-term visions of national transformation, they are increasingly reduced to the protection of local distribution of state funds. British politics is becoming pork barrel.

Nor can only Labour shoulder the blame for this; for all of David Cameron’s proclamations that ‘we’re all in this together’, he instituted an uneven distribution of austerity that protected and improved pensioner benefits, while cutting £11bn from the welfare budget by freezing or cutting benefits for the working age population. Similarly, Levelling Up – which could be described as ‘reducing regional inequality of economic output and social outcomes’ – was reduced to a system of project-based bidding by local authorities with no strategic direction and limited economic rationale.

Politicians are increasingly recognising the importance of what Mancur Olson called ‘distributional coalitions’. In ‘The Rise and Decline of Nations’, Olson explains how groups – whether individuals or organised interests – join forces to secure concentrated benefits for themselves, often at the expense of the wider society. Rather than advancing broad economic growth or general welfare, these coalitions prioritise redirecting resources toward their own members. Olson argues that the proliferation of such groups, combined with their support for redistributive policies, creates economic and political deadlock – especially in stable, pluralistic democracies where diverse interests have the greatest opportunity to organise and exert influence.

That is the problem Starmer – and any Prime Minister attempting serious welfare reform – will now face. The public purse is no longer guarded with Gladstonian rectitude, but raided repeatedly by politicians whose transient authority compels them to prioritise short-term electoral survival over long-term national interest. And it will take a leader stronger than Starmer to break that cycle.