(written May 12, 2026)
Labour cannot say that they did not see their election defeat of May 2029 coming. In politics as in sport and war, the verdict was as much against Labourโs lack of achievement as for the victors of 2029, Reform. Paradoxically, Labour had claimed to have a โplan for changeโ. The changes were to organisations โ to name four examples, the abolition of NHS England, the drastic cutting of Britainโs 43 police forces down to a dozen regions and abolition of police and crime commissioners, the making of two-tier local government by the merging of various district and county councils, the ending of train operating companies and returning the railways to national ownership. While each had its merits, trouble was 1) any gains would take more than a few years to become apparent, and voters spoke in the mean time, and 2) change to organisations might only mean new logos and names over doors, and would not necessarily mean better services: fewer pot-holes, safer streets.
History repeated
For a country that supposedly prided itself on its history, one of its few remaining assets (thank you, tourist dollars!?) few drew a parallel between Labour of 2024-29 and the final Liberal government of 1906. Like Labour, those Liberals came into power on a landslide, only to disappoint their supporters by not giving them what they wanted; only for the government to rally, against enemies โ in the Liberalsโ case, the House of Lords that blocked passing of a budget. Like a batsman in cricket or a snooker player who feels free to be bolder in a lost cause, Labour ministers and the two prime ministers after Sir Keir Starmer โ echoing the Conservatives of Boris Johnson to Rishi Sunak, a bad omen โ as their five year term came to an end, found their stride. In crime prevention, the trouble all along had been a lack of understanding of the whole, due to either a lack of project management or enough thinking early on, or even before Labour came to power in July 2024 โ thinking that Reform, too, failed to do (another story, although a short one; its ‘full policy’ to ‘make law-abiding citizens feel safe’ ran to 110 words). Any good work to collar more fraudsters, football hooligans, shop thieves, drug dealers and so on foundered because the prisons were full; the backlogs of cases in crown courts was persistent; the Probation Service was overwhelmed and demoralised. That all those things were true before Labour came in, made no difference.
‘Plan for change’
If Labour had truly had a โplan for changeโ it would have been forensic about altering those criminal justice and other metrics. Or, it would have identified policies, or better still causes, that would have been controversial โ because everything has its believers and disbelievers โ but would at least have been rallying points; such as decriminalisation of drugs. Instead Labour stumbled onto some well into its five years, just as the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher did in the mid-1980s, notably privatisation of telecoms and other utilities. Labour however did not have Mrs Thatcherโs good fortune of having a second term thanks to winning the Falklands War during her first. Britainโs enemies of the later 2020s were not as obligingly distant and fleeting as Argentina in 1982.
