The Guardian view on Labour’s difficult year: denial of hard choices is no longer an option | Editorial

The formula for stable government, according to Britain’s constitution, is a big parliamentary majority and divided opposition. Sir Keir Starmer’s predicament proves that those conditions are not sufficient.

The prime minister’s inability to convince voters that he has an agenda for national renewal, and the demoralising effect that has had on the Labour party, make a leadership challenge look plausible after local elections next May. Maybe sooner.

Toppling Sir Keir would be consistent with a pattern in recent British politics for short-serving prime ministers. David Cameron was the last one who managed a full parliamentary term. Since then, the average tenure has been around 20 months. This suggests there is something about governing Britain that defeats all who have tried in recent years.

That isn’t to excuse Sir Keir’s personal failings. A more charismatic leader with a more developed plan for government might have fared better. But his mistakes are amplified by structural problems that antedate his arrival in office. Voter dissatisfaction drives MPs to want to replace their leaders, and economic malaise has been driving public discontent since the financial crisis of 2007-08. People have been working harder, without a proportionate rise in their standard of living. That would be a political depressant even without the shocks of Covid, war in Ukraine and Brexit.

Stagnant wages, a high cost of living and self-imposed fiscal rules have turned policymaking into an exercise in shuffling scarce resources between competing interest groups. Chancellors are always raiding one department’s budget to prop up another one, taxing one group of people to spend on their neighbours. This is zero-sum politics. It generates resentment and makes it easy for demagogues to get traction with claims that migrants take an unfair share of public resources.

The government came close to recognising the character of this quandary before November’s budget, when Rachel Reeves addressed the country to warn of the need for broad-based tax rises to fund public services. But that would have breached an unambiguous manifesto pledge, so the chancellor and the prime minister flinched. The budget instead relied on stealth taxes, improbable spending projections and wishful thinking about future economic growth. Hard choices were deferred.

That is not surprising when so many political incentives militate against candour. Leaders from all parties cite the virtue of confronting tough decisions and levelling with the public, but the more common practice is cakeism – pretending that voters can have their cake and eat it too. It was Boris Johnson who made that an explicit doctrine for Brexit, claiming Britain would enjoy only benefits and pay no cost for relinquishing EU membership. Since then the spirit of cakeism endures in denial of other awkward questions, on funding social care, for example, or managing the climate crisis.

In 2024, Labour won power with a cakeist manifesto, promising change within budget constraints that felt more like continuity. In 2025, the impossibility of delivering on that promise became obvious. In 2026, the party will need a more honest account of Britain’s predicament and clearer prescriptions to deal with it. MPs might decide that new leadership will provide those things. Perhaps it can. But they should note also that replacing prime ministers has become a habit in British politics born of systemic failure to address more complex problems.