Since Labour won its huge majority, the polls suggest that public support has declined, as voters detect little of the “change” promised during the campaign. Critics have been asking: what is this government in power for? The Conservatives, who you might expect to benefit from Labour’s woes, are in the terminal ward, while Nigel Farage feeds on the disaffection with “politics as usual”.
To help it find its purpose, No 10 has enlisted an ex-academic named Jonathan Rutherford. Long associated with the socially conservative Blue Labour group, Rutherford has also worked as a left wing community activist and a journalist. He and Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, worked together in the Labour Together group. After McSweeney guided Starmer’s successful bid for the Labour leadership, Rutherford wrote the new leader’s first speech.
Now, through his project, “The Future of the Left”, Rutherford tells me, he’s working with the government to “shape its political narrative and a political purpose”. Last year, Labour won “by default on an anti-Tory majority”. It can’t rely on that twice. It “has to build a new coalition to win in 2028 and to undertake the historic challenge of turning the country around, rebuilding the national economy and restoring the social contract.”
When I first met him, in April 2023, he was already warning that Labour would scrape into power and fail to deliver real change – only for Farage to sweep in and transform the political landscape. He now fears that, without a clearer understanding of populism, Labour risks responding to Reform “like the US army did to the Viet Cong. It simply did not understand what the hell they were doing. All of its tactics were catastrophically wrong and they lost.” Why? Because the Americans “looked at the world, and they saw themselves”.
So what is Rutherford telling No 10? And is there anything in what he is offering that can build a coalition of broad support, clear the way for an enduring new political settlement, and consign Reform to the dustbin of history?
The idea of a new political consensus has been echoing around British politics since the crash of 2008, which cracked apart the neoliberal settlement that had dominated since Thatcher. Blue Labour, the movement that brought Rutherford to prominence inside the party, emerged in response. It argued that the crash exposed the haughty unfairness with which the state and big business often treated ordinary people. The Blue Labour argument was that New Labour had never fully healed the damage that Thatcher had done to economic security and the pride of place that industries and institutions had once provided.
It has become a political cliche that many voters might welcome both a turn left on the economy and a more conservative line on social issues. Witness all those promises of “levelling up”. But no government has made it happen.
The “big, big challenge”, Rutherford suggests, is to “move into a new political era, a new political settlement, where power shifts back to working people and where national income shifts back towards working people.” But first, Labour needs to lift its eyes from the minutiae of policy, and tell a compelling story of what has gone wrong in Britain, and how that needs to change. It needs to “develop a political economy. It doesn’t have one. The OBR and Treasury orthodoxy have simply got far too much sway”, he argues. “We need to restore levelling up – that disappeared”.
To drive the necessary change, Rutherford argues, requires a “clear strategic power at the centre. I would establish a social and economic development unit in
No 10. Someone said to me: ‘You can’t do that, there’s no room!’” His frustration at this kind of process-driven obstructionism erupts. “You can find a building to put it in! But the point is we need development economics, not budget management.” Perhaps it should be a full ministry; either way, it would need to be under the direct authority of the prime minister.
A criticism of Blue Labour is that it favours grand rhetoric over policy detail. Rutherford protests that he has spent 15 years working with a range of Labour politicians developing policy. He gives as an example his 2022 report, Labour’s Covenant: A Plan for National Reconstruction, which argued for a state-led approach to economic growth, with a shift of power to local institutions.
The primary criticism of the government is the lack of an overarching philosophy that transcends Rachel Reeves’s fiscal caution. Before she took office, Reeves used to talk in much bolder terms about “breaking up monopolies, devolving power and reforming corporate governance” and the “need to support new forms of economic ownership”. Rutherford worked with Reeves on her 2018 pamphlet, The Everyday Economy, from which those lines are taken. As shadow chancellor, she developed these ideas in speeches about “securonomics”. Since then, he fears all that has fallen away.
Even so, Rutherford welcomed aspects of Reeves’s spending review, particularly the plans to regenerate struggling neighbourhoods, and build transport infrastructure in northern England. In her speech, Reeves spoke about “security”, even “securonomics”, and of ensuring that “renewal is felt in people’s everyday lives, in their job and on their high streets”. Rutherford remains doubtful that infrastructure spending will achieve that. But the speech did mark a return of the more political side of Reeves’s worldview. The question is whether she can shape that into a coherent political economic story.
The “principal purpose in the first term”, Rutherford tells me, must be to “restore the social contract” as the vital first step to building a broad coalition of public support. It’s an idea that reportedly also appeals to McSweeney. A social contract, Rutherford notes wryly, is “quite a liberal idea,” not generally his favourite thing. His version, however, focuses not just on rights, but responsibilities and rules: stopping the boats, tackling crime, reasserting “a sense of decency in public life”.
This view of how we live together, he suggests, was what really lay behind the most controversial comments Starmer has made since taking power. Last month, the prime minister declared that we need to re-emphasise the “fair rules”, often unwritten, on which “nations depend”, and “the obligations we owe to one another.” And then – while insisting he celebrated diversity – Starmer said that, after years of high immigration, “these rules become even more important” as without them, we risk becoming “an island of strangers”.
Rutherford argues that these remarks were an extension of themes already set out by the PM. In a January statement on the murder of three young girls in Southport, Starmer warned of “More and more people retreating into parallel lives, whether through failures of integration or just a country slowly turning away from itself”.
In February, he praised the “British families” who “opened their doors to fleeing Ukrainian citizens”, as he promised to raise defence spending. This, according to Starmer, would make the country more secure, and drive economic regeneration. “We will have to ask British industry, British universities, British businesses, and the British people to play a bigger part; use this to renew the social contract of our nation, the rights and responsibilities that we owe one another.”
Pulled together, Rutherford says, these statements have the makings of a coherent narrative that the government should illustrate “with a series of reforms and actions which demonstrate that Labour is getting a grip on the state, that it’s going to restore social order, it’s going to restore control of the borders”.
But when Starmer spoke of “an island of strangers”, not everyone heard an uplifting story of mutual obligation. He was even accused of deliberately echoing Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech. As history, this is unconvincing, much as the speech inadvertently stirred deeply painful memories. Starmer’s plans would still allow annual net migration of around 300,000; Powell talked of the black man holding “the whip hand”, called for repatriation and prophesied civil war.
Rutherford stands by the “strangers” line, conceding – much as Starmer has now done – that it “could have just done with a little bit more explanation”, to set it in a much broader context. “You can extend that to talk about the way that society has totally fragmented. You could talk about the separation between people who voted Remain and voted Leave. You could talk about the way communities and people’s ways of life have been shattered by the market.”
But is there not a risk of saying “Farage is right – don’t vote for him”? He is not saying that, he insists. When I suggest one way to avoid that implication would be for Labour to focus more on the economic imbalance of power, he agrees.
Given the divides over immigration, and memories of the battles between Remainers and Leavers – of whom Rutherford was one – what are the chances of Labour building a lasting new settlement? Labour, after all, is at risk of losing voters not only to Farage, but to the Lib Dems and the Greens. He rejects the idea of a progressive alliance to keep those voters onside.
“Labour would find itself piling up votes in the better-off parts of the country and unable to secure a majority. Such a strategy would cement the Brexit cultural class divide and profoundly destabilise the country along class lines, accelerating its drift towards ungovernability.” The party needs “to build a cross-class national coalition, but the professional middle classes cannot be the dominant partner”. They are “too intolerant, too detached from the country, too condescending”.
Conversely, liberals and progressives have often suggested that Blue Labour is too nostalgic, harking back to a mythic version of the 1950s. Rutherford rejects this, insisting that it “has never championed the white working class”. The critics, he counters, just don’t like talking about how class “determines people’s lives, whatever their ethnicity”.
Given these divisions, what could a broad, transformative Labour-supporting coalition actually agree on? Perhaps the most likely common ground lies in shifting economic power towards ordinary people. The writer Sam Freedman – no friend of Blue Labour – has suggested that this side of its politics has a potentially unifying appeal.
As Freedman pointed out in February, the government could make a case for this based on what it has already started to do: boosting public-sector pay and the minimum wage, strengthening employment rights, industrial strategy, rail nationalisation. The obstacle is that growth-focused ministers seem so scared of upsetting business they don’t want to crow about their own achievements – even as Farage undercuts them from the economic left.
On immigration, the bar is even higher: the groups that might make up any such coalition will need to reach compromise. If not, they will have to fight it out for the chance to take on Farage.
As Rutherford sees it: “Labour has got one chance. Only one chance.” It has to act decisively, now.
That warning sounds similar to worries that can be heard well beyond Blue Labour. “We’re in a moment of deep turbulence and change, and we’re in office but we’re not in power, and we’ve not got a grip on it. And people sense that. They know it. And that’s why they hear Farage, who’s extremely capable, and they think, ‘OK, I’ll give him a go.’”
Phil Tinline is the author of The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares and Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax That Duped America and Its Sinister Legacy
