NIALL FERGUSON: Whatever Keir Starmer's vision for Britain ... it is China, Russia, Iran and Argentina that could have the final say
Labour governments invariably come in with bold domestic agendas. But they soon discover the truth of Harold Macmillan's famous (though perhaps apocryphal) reply to the journalist who asked him what was most likely to blow a government off course: 'Events, dear boy, events.'
Rishi Sunak knows what that most urbane of Tory prime ministers meant. Less than a year after he entered No 10, Hamas blew up the Middle East with its October 7 attack on Israel, creating not only a foreign policy problem for the current government but a domestic one, too.
Whatever grand designs Sir Keir Starmer may have in mind for his own premiership, forces beyond his control are already preparing the events that will derail them.
Some of these we can already guess. Others we can imagine, but seem unlikely now. And then there are the 'unknown unknowns,' as former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called them — the things we cannot even conceive.
If Keir Starmer (right) wins as big as the polls suggest, he will come close to matching Tony Blair's (left) crushing victory over John Major in 1997
Harold Macmillan's famous (though perhaps apocryphal) reply to the journalist who asked him what was most likely to blow a government off course: 'Events, dear boy, events'
It's not hard to think of the known unknowns. First, there's the uncertain outcome of the November 5 presidential election in the United States. After all the nasty things Labour has said about Donald Trump over the years, Starmer must feel his stomach lurch at the very thought of having to glad-hand him if he is re-elected.
Even if Trump narrowly loses to Joe Biden, there will still be at least two wars going on, in Ukraine and Israel.
Meanwhile, the CIA thinks Chinese leader Xi Jinping is aiming to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. There is also mounting concern in Washington that the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is preparing to attack South Korea.
Though Russia, Iran, China and North Korea seem to have little in common, it is increasingly clear that they are working together to undermine the West.
Closer to home, Starmer – should he win – seems highly likely to confront a crisis of the monarchy, just as he is preparing to eject the hereditary peers from the House of Lords. The King and his daughter-in-law are both being treated for cancer. Of the King's brothers, one seems irreparably disgraced. Of his sons, one has turned his back on Britain and is at permanent war with the British Press.
No such forebodings are likely to be troubling Sir Keir today, however. For him, the political news is nearly all good. If the polls are to be believed, Labour is on track to win back power in a big way. New YouGov data, published on Thursday, found the Conservatives would win just 155 seats at the upcoming contest, compared with the 365 they won in 2019 — a calamitous reversal of political fortune.
If Starmer wins that big in October — the month most Westminster-watchers are betting on — he will come close to matching Tony Blair's crushing victory over John Major in 1997. But it will be an even bigger swing, if you recall how narrowly the Tories had won in 1992.
Everyone remembers the humiliating defeat suffered by Michael Portillo in Enfield Southgate in the small hours of May 2, 1997. This latest poll suggests there could be similar 'Portillo moments' this year for Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, the Leader of the Commons Penny Mordaunt, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps and Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove.
Then newly elected prime minister Clement Atlee celebrates with his wife Violet in 1945
As always when they sniff victory, Labour's leading lights are conjuring up visions of a brave, new Britain. In her Mais Lecture on March 19, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves promised 'a fundamental course correction' and 'a new model of economic management' to fix Britain's below-average productivity growth and investment.
Labour has certainly learned some lessons from the past. Reeves has no desire to be her party's answer to Kwasi Kwarteng, whose over-ambitious 'mini-Budget' sank Liz Truss's premiership in the space of an afternoon. Hence Reeves has defended the decision to axe Labour's £28billion green investment plan because of 'changed circumstances' — namely ballooning interest payments on the national debt. She also pledged to uphold Bank of England independence and the Office for Budget Responsibility. That ought to have settled nerves in the City.
But there were plenty of other bold pledges (and one horrible neologism: 'securonomics'). There will be 'a reformed and strengthened Enterprise and Growth Unit,' a new 'British Infrastructure Council' and two more new entities: a National Wealth Fund and Great British Energy. There will be planning reform to get more houses built and — of course — 'an urgent resource injection into our public services: to cut NHS waiting lists, tackle the crisis in dentistry, transform mental health services, recruit and retain teachers and provide breakfast clubs in every school'.
Doing all that and at the same time moving the the 'current budget … into balance, so that day-to-day costs are met by revenues' and reducing the debt 'as a share of the economy by the fifth year of the forecast' isn't remotely plausible, of course — even without unforeseen events.
Rachel Reeves must know this. Indeed, she acknowledged in her lecture that we live in an altogether more dangerous world than that of 1997.
This is part of the reason why Starmer's shadow cabinet are careful not to come across as New Labour 2.0, despite the influence that Tony Blair Institute evidently has behind the scenes. Indeed, shadow ministers have taken the risk of saying positive things about – of all people – Margaret Thatcher. Britain was 'on its knees, the sick man of Europe by the late 1970s,' shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently said. The country needed 'big economics' and she delivered it.
The CIA thinks Chinese leader Xi Jinping is aiming to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, writes Niall Ferguson. Pictured: A Chinese military procession
Now, I would dearly love to believe that this compliment was a sincere admission of error by a party that spent decades vilifying Lady Thatcher — as opposed to a cynical pitch to win over disillusioned Tory voters.
But the reality is that Starmer's government will be neither New Labour nor Red Thatcher. It will have much more in common with the Labour governments of the pre-Blair era. In each case, decent, well-meaning prime ministers came in with bold domestic programmes, not all that different from those promised by Rachel Reeves.
And in each case, events intervened to disrupt the construction of the New Jerusalem.
Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, governed for less than a year from January to November 1924. In those days, Labour really was the party of the unionised workers. But it was not easy to sell such moderate socialism while the Bolsheviks were consolidating their brutal rule in Russia. It was public opposition to MacDonald's attempt to negotiate a treaty with the tyrannical Soviet regime that brought his minority government down.
After MacDonald returned to 10 Downing Street in June 1929, he was once again destined to be the victim of 'events'. Within months, Wall Street crashed and the world economy was plunged into the Great Depression. By August 1931, MacDonald had been forced to form a National Government with the other parties.
As capitalism reeled, Stalin was consolidating his power in the Soviet Union. Mussolini already ruled in Italy; Hitler was soon to seize power in Germany. And the British Empire was slipping towards being ungovernable, as conflict between Jews and Arab Muslims escalated in Palestine. It would be hard to imagine a worse decade for moderate social democratic politics than the 1930s.
Labour had another shot at building its New Jerusalem in July 1945. Before Clement Attlee's government could embark on its ambitious plan to nationalise large chunks of the economy, however, it was hit by the economic consequences of peace, notably the abrupt end of the American Lend-Lease programme, which had supplied Britain’s war economy, in August 1945.
Attlee had become prime minister after the German surrender but before Japan had been defeated. The American decision to drop two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed the dawn of a new age. If Britain wished to remain a great power, it needed its own Bomb — and that was barely affordable even on a small scale.
Then there was the Empire. From Israel to India, nationalist groups were willing to fight for independence. And, riding the wave of decolonisation, Communist parties everywhere – from Tito's Yugoslavia to Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam and Mao's China – threatened to spread Stalin's red empire.
With Aneurin Bevan's National Health Service and William Beveridge's Welfare State, Attlee's was the most ambitious program of any Labour prime minister. Yet the geopolitical context — post-World War, early Cold War — guaranteed that there would be complicating events.
It is well known that the Labour leader Keir Starmer most admires is Harold Wilson, who was prime minister twice, from October 1964 to June 1970 and again from March 1974 to April 1976. Wilson began with a slim majority (just four seats) but with bold economic plans, symbolised by the new Department of Economic Affairs and Ministry of Technology.
His government immediately began to increase social benefits. Prescription charges for medicines were abolished, while pensions were raised to a fifth of industrial wages. The Travel Concessions Act 1964 introduced bus passes for pensioners. From the outset, however, Wilson was under pressure to devalue the pound (though he held out until 1967). Decolonisation continued, meanwhile: Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Kenya, Gambia.
But the biggest such problem was closer to home as 'The Troubles' began in Northern Ireland towards the end of Wilson's first premiership.
Returned to power in 1974, Wilson once again embarked on ambitious social spending. Once again, he called a snap election and increased his majority. But the timing was even worse this time around. The 1973 oil crisis worsened an already serious inflation problem.
By the time Wilson handed over to James Callaghan, Labour had no choice but to adopt counter-inflationary monetary and fiscal policies — setting Britain on course for the Winter of Discontent and the election of Margaret Thatcher in May 1979.
Even Labour's most successful prime minister, three-time-election-winner Tony Blair, had his share of events.
Less than four months after entering Downing Street, Blair had to cope with the outpouring of national grief that followed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on the morning of August 31, 1997. And by then, the struggle to restrain Saddam Hussein's weapons program had already begun. It was a struggle that would eventually lead Blair to his fateful decision to back the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 – something for which the Left wing of his party will never forgive him.
Blair timed his departure to perfection, nevertheless, handing the keys of Number 10 to Gordon Brown on the eve of the global financial crisis that would sink his premiership in a nightmare of bank runs and bailouts reminiscent of Ramsay MacDonald's fate in 1929.
As I said, some of the events that will derail the Starmer government are already foreseeable. But what of Rumsfeld's 'unknown unknowns'? Here's one. What if the recently elected Argentinian President Javier Milei invades the Falklands?
Don't rule it out. I was in Buenos Aires last week and I can report that Argentina is bracing itself for severe economic shock therapy. Milei is a true Thatcherite, who is slashing public spending in a bold effort to rein in his country's galloping inflation. Such austerity policies are rarely popular for long. And Milei knows very well that it was the Falklands War that rescued Thatcher's government from election defeat.
In his speech on Tuesday – April 2 is 'Malvinas Day' in Argentina – Milei spoke suggestively of 'a roadmap so that the Malvinas Islands return to Argentine hands.' And he referred to them as 'our islands'.
In 1982 the Royal Navy had 44 submarines and 64 destroyers and frigates. Today it has 26 submarines and 17 destroyers and frigates. The RAF had 31 jet squadrons in the 1980s. We may soon be down to seven. In 1982, the UK armed forces personnel numbered 327,600. Today that number is 142,560. In other words, our armed forces have more than halved in size, during a period when our population has increased by a fifth.
That ugly word 'securonomics' will come back to haunt Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer if such an unexpected event reveals — on Labour's watch — that Britain can no longer defend its own possessions.
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
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