Preparing for progressive change from opposition

Abstract

In this paper, drawing on the examples of 1997 and 2015, we will look at the task of preparing for government that Sir Keir Starmer must wrestle with over the period until the next general election, which is due to be held no later than January 2025.

One factor distinguishes Keir Starmer's preparations from the case studies of Ed Miliband and Tony Blair, which is that the next general election may be even sooner than scheduled. Indeed, at various points in the past few months it has looked possible that an election would be imminent. In contrast, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 ensured that the coalition government could endure.

For Miliband's Labour, this meant that thoughts turned in earnest to what governing would involve. In 2013. Lord Falconer was put in charge of leading Miliband's transition to government along with a steering committee, comprised of party aides, shadow ministers, outside experts and old hands like Andrew Adonis, which had limited input. Falconer, trusted across factions and seen as competent, was crucial to ensuring this process was given status within the leader of the opposition's office.

Going back to events surrounding 1997, Jonathan Powell – tasked with creating a greater sense of order and structure at the top of New Labour – began, from early 1996 onwards, to meet monthly with Charles Clarke (who had been Neil Kinnock's chief of staff), Patricia Hewitt and the recently retired former permanent secretary, Sir Nicholas Monck, to discuss preparation for power.2

A decade and a half later, Miliband and Falconer took this work as their point of departure.

The first lesson they took from 1997 was to use management consultants to conduct an ‘outside in’ analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the major delivery departments, aiming to give the party an honest assessment of the capacity of government departments they would inherit after five years of austerity. This echoed the accountancy firm Arthur Anderson's work for Labour in 1997.

The second lesson they took was the need to give potential new ministers the skills and knowledge required for the job of secretary of state. Much has been made of the level of experience within the current shadow cabinet, only two of whom have been secretaries of state, and a further six have junior ministerial experience. But back in 1997, the Labour frontbench was significantly more inexperienced – in the shadow cabinet, only Margaret Beckett and Jack Cunningham, both junior ministers in the Wilson government, had any experience at all. During 1996, ‘summer schools’ were held at Templeton College, Oxford. Driven by Patricia Hewitt, future ministers looked at lessons from the world of big business and the management of large organisations; another session, based around the themes of Gerald Kaufman's book, How to be a Minister, was led by the Fabian Society. These sessions often suffer from a lack of engagement by senior figures – in 1997, neither Blair nor Gordon Brown attended.3

Finally, before policies drawn up in opposition are tested by reality, it is important to game how they will survive contact with the House of Commons. This involves preparation for the full range of likely parliamentary outcomes, and preparing for the possibility of cross-party talks. In 1997, Blair and Paddy Ashdown held extensive strategic discussions. There was some sharing and matching of policy positions to work out areas of symbiosis – the archives show that David Miliband, Labour's head of policy, was particularly disdainful of Liberal Democrat policy positions, describing them as “a combination of pressure group fashions and longstanding party totems”.8 But, crucially, the faction within New Labour that believed in the idea of a ‘progressive realignment’ – and there were some, though Miliband was not one – had not worked out how the project could survive if plan A – a Labour landslide – was achieved.