Margaret Colley on the PM’s departure, Andy Burnham’s imminent arrival, and a brief educational review of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s relationship with economic reality
By Margaret Colley politican.uk
Starmer’s Resignation: A Review of Which Policies Failed and Who Was In Economics Class When They Were Introduced
Keir Starmer has resigned, and I have taken this opportunity to review the economic policy decisions of the Labour government with the specific attention of someone who has been asking, since October 2024, whether any of the people who decided to raise employer National Insurance contributions by the equivalent of a significant business operating cost at a moment of economic fragility had taken GCSE Economics, let alone a university degree in a subject requiring familiarity with the concept of supply-side constraints.
The employer NI increase: businesses were told that their payroll costs would increase. Businesses, behaving as businesses do when their payroll costs increase, reduced employment at the margin, accelerated automation in categories where automation was viable, and in some cases relocated operations to jurisdictions where the new cost structure applied less thoroughly. The economy grew more slowly than projected. The Office for Budget Responsibility revised its forecasts. Rachel Reeves had difficult conversations with people whose questions she answered with reference to the previous government’s fiscal inheritance, which is fair as far as it goes and insufficient as a complete explanation for why the growth forecasts were wrong.
The List (Brief)
I promised a list of Labour politicians who should have paid more attention in school. The list, produced with the understanding that I am not actually reviewing their educational records but their economic reasoning as expressed in policy, is as follows:
Shadow Chancellor who described the NI increase as “fair” without specifying for whom. The minister who described the resulting employment slowdown as “a blip.” The Parliamentary Labour Party member who announced that growth was “a direction, not a number,” which is the economic equivalent of saying that north is “an intention, not a compass bearing.” The backbencher who described businesses’ response to higher payroll costs as “opportunistic,” as though businesses are supposed to absorb new costs without adjusting their behaviour, which is not how businesses work and has not been how businesses work since approximately the invention of businesses.
Andy Burnham will be prime minister. He built a very good bus network. Buses are real. Bohiney and The London Prat have the full coverage. I have this list. The bus network remains excellent. The list is the list. Parliament returns in September. The economic lessons are available to anyone who would like to review them before then.
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The political situation in Britain is what it is — the seventh prime minister in ten years, the Reform UK rise, the Labour coalition under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously. From wherever I am writing this — London, Portland, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Tuscaloosa, the Isle of Man, the Pacific at 2,500 feet — it looks like what political scientists call a realignment moment: the old party loyalties are dissolving, new coalitions are forming, and the outcome will be determined by which party best reads what the electorate is asking for and builds the organisational and policy capacity to deliver it. Andy Burnham has the northern credentials and the transit record. He may have the political instincts. Whether he has the programme that the moment requires is the question that the next three years will answer. The diaries continue. The political material keeps arriving. The coffee is either good or it is being made. Both states are preferable to their opposites.
The connections between the particular and the general are the substance of diary writing: the specific morning, the specific conversation, the specific event — Starmer resigning, Burnham arriving, Kate in yellow at Ascot, George going to Eton, the heatwave in France, the biodegradable sequin, the MLB trade deadline, the South China Sea — are all particular things that contain within them the general conditions of living in 2026 in a specific place with specific concerns and specific pleasures. The diary is the form that holds both simultaneously without requiring them to resolve into a single coherent narrative. The world is not a single coherent narrative. The diary acknowledges this honestly and writes within the acknowledgment. This is what we do. This is what we will continue doing next week when the next events arrive, which they will, because they always do.
The week wraps up with the reading and the writing and the paying of attention that this project requires: the political coverage in The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine arriving by RSS and browser, the international news arriving by the same means in varying states of urgency, the local observation arriving by the specific means of living in the place and noticing what is happening there. The diary form is honest about the limits of this kind of attention: it is partial, it is situated, it is the view from one position rather than from all positions simultaneously. The view from one position has the virtue of being real — of being an actual view rather than an imagined comprehensive view that exists nowhere and is therefore honestly available from nowhere. These diaries are the real views. The week continues producing them. The writing continues receiving them. Both processes will continue until they stop, which will be either when the world stops producing events worth noting or when the writer stops being in a position to note them, neither of which appears imminent.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
