Proving that government can be a force for good is essential if Sir Keir Starmer is to see off the populist right

Listening to Sir Keir Starmer’s recent lament that the “flabby” state is failing Britain was to experience deja vu all over again. More than a quarter of a century has passed since another Labour prime minister, one Tony Blair, vented his frustration with the public sector by complaining that trying to reform government had left him with “scars on my back”. In similar vein, David Cameron’s lot used to excuse their struggles to get stuff done by blaming resistance from the amorphous administrative “Blob”. Dominic Cummings told Boris Johnson that the solution was to pack Number 10 with “weirdos”, “misfits” and “wild cards” – a self-description if ever there was one – while purging the senior civil service. He was still working his way through his “shit list” of mandarins when he got the boot himself. You will not recall the Johnson administration as an able and stable outfit dedicated to serving the needs of the public. The grim chaos of that period is a warning to the current government that braggadocio, stunts and wheezes will not make the state smarter.

Most prime ministers become exasperated with the bureaucracy under them at some point. It has taken eight months for Sir Keir to conclude that a “weak”, “overstretched” and “unfocused” state is failing to properly perform its “core purposes”. He’s not wrong. The contract between government and citizenry is in a bad way. “The public has lost faith in the state to deliver,” says one cabinet minister who worries about this a lot. “People find themselves paying more in tax, but do they feel the benefit in the public realm? They don’t.”