Will Starmer’s chainsaw be Black & Decker or Fisher Price?
On Monday I used this column to ask who, if anyone, will have the courage to take a chainsaw to the British state. It’s an inelegant metaphor, but an effective one as Argentina’s Javier Milei and Elon Musk in the US revel in the process of hacking away at state infrastructure. Milei won his election after waving an actual chainsaw around on stage, as a theatrical warmup act ahead of his radical (and effective) reform agenda.
Keir Starmer will today set out his plans to reform the state, with aides apparently referring to this agenda as “project chainsaw.” This is gratifying, but the question is whether the kit will be Black and Decker or Fisher Price.
Starmer has talked a good talk on slashing regulation and there’s no doubt that he’s nudged some industry watchdogs into more of a pro-growth mindset, but today he intends to go further and outline plans for a wider overhaul of the state’s functions, capabilities and (apparently) size. We’re told that thousands of Whitehall jobs will go, quangos will be scrapped or merged and government departments will take on many of the roles currently the preserve of arms-length bodies. This is good, sensible stuff and it’s certainly the case that the Tories took their eyes off the ball during the last few years of their period in office.
When I put it to shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith that his party didn’t exactly bequeath an agile, efficient public sector he conceded that “the malaise has gone on for decades” and that he’s “100 per cent supportive” of any effort to slim down the regulatory infrastructure. His leader, Kemi Badenoch, has said that she wants to take her time in working out a complete “rewiring” of the state ahead of the next election, so is Starmer stealing a march on her?
Personally, I simply don’t believe that Starmer or Rachel Reeves are motivated by a burning desire to shrink the state. After all, they may scrap a quango or two but they’ve also launched dozens more since coming into office. However, if their (more plausible) ambition is to fine tune the state, to reform and modernise, it could prove a vital first step on the road to a more dramatic overhaul of the kind necessary to ultimately live within our means and rebalance the economy away from such eye-wateringly high levels of public expenditure.
The Overton window (of what’s deemed palatable in public policy debates) is shifting, and that should be welcomed.