The crisis of legitimacy in British politics is rooted in the erosion of two key pillars that uphold public confidence in our governing institutions and democracy itself: input legitimacy, the extent to which we feel that we are empowered to shape the policies of government, and output legitimacy, the quality of the results government gets. Both are necessary foundations of the legitimacy of our governing institutions.
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Rebuilding confidence in British governing institutions was never going to be easy. It was always going to take time and require serious reform to re-establish both input and output legitimacy. British democracy requires reinvigoration to re-establish faith that the government acts in the people’s best interests and can respond to their demands, and the British economy requires an injection of energy and investment in resilience if living standards are to improve and be protected.
But Sir Keir and his Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have been more concerned with sticking to arbitrary fiscal rules inherited from the Conservatives than building a resilient and thriving economy or a state that people feel works in their interests. High profile cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance painted a picture of a callous, not supportive, government. Increased employers’ national insurance contributions have been projected by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research to both increase unemployment and slow growth, which will remain anaemic in the coming years.
They are now set to cut £6bn from an already thin welfare state. £5bn will be ‘saved’ by making it harder to qualify for Personal Independence Payments, with further cuts made by freezing Personal Independence Payments next year (a real terms cut) and cutting Universal Credit for those judged as unfit for work.
As trade union bosses have rightly pointed out, this is an attack on the poorest and most vulnerable in our society, one that tells Britons that balance sheets are more important than voters’ lives. That is not an exaggeration: we know from a decade plus of austerity that disability welfare cuts literally led to thousands of disabled people losing their lives.
The Guardian reported earlier this week that the government is additionally considering plans drawn up by Labour Together, the think tank founded by Sir Keir’s Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, to reorganise and cut back government bodies employing up to 300,000 people. The plans, rather moronically called Project Chainsaw, are billed by Labour Together as an effort to channel the populist right Argentinian President “Milei’s energy but with a radical centre-left purpose”.
In reality, this is yet another assault on the state and the welfare of the UK by yet another government that has bought the magic beans of efficiency and technological advancements as cure-alls for the state’s struggles. They would rather hack away at the state, kneecap small businesses, and take from the poorest than even consider taxing the hundreds of billions in wealth held by the UK’s richest.
Sir Keir and his government may well enjoy a small bump in the polls thanks to his adroit handling of recent developments in the war in Ukraine, but by cutting back other parts of the state while committing to increased defence spending, he risks appearing to choose warfare over welfare. Not only is this a false dichotomy, but a counterproductive one that opens space for the populist right to not just erode confidence in the government further, but even to erode the UK’s astronomically high level of support for Ukraine.
It will also invite voters to ask why they should support a government that fails to support them, or uphold their half of a social contract that the state has abandoned. Before the new government took office, the UK came fifth out of 28 countries ranked by strength of populist sentiment in the Broken-System Index from Ipsos, and we were one of just three countries in which such sentiment had become stronger since 2019. The results suggested that half of us believe that we need a strong leader willing to break the rules to fix the UK and that most of us believe the economy is rigged in favour of the rich and powerful and want a strong leader to retake control.
The government’s trajectory is likely to further grow this sentiment and provide even more fertile ground for outsider politics, whether that of Farage and the populist right, or that of the UK’s secessionist movements. By failing to show the necessary ambition and creativity to tackle the UK’s legitimacy crisis, the government threatens to intensify the trends undermining British democracy. Populism will continue to thrive, and in three or four years' time Labour will be ousted by either Reform UK, the Conservatives, or a right populist coalition selling the same snake oil policies that have defeated mainstream governments across Europe.
When Sir Keir entered office, he had the opportunity to rebuild the legitimacy of British democracy and re-establish trust in our politics. On the eve of the elections, I wrote in these pages that his agenda failed to show the requisite ambition to rise to that challenge and avoid becoming populism’s next victim. He has plenty of time to turn things around, but the government’s direction to date has done nothing to convince me that it will survive a first term, to all of our detriment.
**Mark McGeoghegan is a Glasgow University researcher of nationalism and contentious politics and an Associate Member of the Centre on Constitutional Change. He can be found on BlueSky @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social**