Starmer squandering chance to gain public's trust, says boss of influential progressive think tank

Keir Starmer had a chance to make the public think his government is different to all the politicians who’ve come before, but missed the boat. That’s the view of Harry Quilter-Pinner, the new director of the IPPR think tank, who says voters in focus groups still bring up the freebies story, months after it dropped out of the headlines.

“Keir Starmer and Labour had a very small window to try and prove people wrong, and that story unfortunately just reinforced something that people were looking out for and expecting to see,” he tells Big Issue from a conference room in IPPR’s Westminster headquarters. While months may have passed since Starmer paid back more than £6,000 in gifts including Taylor Swift tickets, the story has lingered for voters.

“They have the opportunity to recover ground in the polls, but I think it’d be very hard to recover the image that Keir Starmer was projecting pre-election of being different and above it all, and on your side.”

In all the discussion over what’s driving Starmer’s government, it could be easy to miss the influence of think tanks. Morgan McSweeney – the man credited as the brains behind Starmer, or the true driver of the train – came up through the Labour Together think tank. Ex-Resolution Foundation head Torsten Bell has found himself one of the quickest MPs from the 2024 intake to make it to a ministerial post. 

At the same time, the politicians at the very top of Starmer’s administration come across as bland and shorn of ideas. Think tanks fill the gap, giving politicians a buffet of perfectly palatable solutions to political problems. So it’s an interesting time to be taking over at the Institute for Public Policy Research, which bills itself as the country’s leading progressive think tank – or just the boffin factory which gave us David Miliband.

As his organisation pumps out reports on AI, housing policy, electric vehicles, green buses, trade and more, hoping to shape Labour’s response to the pressing problems, Quilter-Pinner worries Labour might just be squandering its chance.

“I think we’ve got into a situation where people don’t believe that politicians are actually trying to do good in society, and not out for themselves. Anything, absolutely anything that reinforces that view, people pick up on, and they’re no longer willing to give politicians the benefit of the doubt,” he says.

“Where I am a bit critical of the government is that it’s communicated about its changes really poorly in my view. It’s not narrated very well what it’s going, why and what impact that’s going to have. And I think that’s left people feeling not much is happening, and even the stuff that is happening they don’t understand why or when.”

He adds: “The winter fuel payment debacle surprised me. We weren’t expecting that. Obviously in hindsight it looks like a mistake. That’s one of the few things that cuts through with people.”

So, to Quilter-Pinner, Starmer is at a fork in the road between a decade of national renewal or just business as usual. “I think there’s the start of a project emerging, but I think the next year is actually really crucial. You’ll see quite a lot of those plans solidify,” he says. “There’s a lot of policy that will be set in the next six months, and that will determine the direction of travel, but also it will reveal how ambitious or not this government is going to be.”

The backdrop to this is the utter mess the UK is in. “The fact that the economy is not delivering for most people is a huge problem,” he says, leading to a huge lack of trust in politicians. “I think the only way we break out of that cycle is by a government really getting to grips with some of these problems, and being able to demonstrate that they are doing that, even if there is a electoral cost in the short run to some of that activity.”

Take housing: Labour needs to tackle the underlying issues, and increase the housing supply rather than simply pumping up demand by making it easier for people to buy. But it might not be pain-free. “If they follow through on that, and a radical version of following through on that, they will lose seats, right? Because they’re going to pick some areas where they’re going to build a load of houses, and that’s going to piss off a load of people locally. But at some point governments need to do that, otherwise we’re just never going to solve this,” he says.

The benefits of Rachel Reeves’ hike on employer national insurance contributions are not widely understood, he adds. For years, the UK’s model of growing the economy has been “kind of dependent on migration”, with investment in labour cheap and flexible, rather than added productivity. The package on workers’ rights – which Angela Rayner has been forced to defend against pressure from businesses as one of the government’s few popular policies – will make laying people off harder and reduce the availability of low-wage labour.

“That will be good for workers, because they will get a bit more security and higher wages. But it will also be good for our economy, because it will incentivise companies to invest more in the capital infrastructure around our workers that will increase productivity,” says Quilter-Pinner. “We have a very low take up of robotics and technology in this country, that also has an impact on productivity and growth.”

He adds: “You don’t need to tell someone in Grimsby that story on the door, but you do need to tell your businesses that story when they’re saying we need to scrap the workers’ rights. There has to be a really clear overarching story of what Labour’s growth plan is.”

On homelessness, Quilter-Pinner – whose work for a homelessness charity in London’s east end involved introducing a Housing First model – believes Labour has shown positive signs with a pledge of £1bn to tackle the problem, but “that’s not going to cut it unless it’s repeated year after year”.

How do you get Labour to listen to all this? “Labour didn’t have the time in opposition that they would have had previously to do some of the big thinking. I think they’re more open to ideas than a lot of governments would be,” he says. The ideas spread through public events, private meetings with advisors and civil servants and politicians, or private briefings for politicians “framed specifically for the decisions that they’re trying to make”.

Then there are certain figures in the media they know Labour’s top brass pay attention to. “There are columnists like Robert Shrimsley at the Financial Times, we know is regularly read in government. There’ll be specific people who we know get more pick up, and so we will try and make sure that those people know about our work and are referencing our work,” he says.

Around the world, the right seems to be stealing a march on developing its ideas, Quilter-Pinner says. “We’ve ended up in this weird position where conservatives [small C] across the world now appear more willing to smash the system, to drive change than progressives. Progressives have ended up in this weird space where they’re defending the status quo,” he says.

“I think we need to reflect, for those of us who are progressive, that we maybe haven’t been as creative and open to new ideas as we should have been and that we need to be. I think broadly Labour get that and are open to ideas. But I think they are skeptical of tired ideas, as in factions just defending their existing factional solutions that have been around on the stocks for the last 30, 40, 50, 60 years.”

Think tanks: These are the minds moulding Britain

Resolution Foundation 

It’s not just ideas that pass between think tanks and governments. After serving as universities minister, former Tory MP David “Two Brains” Willetts took over as chief of the Resolution Foundation, which focuses on improving living standards in the UK. Nearly a decade later, chief executive Torsten Bell made the journey in the other direction and now finds himself as parliamentary under-secretary of state for pensions. 

Policy Exchange 

The recent wave of anti-protest legislation from the Conservative government did not come out of nowhere. Rishi Sunak admitted the right-wing Policy Exchange think tank had helped draft the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, after reports that the law had originated in a briefing from the organisation. 

Centre for Policy Studies 

Co-founded by Margaret Thatcher in 1974, the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) boasted that the 2019 Tory manifesto was a “proud moment”. Two of the manifesto’s three authors were involved with CPS, and policies on levelling up, national insurance and more found their way into the finished document. 

The Institute of Economic Affairs 

Liz Truss’s premiership self-destructed after a disastrous mini-budget sent the markets and economy haywire. Her ideas were shaped by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). “Britain is now their laboratory”, said Tory activist Tim Montgomerie after Truss won the Tory leadership. The IEA’s director said the think tank would have “a lot of hard thinking to do” if its ideas turned out not to work. 

Fabian Society 

Think tanks are nothing new. Founded in 1884, the Fabians mined ideas for generations of progressive politics, including arguing for a minimum wage in 1906. Politicians from Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have counted themselves as members. 

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