Labour’s Great Admission — They Never Prepared For Power
Two years after the 2024 election, Morgan McSweeney has admitted Labour was not ready to govern. The result has been policy mistakes, reversals and a country still waiting for change.
Today marks two years since Labour won the 2024 general election and Keir Starmer entered Downing Street.
It was a huge parliamentary victory. Labour won 411 seats and secured the kind of Commons majority most governments can only dream of.
But two years on, Morgan McSweeney, the man who helped build the operation that put Starmer there, has admitted Labour was not properly prepared for what came next.
McSweeney said Labour “didn’t prepare enough” for the world it was entering. It had not had enough conversations at the top of the party about what governing in a changed Britain would mean. Most strikingly, he said Labour “didn’t come in with enough of a theory” about how it would deliver change.
That is a remarkable admission from the architect of Labour’s return to power.
A Landslide In Seats, Not In Support
Labour won 411 seats in 2024. It had an overwhelming parliamentary mandate.
But it did not have an overwhelming popular vote.
Keir Starmer’s Labour received around 9.7 million votes. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour received 10.3 million in 2019.
That means Labour won roughly 560,000 fewer votes under Starmer than it did under Corbyn, despite securing more than twice as many MPs. Turnout also dropped from 67.3% in 2019 to 59.8% in 2024.
Labour’s victory was legitimate. That is how first-past-the-post works: seats determine who governs.
But the nature of the result matters. Labour did not sweep to power because the country was united behind a detailed programme for government. It benefited from Conservative collapse, lower turnout and a fractured right-of-centre vote.
It won office. It did not win a great national wave of enthusiasm.
That made preparation more important, not less.
Winning An Election Is Not The Same As Being Ready To Govern
McSweeney’s explanation is revealing.
For years, Labour had convinced itself that it could not win. The party focused on becoming electable, building the campaign machine and getting voters to believe that power was possible again.
That was understandable. After 2019, Labour needed a route back.
But a party asking the public to hand it the keys to the country has a responsibility to prepare for what comes next.
Winning is only the first test. Governing is the real one.
McSweeney said that by early 2024, while planning for day one in government, he had started to realise they had not done enough to prepare. Labour then got “exposed” early.
That is exactly what happened.
The Winter Fuel Decision Set The Tone
The first major decision of the new government was to remove winter fuel payments from millions of pensioners.
It was politically disastrous and it came to define Labour’s opening months.
McSweeney now admits it was a mistake. He said it “probably speaks to not having enough of a plan”, describing a new team coming in, seeing financial pressure and moving quickly to rein things in.
That is the problem in one sentence.
A government that has done the hard thinking beforehand knows which choices are politically, economically and morally sustainable. A government that has not prepared reacts to the first crisis it sees.
The winter fuel decision looked like that: a Treasury spreadsheet finding the easiest available saving, with too little thought given to the people who would pay the price.
Labour should have entered office with optimism, clarity and an understanding of what voters had just endured.
Instead, it opened by telling the country things would get worse and then targeted pensioners.
Policy By Reaction — And More State Control By Instinct
The same pattern has continued.
Farmers have faced inheritance-tax changes that caused anger across rural Britain. Employers were hit with higher National Insurance costs while businesses were already struggling with weak growth, rising costs and recruitment pressures. Welfare reforms have become trapped in rows, retreats and confusion.
Each policy can be debated individually. That is not the point.
The point is that they have not felt like parts of a coherent national plan.
They have felt like disconnected responses to immediate pressures: the Treasury looking for revenue, ministers responding to a fiscal hole, advisers trying to manage the next political problem.
Yet while Labour says it did not have enough time or preparation to work out how to fix Britain’s biggest problems, it has still found time for significant changes to the relationship between the state and the individual.
Digital ID is one example. The government initially proposed a national digital ID scheme with a compulsory role in proving the right to work. After public and political backlash, it dropped the mandatory element, but the wider digital identity programme remains in development through the GOV.UK App and related public-service systems.
Then there is jury trial.
The government’s courts legislation is designed to reserve jury trials for the most serious cases and move more cases elsewhere in the system to tackle the Crown Court backlog. Ministers argue that reform is necessary. But trial by jury is not a minor administrative detail. It is one of the oldest safeguards between the citizen and the power of the state.
If the state is failing because courts are under-resourced and backlogs have been allowed to build, the answer should not simply be to reduce the protections available to ordinary people.
That is what makes this so troubling.
Labour may not have arrived with a clear plan to improve public services, grow the economy or restore trust. But it has still shown a willingness to reach for more central control and to dilute protections when the state itself struggles to perform.
When a government does not arrive with a settled theory of how it will govern, this is what politics becomes.
A problem appears. A policy is rushed out. The backlash begins. Ministers retreat, reframe or blame somebody else.
Meanwhile, the country still waits for the change it was promised.
Government Is Not A Prize For Westminster Insiders
This is the bigger issue.
Government is not a prize for the people who ran the campaign. It is not an internal project for advisers, strategists, civil servants and the small circle around Number 10.
It exists to serve the public.
That means the pensioner worrying about heating their home. The farmer wondering whether there will be a family business left to pass on. The employer deciding whether they can afford another member of staff. The young person trying to find a first job. The family paying more tax while public services still fail to deliver.
Those people do not care about the internal logic of Westminster.
They care whether their lives are getting better or worse.
McSweeney is right when he says voters are not short of patience. They are short of time. They have spent years being told to wait through stagnant wages, higher bills, rising taxes, strained public services and a political system that repeatedly promises change but rarely delivers it.
They do not need another government explaining why the job is difficult.
They need one that is ready.
And Now Comes Andy Burnham
The danger is that Labour treats the failure of the Starmer years as a communications problem rather than a governing problem.
McSweeney has already backed Andy Burnham’s idea of a “Number 10 North” and argued that too much national decision-making is concentrated in London. There is a fair point underneath that. Britain is too centralised, and too many people making decisions about the country have little understanding of life outside the Westminster bubble.
But moving the postcode of power is not the same as changing how power is used.
Burnham’s answer appears to be more devolution, more intervention and more political control over areas such as housing, welfare, education and local economic policy.
That may sound radical. It may also mean giving the same political class even more authority over the lives of ordinary people.
And that is the question Labour now has to answer.
If Starmer’s government was underprepared, reactive and increasingly willing to extend the reach of the state, why should the public assume the next phase will be better?
It may prove to be more of the same, only bigger.
Two Years On, The Excuse Has Run Out
McSweeney deserves credit for being more honest than most people who have worked at the centre of power.
But his admission should concern every voter.
Labour did not merely inherit a difficult country. Every incoming government inherits problems. The question is whether it has prepared properly to deal with them.
Two years on, the answer appears to be no.
Labour had a plan to win. It built a machine, neutralised internal opposition, took advantage of Conservative collapse and won a huge majority in Parliament.
But it did not arrive with enough preparation for government.
Britain needed a government that understood what had gone wrong, who was being left behind and how to put it right. Instead, it got a government still working out its theory of change after it had already been handed the power to deliver it.
And now, rather than a genuine reset, the country may be asked to accept an even more interventionist version of the same project under Andy Burnham.
That is not leadership.
It is power without preparation — and potentially even more power without accountability.
✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions
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Burnham must have the same "No plan" problem as Starmer. Until a few weeks ago he was mayor of Manchester which must have kept him busy so when did he do the planning for government? It's not a trivial task. On the train journey down to London I suppose. I get the impression that they think they don't need a plan because all they have to do is follow socialist principles on an issue by issue basis as they occur and it will come out fine.
I voted for Blair (and regretted it shortly after) but I have to say when he came into government it really did seem to have hit the ground running. One policy announcement after another, bang, bang, bang.