COMMENT

It’s not red or blue. It’s power we hold to account

Since taking office, Keir Starmer has begun to deliver on some of his promises. But he has also made some bad choices. Good Law Project are here to hold the government to account.

Jolyon Maugham KC, Good Law Project

Oct 18, 2024 — 2 min read

Credit: Flickr/Number 10

W hat it does say on the Good Law Project tin is that we “use the law to hold power to account.” What it does not say, and it never will, is that we are an offshoot of the Labour Party or we’re only interested in beating up Tories.

The need to do this emerges clearly from Labour’s first hundred days.

Where Labour should have kept pensioners warm and stopped kids going to bed hungry, it instead briefed out that it would water down both of its manifesto promises to tax the super-rich. For a new wardrobe and some concert tickets, it flushed away the opportunity to restore trust in politics. When it should have stood with the trans community, targeted by billionaires and the far-right, it cosied up to exactly the wrong people. And when it could have reversed the needless harm done to the lives of young people, it insisted on no return to the Erasmus scheme.

And it has thrown away the opportunity to recover money wrongly given to Tory VIPs by botching the appointment of a COVID Corruption Commissioner. It will make an appointment for two to three days a week for one year, with a wide range of objectives. Insiders tell us the Cabinet Office – the department which ran the VIP lane – was reluctant to go further. But did Labour really think it could deliver vital structural change without breaking a few eggs?

Labour has also done much that is good. It seems to be delivering on many of its environmental promises, Starmer has been clear that we will not become a pariah state by leaving the ECHR, and everyone who cares about the NHS will be pleased that Labour has sought to tackle the skills flight by paying people properly.

Labour has been better than the Tories – but we will hold it, and successor governments, to a higher standard than that.

That’s what it means to hold power to account.