Losing a junior minister in an extremely civilised way underlines that this is a regrettable decision being made out of necessity. It's not naive - it's good politics that you don't happen to agree with, which is a different thing.
He's had a good week, and come away looking pretty solid. You don't have to like the policies or the direction the world is going in to see that.
I think you're engaged blind optimism or maybe even blind faith. I was on a bus the other day, the views of Reform voters on things like foreign aid isn't exactly hard to fathom.
These are the people who are watching their own communities displaced by mass immigration. Entire districts changing in the space of a generation. They're not moderates, they don't really do nuance in that fashion. Nor do the bemused/fed up middle aged middle classes and generation anxiety who are also being enticed by Reform.
Not hard to fathom. Just like it wouldn't have been hard to figure out what pensioners in said districts, people who worked all their lives and paid into the system, would think of being forced to the front of the queue for filling in government black holes by a Labour Prime Minister. Or what parents in those districts would think of the failure to deliver on the promise of ending the two child benefit cap.
Or what it looks like to have a Chancellor who doesn't understand that VAT is not a progressive tax. Or an education secretary who can barely contain her working class glee at sticking it to private schools, unable to even fathom (or just care) some of those pupils aren't there by choice but through the failures of her department under previous mainstream failing parties.
Or to be asking companies hit by Covid, Brexit and inflation and stagflation, to pay for ill advised promises not to increase personal tax because the Labour party under Starmer is a dogged aderhent to the very maxims that have seen mainstream politics failing voters for a generation. Over promise and under deliver. Time and time and time again. Or worse, stick rigidly to fiscal rules even when voters are clearly not voting on such things anymore.
Politics is about optics. It's starting to look like every single decision this man makes is a "difficult choice" where you have to get seriously into the weeds of policy wonkery and also see the situation exactly as he sees it, to view it as good decision making.
Politics doesn't work that way. The naivety is thinking it does. Bad decisions when there are decent alternatives are exactly that. Do you seriously think a minister resigns if they don't think there was a way to meet the need for increased defence spending without cutting foreign aid by 0.2%? The man can't get his own Cabinet to agree, so what chance 60% of the voters?
Nobody wants a Cold War, sure. So why is Starmer cutting foreign aid to increase defence spending for exactly that purpose? Nobody will be fooled by this. Anyone who knows anything about the European theatre knows that the previous well established doctrine was that without American troops and equipment, the Russians would walk right over the continent.
And if events in Ukraine has changed that thinking, it's only to make it clear we really wouldn't need to commit a third of our conventional military to defending a Ukrainian demilitarised zone. Not least because by the time we're there, Putin will have figured out the next ruse. We're committing to ground warfare even as it becomes clear the next threat might be maritime.
We have far better things to spend such sums on, even if we stuck to spending it on defence. But if you disagree, you're naive? Come on. It's becoming clear who the weak link is. And the first people to realise it is usually the Cabinet. Unless you pack it with blind loyalists. The result is the same. Defeat.
Politics. Quite a difference animal to policy.
