Starmer’s Labour government defined itself by its “hard choices.” The phrase has served as the drumbeat to nearly every decision taken since the general election last July. The underlying claim is not so much that the previous government was intentionally reckless, but that it abandoned the levers of responsible state authority — on immigration, welfare, crime and the economy. Labour was to be the government that really did “take back control.”

The central difficult decision was a cut to winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners, restricting eligibility to only those who qualified for pension credit and other means-tested benefits. Following the disappointing results of the local elections, however, the Government has been considering a U-turn on its controversial policy, amid warnings of “Labour’s poll tax” further reducing the party’s support.

“We took difficult decisions, but the right decisions, at the budget, including the decision that we took on winter fuel,” Starmer told reporters during his trip to Albania last week, as he refused to deny he was reconsidering the policy. “We are now seeing the benefits of that in the interest rate cuts and the growth figures. They were difficult decisions but the right decisions.”

The policy, alongside some of the other hardline measures taken by the Government, has long been unpopular with Labour MPs. Letters have circulated attacking proposed welfare reforms, and some junior ministers have threatened to resign in protest. But Number 10 is not contemplating a reversal because of internal pressure. Labour’s substantial parliamentary majority dilutes the risk of defeat, and Starmer’s war on the Labour Left since 2020 has secured his internal position. The calculation is electoral. The decision may simply have been too harsh for the public to bear.

Dissenting MPs would be better off donning a wig and fake glasses and joining one of Morgan McSweeney’s focus groups to express their displeasure. That’s where the real feedback is taken. Number 10 is still trying to read the public mood, weighing its instincts for discipline and restraint against the emotional cost of cuts. The public rejected the Conservatives for economic chaos. But winter fuel cuts may have crossed a line. Labour is now searching for the fiscal space to reverse them.

Cuts to winter fuel payments — and the retention of the two-child benefit cap — always jarred with Labour’s instincts. The focus on hard choices has often felt less like strategy than theatre: sacred cows slaughtered to prove Labour’s seriousness, with little clarity about the destination or benefit for the poor and vulnerable whom the party is meant to support. If a U-turn comes, it will be less a moral reckoning than another sign of a party nervously calibrating how to hold together the coalition that gave it victory last year. It may work. But a government without motivation is a government without direction.

Historically, Labour always positioned itself as a movement of national improvement, propelled less by fixed doctrine than by competing ideas of motion and destination. For all their differences, the party under New Labour, Miliband, and Corbynism shared a belief in progress. Each saw politics as a means of ascent. Starmer’s government is different. Wary of the associations with Corbynism and of suffering the same fate as the Conservatives, it reiterates its responsibility at the expense of all else. There are no uplands in sight, no central promise of hope to convince the sceptical. It sees crisis not as fuel for change, but as a blaze to be contained.

Before the general election, the party abandoned its commitment to economic and environmental reform for this very reason. Nearly a year in, it is still looking for a workable arrangement with public opinion. If Labour changes its political strategy for electoral ends, however, it will have taken back control only to keep Britain standing still.

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Angus Reilly is Assistant Editor at Engelsberg Ideas. He is writing a book about Henry Kissinger in the Second World War and a biography of David Owen.

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