After last year’s tax-raising budget, UK chancellor Rachel Reeves assured the public that Labour had “wiped the slate clean” and would not be coming back for more. And yet this year, the chancellor froze tax thresholds and introduced several other tax-raising measures in a budget that was called “brutal” even before it was delivered.

This reversal helps to explain why Reeves is, according to one poll, the UK’s most unpopular chancellor on record. And she’s not alone. Depending on which polling you think is most credible, Keir Starmer comes out as either the most unpopular prime minister since records began in 1977, or merely on a par with Boris Johnson, just prior to his scandal-plagued resignation in 2023.

Clearly, the Labour government has got off to a bad start. But might the bad vibes be fleeting? Is there a way to fairly and objectively assess the performance of governments that cuts through the noise?

It’s difficult to identify objective criteria for judging a government. I have already alluded to one possible measure, in the form of public opinion polls. But many would argue that the best measure of a government is whether or not it does what’s “good”.

In this regard, the government’s defenders might point to decisions such as scrapping the two-child benefit cap at this budget or raising minimum wage. The problem with this approach is that it’s deeply subjective and depends on moral and ethical judgements which are impossible to prove.

A third approach, and one the electorate uses frequently, is economic stewardship: what is the government’s record on the economy and has it been able to generate general prosperity? A fourth is whether the incumbent party keeps its manifesto promises.

Given the UK’s dismal economic growth and this budget’s stealth income tax increase in the form of the threshold freeze, the Labour government arguably doesn’t do well on either of these criteria.

Read more: What will the budget mean for economic growth? Experts give their view

How to measure government success

Academic literature provides us with a range of potentially more objective and systematic measures. Within this, I argue the best all-round set of criteria comes via political scientist Jim Bulpitt’s highly-cited “statecraft” model. This approach has been used for decades to evaluate political leaders.

It emphasises that governments need three main things in order to succeed: first, a winning electoral strategy, founded on a policy package that unites the party and is appealing to at least a plurality of the electorate. Second is “political argument hegemony”. This means getting your story about what is wrong with the country, and how to fix it, accepted as the common sense of politics. And third, of paramount importance, is to be perceived as competent.

So how does the current government stack up?

Not being Liz Truss was an excellent election strategy in a country traumatised by spiralling mortgage and energy costs. But a viable strategy for governing it is not.

A common criticism of Starmer is that he lacks what we might call a “political vision” for the country – a conception of what the good society looks like and how to get there. When polled recently, just 24% of the public said that they “understand his vision for Britain”. What is Starmer’s big idea, comparable to Thatcher’s supply side revolution, Blair’s modernisation drive, or even Cameron’s “big society” agenda?

In lieu of such a big idea, he prefers to play up his managerial and technocratic credentials. This has led to criticism that he “governs by focus group”. This budget, with all the briefing and leaks that preceded it, actually resembled an extended national focus group designed to see which tax rises the country would wear.

Competence is key

It is on competence – according to Bulpitt, a matter of selecting the right policies and implementing them well – that the current government’s record really falls apart.

Time and again, Starmer has been stymied by his own MPs on key issues like welfare reform, and forced into a humiliating climbdown over cutting winter fuel payments.

The appearance of competence has not been helped by the mistaken release of migrant sex offender Hadush Kebatu from HMP Chelmsford, simultaneously making a mockery of the government’s plan to “smash the gangs” and sort out prisons.

Nor by any of the scandals that have damaged the government since it was revealed that Starmer and Reeves had accepted tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of clothes and hospitality from Labour donor Lord Alli. This, plus deputy PM Angela Rayner’s resignation after having underpaid stamp duty on her second home, were particularly damaging for a leader who consciously cultivated an image as “Mr. Rules”.

Worse still, Starmer and Reeves seem to have stumbled into a debt doom loop on the economy: public spending increases lead to a shrinking of the government’s fiscal headroom, which leads to an increase in the cost of borrowing (gilt yields have already exceeded the heights reached as a result of Truss’s mini-budget) and speculation about future tax rises.

This in turn inadvertently dampens consumer and business confidence and depresses economic growth, leading inexorably to a tax-raising budget like this one that the government hoped it would never have to do again.

Read more: Will the budget save Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer? Experts give their views

One final insight the academic literature gifts us is that context is everything. While Starmer and Reeves have arguably performed poorly against the criteria above, perhaps their biggest mistake is to have fundamentally misread the nature of the political moment they are in.

They are governing as if it were still 1997, doubling down on a Blairite style of politics that passed its sell by date around 2008. The current situation now is much closer to 1945 or 1979 – moments when an exhausted political settlement had plainly stopped working and there was an urgent need for a new politics. The tragedy of this government is that, barely a year in, they are already in survival mode.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Christopher Byrne, University of Nottingham

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Christopher Byrne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.