Small change? The generous and ungenerous interpretations of Labour's policy stance

Labour are making their offer to voters smaller and trying to reduce so-called spending traps. There are two ways of looking at this offer

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There are two different interpretations available of Labour’s fiscally conservative pre-election stance. The truth may well lie somewhere between them, and yours may also depend on where you sit in terms of your generosity - or animosity - to the Starmer project. I thought today it would be interesting to unpack these to see what each might mean for how Labour would govern and what it could achieve.

The ungenerous case

Labour is, despite leading in the polls by extraordinary margins, running scared of the Conservative press and their endless ‘tax and spend’ questions in the run-up to the election. As a result, the actual Labour offering is simply to better manage our declining economy, crumbling public services and levels of inequality that are vastly worsened by 13 years of pernicious welfare policies and the rolling back of workers’ rights by the Tories.

They are talking big on productivity and green growth, but are - meanwhile - rolling back from or going silent on many of the specifics of how to achieve this including investment in reaching Net Zero, devolution and regional rebalancing, investment in the NHS and a plan for social care.

Then there has been more specific and potentially disturbing messaging around some of the most pernicious aspects of Tory welfare reform with Starmer saying that Labour would no longer end the two child policy or the Bedroom Tax.

This leaves Labour with a vastly reduced policy offer. In reality, for all the talk of ‘reform’ what they are really offering is much the same as we have now, but with more competent management and slightly less cruel and ‘culture wars’ based language and signalling. The direction of travel might be stalled, but it would not be reversed, and the damage of a decade of austerity would not be turned around.

The result would be that Labour would implement a few flagship policies but might do so in a considerably weaker fashion than previously envisaged.

The urgency of reaching New Zero - for both existential climate-related reasons and the desire to be world leaders (and exporters) of cutting-edge technology - would be lost in caution, meaning slower progress environmentally and economically.

The need to empower communities to build, raise funding and make their own decisions would be stymied by an over-controlling Treasury that simply refuses either to devolve its power or to change its short-termist outlook.

The Tories have clearly decided that “Labour will concrete over the green belt” is a useful, ULEZ-style attack to deploy. Meanwhile, the housing crisis is getting worse by the day. Labour needs a huge offer on housing, but post-Uxbridge may well be far too spooked by the success of a few cut-through Tory attack lines to make one and will refuse to impose proper targets and ensure that all localities are able to build and offer a wide range of housing options.

There would and will be changes under any Labour government. Going too slowly in the right direction would be better than a Tory government going the wrong way.

But if we have learned anything from the last decade, it should be that unless change is fundamental and embedded it is all too easy to strip away. Look at what has happened to what were once key programmes such as Sure Start to see where New Labour incrementalism failed to achieve real - rather than superficial - changes. Ones that seemed ready to make a difference, but were too easy to scrap and therefore too ephemeral to ever do so.

The generous case

Labour can’t go into every election simply promising to spend their way out of the hole the Tories have dug. it makes us a party of reaction rather than a party capable of shaping the future. The answer is not simply to focus on overturning the Tories cruellest policies but to change the underlying causes that make these policies an available source of cuts for small state Tories.

What does this mean in practice and how does this fit with the rhetoric of Starmer and his shadow cabinet?

Well it means reform. But it doesn’t mean it in the simplistic terms that many newspaper headlines (and many Blairites) do. It’s not a ‘grown up’ approach to go hard on welfare. It’s deeply naive and - in fact - childlike to think the private sector has all the magical answers to productivity issues.

if we really want to have the best levels of productivity in the G7, we need to do better than simply to squeeze out all joy from the workplace to ensure that a churn of workers, paid as little as an employer can get away with, work until they burn out only to be replaced with another cohort of rightless workers.

Labour retains plans to get to £28bn of spending per year on transitioning our infrastructure to cope with the new green economy and the establishment of GB Energy as a state-owned way to do so. They are also committed to a suite of workers’ rights that would roll back some of the worst of the Tories excesses and make sure that people could be secure from day one in good, well-paying jobs.

These things are reform. They are looking at the systems as they exist and thinking about how to transform them. Neither are in the realm of the kind of things that usually get considered ‘reform’ because they are not about squeezing welfare recipients until the pips squeak or giving a lot of public sector money to the private sector to run efficiency programmes (that usually offer a short term sugar hit of savings while baking in far more long term problems due to capacity being reduced).

There are many ways that reform can and should happen. The Attlee government was a reforming government. The Thatcher government was a reforming government. That’s why - as a standalone concept - reform is pretty pointless.

The generous interpretation of Starmer’s reform agenda is not about spending to fix a broken system but truly getting under the hood to fix the machine itself. That could be quite exciting and make big changes to the way the UK economy is run - and who benefits from it. Because in a more self-sustaining Britain, with a more productive economy, we could see a government better able to enact a proper redistribution of the income that productivity brings. We could see a government that shapes that economy so it empowers workers of all kinds. We could see a government that invests in the things that make a nation healthy and saves money on less acute need.

If this case is lived up to, the next Labour government could embed changes in ways that the last were simply too unwilling or unable to, but that could last for generations. They could make the kinds of changes that have been long talked about for the British economy and the people it should serve.

Which is right?

I don’t know which of these interpretations is right. I have previously been a leaner towards the more generous of the two.

This is partly, I think, because it’s what I believe needs to happen. It’s partly because it gels with my annoyance at some of the short-termism and simplistic anti-Toryism of some of my fellow Labour members. And in all honestly, it’s at least in part because I voted for Keir Starmer for leader, and - as such - have a certain amount vested in being generous in my interpretation.

However, I don’t think these two options are either/or. I think the truth of the matter will lie somewhere between the two. How far to one side or another - well the proof of that will be in the delivery.

But there does need to be some more thought put into how to communicate to an increasingly ungenerous Labour membership that the latter is coming and will be the pathway to not just overturning Tory evils but embedding Labour good.

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I run a political and communications consultancy called Political Human. Please get in touch if you are looking for political or media consultancy advice, strategic communication and campaign planning, ghostwriting, copywriting, editing, training or coaching.

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What I’ve been up to

Three podcasts for your delectation this week. Firstly a post-byelections House of Comments. Then two episodes of Fabian Thinking, firstly on their Commission on Poverty and Regional Inequality and then on a Manifesto for the Self Employed.

Theatre-wise I reviewed two very different 4* shows. Dear England and 80s Live!

Most excitingly, I was delighted that this short film, by my lovely friend Chris Eyre, about my slightly odd career choices was released last week.

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