Starmer must offer a government of centre left realism
Everything about Labour's language speaks to understanding the dire state the country will be in after the Tories. But as we approach a change election, that change has to be tangible.
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Labour is not making you any promises.
That’s not strictly true. Labour has committed to some pretty good policies on investment in making the UK green energy self-sufficient. The promise of spending £28bn a year for ten years to do so could transform more than just our energy system but have huge effects down the line on household bills, on workforce and jobs and even on how we farm and our food chain.
But this is the policy area that is reached for because when it comes to offering the big and the bold, this is currently what Labour has.
The rest of the time, Labour are developing policy and talking about their goals which are ambitious. Halving crime is definitely going to be tough. The fastest growth in the G7 is hardly an unambitious target.
Labour have a really good story to tell on why change is needed. It is not one the public need much persuasion on. Nothing works at the moment. Everyone has a story of where life has got harder and more expensive. Everyone knows someone who has been let down by the state and they rightly blame the Tory government.
Labour are starting to set out a vision too of what they want to change. The five missions point to a transformed Britain. If they are achieved, the country will look very different than it does now.
What we don’t get so much of is a ‘how’ that matches the scale of that ambition. With everything needed to be costed in advance within incredibly restrictive fiscal rules, it makes that understanding hard. This is what is driving parts of the commentariat nuts. They keep saying that Labour has no plans. They aren’t quite right, but there does seem to be a gulf between what Labour is saying it wants to achieve and what it is saying about how it will deliver that.
The current leadership is terrified of the scenario of 1992 repeating itself. And you can see why. An election where Labour went into it vastly ahead in the polls, where the Tories were considered tired, but had just got rid of an unpopular leader replaced with a boring technocrat who just didn’t excite the same levels of loathing or blame for the state of the nation. Of course that same technocrat went on to lose the following election after Black Wednesday crashed the UK economy and the Tory reputation never, ever recovered - even as the economy did.
I get a little tired of the ‘is this 1992 or 1997’ debate. The 2024 (we assume) election is going to be unique as all elections are. But if we are to look at that argument, I would say that the Liz Truss interregnum was the Black Wednesday of our time. So for all that Sunak may be the new John Major, he’s the one who already has that crisis setting the terms for him.
The landscape isn’t just a result of the disaster of Truss’s crashing the economy. Let’s face it, she just sped up what the Tories have been doing for years. We have had a decade of stagnant growth for our wider economy and wage growth for most of us. Meanwhile austerity (which was, you will recall, supposed to be the balm for the economy after the shock of the 2008 global financial crisis) has degraded public services to the point where for most of us they simply do not work.
Hospitals and schools are in permanent crisis. Local government cannot deliver the services they are legally mandated to, never mind the kinds of services that local elections should be a fight over. Trains don’t run - but still cost a fortune. There is literal shit on the beaches and in our rivers.
All these things will have to be sorted out by an incoming Labour government. All these things need investment as well as political intervention.
And that is where Labour are struggling to get a hearing. Becuase for a cautious Labour opposition, promising to invest is anathema to how to campaign. It’s what gets us beat is the belief.
It’s true that the Oprah-style (“you get a spending pledge! You get a spending pledge”) of the 2019 manifesto (and the additions that came afterwards) was incredibly bad politics. I wasn’t against any of the individual pledges at all. The Waspi Women have been absolutely shafted and I agree with reversing that. Free broadband for all is a very good aim for a country that wants to ensure growth - and turned out to be exceptionally prescient when lockdowns arrived a few months later.
The problem was that it was delivered with a weird combination of desperation to reignite the flame that burned during the 2017 election and casual proffligancy that did nothing to address Labour’s electoral weaknesses of not knowing how to stop spending. It had the expected result. We were beaten. By Boris Johnson.
So I understand the need for Labour to put front and centre a sense that they will properly manage the public finances.
But there are ways of doing that that need to be better understood by Labour.
I had a great boss once who told me when I was working to capacity that if he ever asked me to do something else my first question should be “what is it I should not be doing to do this instead?” It feels to me like Labour are going to have to ask themselves the same question.
If the mission on the economy works, Labour may well have better fiscal headroom to do more. But that is not going to happen overnight. It will take a lot of time and a lot of changes to our economy that are going to be hard and are quite boring to discuss (and thank god we actually have people in charge who might not be interesting on Newsnight, but know how to actually think about this stuff). It won’t be this tinkering that leads election leaflets (I am willing to bet all the money in my pocket that we’ll lead on the NHS because we ALWAYS lead on the NHS).
In the meantime, Labour has to prioritse what it can offer on the ‘how’ of the rest. Becuase, while we absolutely should not be in thrall to the commentariat, they do have a point when they make complaints about the thinness of Labour’s current offer.
One reason cited not to do this - especially this far out from an election - is that the incumbent government can come in and steal all your best policies. This is definitely a risk.
But let’s consider childcare for a moment. Bridget Phillipson has done a fantastic job making this front and centre of Labour’s conversation - but without a completely fleshed out offer. None of which stopped Sunak and Hunt from making childcare a huge part of their offer at the Budget. Their plans may well not be as good, as workable or as comprehensive as Labour’s. But there is now a Tory offer on childcare being delivered from Government. I have my own reasons to think it will backfire on them (for another day), but as politics is painted in primary colours, the stealing of this policy area has happened despite Labour not releasing detailed plans.
So I would worry less about Labour being more detailed about how they plan to achieve their ambitions. Not least because if you set a Labour plan against a Tory plan the question then becomes who the public trust to deliver it. And Labour lead on this by quite some margin.
If Labour can get out of the way now a conversation about what they won’t prioritise in initial spending rounds, they can then then focus on promoting and flexing out what they are going to do first.
This will need managing with internal and external stakeholders. There will be losers. Some of them will sit alongside Kier and Rachel in the shadow cabinet. They will need managing and to feel like their lesser funded work is still going to make a vital contribution to Labour’s future. But if they know that they aren’t where the money is going to be, they can, at least, spend their time being imaginative inside of their brief about how to do things that don’t cost much but might change things.
There will also be noisy losers in the campaigning world. These are not the enemy even if it can absolutely feel like it when they are screaming at you. They too will need to be brought into a grown up conversation about what can be done in their areas as Labour focuses money and energy elsewhere. They could work with those shadow ministers to develop some of that non-costly policy. There are few people better at being imaginative on a budget than a charity campaigner - trust me!
Labour have tried to start 2023 by answering the question of ‘what will you do’ with the five missions. But until they give us a little more of the ‘how’, I don’t think they will get a fair hearing on this what. This is the year to do so.
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What I’ve been up to
There have been two episode of House of Comments over the last fortnight (one where I was really quite unwell which is why this newsletter had an unexpected break). In the first we discussed Johnson’s appearance at the select committee and the Casey report on the Metropolitan Police. In the second we discuss Trump’s indictment and the fallout of the SNP’s leadership contest.
I was on Sky News which I don’t have a clip of which is sad as my darling cat Smudge decided to make a cameo appearance. Oops! Hope they’ll ask me (and not her!) back.
I reviewed Cyanide at the Speakeasy - an immersive murder mystery which I greatly enjoyed.
Questions, comments and arguments are very welcome. Insults will get you summarily blocked on every platform that I can think of and a few I can’t. Hit reply or respond on Twitter at @EmmaBurnell_
The Tories are very adept at presenting half baked policies as more than they are. Take Johnson on social care, for instance, or the freeports stuff. They're good at selling crap products with boosterish claims (amplified by a supine tabloid media) about their 'turbocharging growth' or 'unleashing Brexit benefits' etc.
Labour, on the other hand, has a timidity and defensiveness in general about selling its policy offers in punchy confident terms (partly because the default media line is always 'ok but how will you pay for it?', which is always tough for oppositions - usually Labour - to answer).
This lack of confidence is partly a result of fear of media reactions, but also memories of painful losses like '92. (Public school imbues a certain type of bullish self confidence in people too, which I think partly explains the Tory approach). But being so far ahead now in the polls gives Starmer latitude to be bolder by which I mean clearer about the 'how'. I suspect he thinks the opposite is true - that he needs to be cautious to protect a big poll lead - but if true, I think he'd be wrong on that score. There is a risk of a 2010 in reverse (as many others have argued) at the next election if more flesh is not put on the bones of those five pledges. I speak from a sympathetic position and I'm sure many other voters are similarly minded in wanting not revolution but a pragmatic but specific offering from Labour. The Corbynite wing will of course always attack him with demands for 'radical agendas', which usually just means more spending commitments and nationalisation, as far as I can tell. But what he could learn from the Corbynites is the way they certainly enthusiastically promoted their 2017/19 offerings (even though in 2019 in particular overall these were mostly judged not credible by voters).
Agree absolutely with all this, and how do we pay for it? - read Stephanie Kelton, Steve Keen, Mariana Mazzucato, and many others - there is an alternative economics and surely after recurrent financial crashes, stagnant growth and a real terms fall in earnings for most of us, for at least the last 13 years, surely, surely voters are ready to give the alternative ideas a chance?
Magic Money Tree? Mainly since 2010, QE created £900bn from thin air, bought back Government debt with it, giving it to the richest hoping it would trickle down. (See BoE on QE, they say it worked - it clearly didn't). As a consequence the BoE owns nearly a third of UK Gov total debt, and the Govt. owns the BoE - and the Cons criticise a 'Magic Money Tree'!! It's what they have been doing and they would criticise Labour for doing the same thing - but injecting it into the roots of the economy where it would be sucked up.
Modest inflation doesn't hurt the low paid if their wages keep up. Inflation destroys debt.
Raising interest rates increases business costs and causes inflation, it artificially bolsters the pound and makes imports cheaper but destroys exports and UK jobs, It reduces growth and causes unemployment - reducing inflation by forcing down the wages of people who have no alternative - it's brutal and negative. There is a different way.
I could go on - but I'm about to start an online band practice - end of rant!