“So I hope when Keir Starmer comes to Liverpool he is actually going to accept he should not go down the route of Tony Blair and lose the opportunity to do radical change in this country.”
Thus spake Mark Serwotka, the leader of the civil servants’ union (PCS), quoted yesterday in a Sun report on the latest clashes between the Labour leader and the trades union leadership. It also quotes Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, warning that the party risks being seen as a “Nineties tribute act”.
It’s a remarkable charge, not just because of the unwillingness to credit New Labour with delivering “radical change” but because Labour would surely count itself extraordinarily lucky to get governing conditions even approximating those of the 1990s.
By that I don’t just mean the three-figure majority, although that would be nice for it. I mean the economics. Tony Blair sailed into Downing Street on an extremely favourable following wind, with Gordon Brown inhering from Ken Clarke a strong and growing economy. Yes, both originally committed to following the Conservatives’ spending plans. But in the course of New Labour’s three terms, they soon enough got around to spending an awful lot of money.
Should they take office next year, Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves will have no such luck. Barring the sort of annus mirabilis which would likely make talk of a Labour government moot, the Britain of 2024 will be the same as now: growth sluggish, taxes high, and the state starting to buckle under the weight of health, welfare, and social care commitments.
Sir Keir and his top team clearly grasp the implications of this, which is why the collapse in the Conservatives’ poll ratings over the last couple of years has been accompanied by a series of Labour rows as the party pivots from the easy politics of Opposition to trying to assume a realistic prospect for government.
Thus, the leader drawing the ire of the unions by rowing back on bold (and expensive) promises on tuition fees and nationalisation; thus, the Shadow Chancellor spiking Ed Miliband’s £28bn ‘green prosperity plan’ and setting her face against a wealth tax, ruling out any increase to property taxation or capital gains tax.
It all adds up to very little room for manoeuvre. There is only so much money that can be squeezed out of easy targets via windfall taxes or revoking private schools’ charitable status (and the latter, as Jamila Robertson wrote for us this morning, might be counter-productive). There are also tens of billions of pounds worth of cuts currently slated for 2025/6, which could put Labour in the unenviable position of having to either see them through or raise taxes, not to support any new programmes but just to maintain the status quo.
Starmer thus seems in danger of finding himself, once the flush of victory has worn off, in a similar position to Rishi Sunak: the more conservative he is in drawing up his manifesto, the less his MPs will feel bound to his programme, especially if he and Reeves have to start making painful course corrections.
Absent a surge in spending, the Labour leader will need to find other bones to throw to his mutinous party. Grand constitutional tinkering, per Brown, is one obvious danger; ratcheting up regulation, as with Bridget Phillipson’s bid to turn childcare into a graduate profession, another; rolling back strike legislation, as demanded by the above-mentioned union barons, yet another. There are surely more.
None of that will fix what ails Britain. Some of it will make things considerably worse (the main effect of Phillipson’s proposals would be pushing up the already ruinous cost of childcare yet further).
But then, neither party seems to have even a coherent diagnosis of what ails Britain – at least, one that they dare speak aloud. There are few easy answers to the root problems – our ageing population, low productivity, and refusal to build homes and infrastructure – and no popular ones.
Until the conditions arise which allow one or more aspects of that consensus to be decisively broken (and coincide with a government with the will and imagination to seize that opportunity), both parties will be left tinkering at the margins and hoping things get better. For this Government, that means more Tory Stakhanovism. We can but guess what form Labour’s displacement activity will take.