It is difficult to imagine circumstances where a party might throw away a poll lead as commanding as Labour’s currently is. But it has been done. Before the 2017 election, Theresa May opened up a lead of up to 25 points over Jeremy Corbyn – only to see it all but evaporate in the course of the general election campaign.
Whilst more than one misstep went into that disaster, the precipitating one was her decision to try and cash in her huge lead to do something worthwhile but difficult, namely asking asset-rich older people to contribute a (capped) share of the value of their home towards the cost of their own social care.
Both parties learned their lesson from the disastrous fallout of what Labour dubbed the ‘dementia tax’. The Conservatives went back to the drawing board and eventually alighted on a cartoonishly unjust alternative – a special extra levy on national insurance, the tax paid exclusively by working-age people – before eventually abandoning it.
Meanwhile the Opposition are taking no chances this time around. The Sun on Sunday reports that Labour is targeting the so-called grey wall. It quotes a senior shadow minister: “Pensioners will be fed up after that Budget. They are the only voter group we are behind with. But we are going to try to woo them.”
Note that this Budget left the triple lock in place, guaranteeing that pensions will continue to rise faster than wages. It also did nothing to try and address the looming crisis in social care. It simply focused this year’s measures on working-age voters.
Labour may see a political opportunity in that, as they did in attacking the ‘dementia tax’. But the result will be closing down their room for manoeuvre and perpetuating for at least another parliament this country’s economic doom loop, the future arc of which was recently detailed by the Centre for Policy Studies.
If you doubt it, consider the remarkable degree to which Jeremy Hunt and Rachel Reeves, despite the dramatic state of the polls and the tangibly fraying state of the economy, are fighting over a very narrow strip of political territory on economic policy. He steals Labour’s stance on non-doms; she commits to retaining most of the Government’s tax cuts.
Public services are creaking, and the tax burden is set to climb to its highest level since 1948. Something has to give. But neither party is prepared to admit it, because the public is not prepared to hear it. There has been no moment of acute crisis, such as the financial crash or the Winter of Discontent, to open up the political space for any radicalism.
Both Hunt and Reeves know that there are neither many easy cuts (although the Chancellor can nonetheless build his spending plans around making them on the other side of an election he expects to lose) or big new revenue streams – not without taxing housing wealth and/or building lots of new homes, both of which would play very badly in what we are now asked to call the “grey wall”.
They are thus forced to battle it out within a very narrow window of keeping things ticking over. Forget the Overton Window, this is the Overton Precipice – the art of teetering on the brink without going over it.