Do you miss us yet?
That might be a little presumptuous, a month after our party went down to its worst defeat in 300-odd years. But in the 32 days in which Keir Starmer has occupied Number 10, Labour have proved even more abysmal than I expected. My hopes of a Tory victory in 2029 have risen precipitously.
A tad over-optimistic? We do not yet know who our next leader will be. We still have three months of blame-shifting and name-calling to go. We remain hated and will be for a very long time. Starmer (well, Sue Gray) has that 170-seat (ish) majority to play with. Labour have five years to ban, build, and bully. If they so wished, they have a perfect opportunity to finish us off for good.
But come on. After one month under socialism, can anyone, except the most delusional Rest is Politics groupie, say that this government looks impressive? One doesn’t have to think the dying days of the Rishi Sunak Führerbunker were edifying to think life under Starmer is already worse. We left the country in a far-from-perfect state. But what sign is there that Labour will improve it?
Where to start? The early releasing of prisoners, endangering the public? The unexpected tearing up of decades of cross-party consensus on education, appeasing the unions but reversing the gains of the last fourteen years? Or the invention of a £22 billion black hole, to justify tax hikes they were too sacred to mention to voters, and to bung a big pay rise to their public sector pals?
In each case, Labour either didn’t express their plans beforehand or blamed Tory duplicity (whatever their foreknowledge) to justify what they always wanted to do. Rachel Reeves was always going to raise taxes. Wes Streeting was always going to buy off the junior doctors. Bridget Phillipson was always going to tear up the national curriculum and impose a new one on free schools and academies.
So what? Politicians aren’t honest. You could have learnt that in any saloon bar for the past two hundred years. But Labour’s two-faced approach to governing seems all the more despicable since they have made such an earnest and po-faced effort to pledge they were going to be different from those nasty Tories.
Isn’t this Starmer’s “government of service”? Of “country first, party second”? That “treads more lightly on our lives”? What a joke. Even in those areas where Labour could do some good, they have already shown themselves hamstrung by a lack of ambition and imagination, and constrained by party interests.
Our Deputy Editor already highlighted the paucity of Labour’s housebuilding and planning reform intentions in the King’s Speech, especially when they are the central tool the Government has given itself to increase growth, and when taking radical action now is their only hope for it to pay off by the next election.
As Robert Colvile and Joseph Dinnage have covered, reforming the National Planning Policy Framework to raise the housing target to 370,000 a year, making it easier to build prisons and energy infrastructure, and the second coming of Nick Boles are all overdue. But how seriously Yimby is a government that cuts targets in its Housing Minister’s constituency, but triples them for Sunak’s?
Cutting targets for London so that Sadiq Khan doesn’t have to miss them by quite as much whilst upping them in depopulated and more affordable rural or post-industrial areas is a sign that Labour is as vulnerable to backbench moaning about building as we were. These new targets cannot be hit.
Whilst this is depressing news for us twenty-somethings watching our hopes of indulging in the property part of our property-owning democracy further recede, underwhelming on housing is only one of many disappointments Labour will conspire to deliver over the next five years.
As Neil O’Brien, Robert Jenrick, James Frayne, and quite a few others have argued, explaining our defeat is quite simple. Behind the scandals, leadership telenovela, and unfortunate tendency to punch ourselves in the face, we failed on three big fundamentals: NHS waiting lists, immigration, and living standards.
For a government elected on a promise of CHANGE, dealing with these as efficiently and publically as possible is essential to showing voters they mean what they said. Unfortunately for Labour, the initial signs are that they will flop just as spectacularly as we did.
Having paid the Danegeld to the BMA, Streeting already more potential strike action across the next year. Whatever Alan Milburn is paid to advise him, New Labour got waiting lists falling by hiking health spending by 7.1 per cent a year from 1997-98 and 2005-06. Streeting does not have anywhere near the cash to match that, especially in the face of intransigent demographic headwinds.
Yvette Cooper has paused the threshold salary increase for family visas and scrapped the Rwanda scheme – two of the last government’s inadequate but necessary attempts to drive legal and illegal immigration down. Aside from shuffling around a few Home Office desks and being nicer to the French, Labour have no strategy for cutting numbers. The Treasury migrant printer goes brr.
While Rachel Reeves has been blessed with on-target inflation, she has so far shown that her fealty to growth only goes so deep. Alongside looming taxes on investment and savings, she has cut spending on road, rail, and AI projects – all rather essential to our economy’s future development. But don’t worry! She still can find billions for Ed Miliband’s eco-boondoggles. A nation sighs.
Labour’s problem is that their instincts in each area are fundamentally off. Asking for productivity pledges before signing off on pay hikes would be rude, since the unions were obviously victims of Tory intransigence. Pledging to control immigration might woo the punters, but isn’t a bit, well, racist? Green Keynesianism must deliver 2.5 per cent growth. It worked for Joe Biden, right?
But not for Boris Johnson. Too many in Labour, explicitly or implicitly, shared the assumption that they would do a better job than us simply because they weren’t the Tories. Get those bitter, self-obsessed, and bigoted toffs and crooks out, and all will be well. The grown-ups are back. Doesn’t it feel so much quieter? The last few days have shown that to be palpable nonsense.
Our cities are on fire amid a breakdown in law and order. Labour are already scunnered by the same intractable tides that undermined us, even if the progressive mind often lacks the instinctive pessimism to accept that is the case. Indeed, their unwillingness to lose hope is quite admirable. So Starmer furrows his brow, looks grave, and addresses the nation.
Since Labour’s election, a litany of violent attacks and disturbances have combined to give the perception that the Government is losing control of the streets. Starmer is right to ensure that we can get “arrests, charge, remand, and custody and convictions done quickly”. Courts sitting through the night is a start. But will it restore order, and stop the appalling violence from continuing to spiral?
The Prime Minister and police should have the support of every Tory in clamping down on threats towards innocent men, women, and children, and the mindless desecration of property. But his authority already seems to be ebbing away. That heckling at the Southport wreath-laying was a bad omen.
If Starmer fails to get on top of the mayhem quickly, it won’t matter whether he goes on holiday. After a month in office, his government has had a very public collapse in its authority. It’s not the Winter of Discontent. But voters won’t trust him to keep them safe. What happens when the next month brings more stabbings, riots, and protests? And then the next? And the one after that?
A landslide that looked hollow on paper already looks hollow in practice. No wonder his top team is already falling out. Gray hopes to ensure Morgan McSweeney is gone within two years. That might be to Labour’s benefit. His reputation as a miracle worker is undeserved, having ensured Starmer tread water for four years whilst we did him the favour of imploding. He should bail out.
After all, who wants to be blamed for the Anglo Olaf Scholz? Starmer and Reeves’s approval ratings are already in freefall, with the latter falling 23 points in two weeks. Any honeymoon is already over. They came into government unpopular and are becoming more unpopular by the day. If Starmer is heckled while laying a wreath after three weeks, how bad will it be in three years?
It may all be teething trouble. Once ministers have their feet under their desks, they may exercise greater control. That majority can still be deployed, the shit list wiped up, and Britain rebuilt in Starmer’s image. Plenty of governments that started badly have been re-elected. But the immediate signs are hardly promising, which is a welcome opportunity for a party otherwise enfeebled.
Just as Germany’s CDU recovered quickly under a leader offering a break from the Uniparty consensus, the Tories can benefit from Labour’s strife and eat Reform’s lunch if we can repent, reunite, and offer a realistic assessment of our country’s myriad ills. If Starmer seems beleaguered now, imagine the meltdown when he finds himself behind in the polls by this time next year.
Sound fanciful? Ed Milliband managed it by the end of 2010. Labour’s lead is so shallow that any Tory leader who could peel off angry voters to their left and right could overhaul it quite quickly. But that relies on voters being willing to trust us. Our task for the next two years is ensuring we are the receptacle for Starmer’s unpopularity, not Reform, or some hitherto unknown challenger.
That is an uphill struggle, to say the least. We were the party that failed to build prisons, recruit enough police officers, and allowed immigration to get out of control. Britain’s state today is much more our fault than Labour’s. But the opening signs are that things really can only get worse. Having my pessimism vindicated feels pretty awful. Just how grim will our inheritance be in 2029?