“He was in the trap and screaming from the moment he took office.” Such was Francis Urquhart’s description of the hapless Henry Collingridge in the original House of Cards. It might not (yet) be a perfectly apt description of Sir Keir Starmer, but there is a similar sense that the walls might already have started closing in around his government.
A bit rich from a Conservative, perhaps. But if anyone should know what the trap looks like, it’s the Tories. Over the past 14 years its jaws closed tight around them; it has not loosened simply because the electorate has placed a different victim between them.
What is the trap? It could probably justify an essay, but the short version that it is simply the vast and ever-widening gulf between the public’s expectations of the State and its actual means.
There is huge public appetite for extra spending, but not for paying extra taxes. Government debt is now so large that neither party can risk spooking the markets by even hinting at simply financing revenue expenditure through borrowing, as Liz Truss discovered.
If that were it, it would be bad enough. But the public finances are not in some happy equilibrium. Instead, as Karl Williams set out on this site in February, the main revenue budgets – pensions, social care, and the NHS – are trending upwards into frightening territory, fuelled by an ageing population and collapsing birthrate.
As a result, they are eating British politics from the inside out. With no room to raise major revenue taxes or cut major expenditure budgets, the scope of actual disagreement between the two parties (in terms of how they actually govern) is narrowing at the national level; at the local, councils are increasingly just a mechanism for keeping social care and SEND off Whitehall’s books.
The Overton Window is now something closer to an Overton Tightrope, admitting movement in only one direction and where successful government boils down to “the art of teetering on the brink without going over it” and finding some means – any means – of keeping the machine ticking over and making its slow disintegration tomorrow’s problem.
We have already seen how these pressures gradually reduced the Conservative Party’s notional politics to a series of increasingly implausible fictions. Time and again, the Party was elected on promises to reduce immigration – yet net inflow tripled during its time in office. By the end it couldn’t even manage to ask the Migration Advisory Committee about the graduate visa (which the MAC does not like) without finding a form of words that produced an answer in favour of the status quo.
Yet even that was arguably less abject than the situation on tax. By the time of the election, being a ‘tax-cutting Conservative’ meant imposing vast stealth taxes and then dressing up trifling allowances and exemptions (primarily, of course, for old people) as meaningful cuts. We were going to abolish National Insurance! In, like, 20 years, “when it’s affordable to do so”. Maybe.
Meanwhile those prime ministers with any time to think about a legacy (Theresa May and Rishi Sunak) each resorted to setting a distant deadline and leaving the hard work to other people.
Several of the leadership candidates have accepted, tacitly or explicitly, that the Party “talked right, but governed left”. But none has yet faced up to why, at least in public. It’s no mystery: having squandered the window after 2010 when major reform might have been possible, the lethal combination of mounting budget pressures, limited voter appetite for spending restraint, and a stagnant economy reduced government to the year-to-year administration of easy palliatives: tax increases and immigration.
None of those conditions are altered the slightest bit by a change of government. The snare was drawn as tight when Starmer entered Downing Street as when Sunak left it, and now it’s Labour’s turn to thrash in it.
All of Rachel Reeves’ promised “difficult decisions” will be blamed on the Conservatives. Some of that will stick, for a while, especially in cases where it’s basically true, such as prisons – although even that window will close. But bleating about “Tory cuts” to the NHS (when DHSC spending rose in real terms by around 25 per cent between 2010 and 2023) only risks raising expectations there is not the cash to meet.
Starmer also made a rod for his own back by running on a manifesto with, substantively speaking, nothing in it, and Labour hacks who expect to dine out on blame as long as did David Cameron forget that he both spent several years selling that pitch to the electorate in opposition and actually secured a mandate for austerity, albeit a begrudging one.
There are ways out, in theory. The Chancellor is right that restoring meaningful growth would be the easiest (in terms of politicians’ lives if not actually delivering it). But breaking out of decades-long stagnation on the indicators that matter – productivity, real wages, and per-capita GDP growth – would take very strong medicine and force either party out of its comfort zone. Starmer’s moment of maximum strength for making such an effort was the King’s Speech, and he ducked it.
Perhaps the Government will pursue radical reform in other areas. This morning’s pledge to deliver “the biggest reimagining of our NHS since its birth” certainly sounds promising. But the auguries aren’t promising. Just look at housing: bold talk of concreting over the Green Belt and building New Towns added up to a quango, a new designation that will take years to implement, and a fatal insistence that a huge share of any housing unlocked by either policy must be simultaneously built by the private sector and sold below market value.
Is it really likely that Labour MPs, sitting in the most marginal Commons since 1945 (in terms of seat majorities) and being fed a steady diet of “difficult decisions” (keeping the two-child welfare cap, means-testing the Winter Fuel Payment, whatever horrors await in the Budget), are going to have the stomach for any genuinely radical overhaul of the NHS? That wasn’t mentioned in the manifesto?
Perhaps. If not, and Reeves is not prepared to break her promise not to increase income tax, national insurance, or VAT, Labour’s politics will get eaten by the Treasury’s attention-deficit fiscal horizons as surely as were the Tories’.
Even now, fresh off the election, the ideologically-distinctive stuff is (superficially) inexpensive set dressing. It costs nothing to lower school standards (in cash terms, at least). Nor to let the rail franchises lapse (until you need to make up the private investment the franchisees were bringing in, but that’s Tomorrow Labour’s problem). Nobody likes non-doms (although they’re globally mobile and pay a lot of tax).
If that trend continues, we can expect it to play out a lot more quickly than it did for the Conservatives (as it visibly already is) as the arc of the doom-spiral tightens and the political space for more spending or relentlessly increasing immigration diminishes. There is also the risk that one or more cans simply runs out of road down which to be kicked, most obviously as and when local authorities or universities start going bankrupt.
One must almost feel sorry for anyone having to deal with this, especially in a political environment where pollsters and commentators talk about the Government’s lack of optimism like its a tactical mistake, as if it simply hadn’t occurred to ministers that voters might prefer good times to bad times. But this bed of nails has been decades in the making, and anyone who climbs on without a plan to redesign it has nobody to blame but themselves.
And if ever the Government truly tires of life, it can always start putting the prisoners it lets out at the front of the housing queue.