It makes sense for any politician trying to sell painful policies to frame it as the difficult road to a better tomorrow, not least because it is definitely best if that’s true. But you need to at least have a clear idea of where that difficult road is, and where it’s going – and yesterday, Sir Keir Starmer showed little sign of that.
Yes, he talked a lot about the need for hard decisions. But this was mostly in abstract terms. Apart from the cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance, made concrete by having actually been announced, detailed tough decisions were few and far between. Welcome as it is to have a government acknowledge that new power lines must be above ground if we are to afford them, Britain’s wounds will not be bound by overhead cables alone.
Nor should the WFA cuts really count, anyway. In and of itself, that policy doesn’t do anything like open up a path to a better tomorrow; it’s just the first of what will become a litany of smaller cuts needed to stabilise the public finances in the short-to-medium term and create a bit of space for feel-good spending pledges such as Rachel Reeves’ new school breakfast clubs.
It won’t do anything about the trap I described a couple of weeks ago: the gulf between rising public expectations of the state, a stagnant economy and shrinking (in relative terms) working-age population, and the utterly unsustainable forward projections of the major revenue budgets.
Starmer didn’t seek a mandate for the sort of radical medicine which might break that doom spiral, and there’s not much sign that Labour really understands the need for it. Even on housing, the one area the Government could really pull out all the stops, it has announced only a few worthwhile but tinkering interventions, balanced by some absurd decisions.
As we said before the election: Reeves was talking 1979, but walking 1972.
I suspect it’s this, more than the specifics of things like the cronyism row, which explain Labour’s increasingly and remarkably rancid ratings. Boris Johnson is living proof that voters will forgive politicians they like all manner of venial sins. But they have to like you.
How unfair it must seem. This isn’t how having the grown-ups back in charge was supposed to go. Remember Liz Truss? Labour was supposed to be able to dine out on the Mini-Budget at least as long as the Coalition got away with blaming Labour for everything after 2010.
But there are two critical differences between now and then. The first is that whatever you think of the policy, David Cameron got a mandate for austerity. He and George Osborne sent years selling their narrative about Labour before the election and prepared the electorate for what was coming. Starmer’s claiming it’s all a big surprise is, deservedly, much less compelling.
Second, in 2010 the good times weren’t long in the past. It made sense to people that there might be some pain; busts follow booms. But the clock that stopped in 2008 never really started again. We’ve had 16 years of near-stagnation on the key prosperity metrics (productivity, real wages, per-capita GDP). The public isn’t primed for another round of bad times; we’re still on the last one.
Labour will say that’s all the Conservatives’ fault. But the public aren’t really buying it; one recent poll suggested a majority of voters think that excuse will have run its course in… a year.
Nor, despite the many mistakes the Tories made in government, is the charge that the current malaise is all down to wilfully-chosen austerity really plausible. The idea that public spending could simply have continued to rise on an unaltered trajectory from 2008 to now is risible, especially coming from anyone who talks in pious tones about Truss’ recklessness.
Take the NHS. Real-terms cash spending on it increased (Reeves’ definition of ‘not austerity’, remember) by somewhere in the region of 25 per cent between 2010/11 and 2023/4. If it had stuck to New Labour’s rate of increase (which as Chris Snowdon points out was “one-off splurge to achieve a specific spending target” which was “was not sustainable and was never intended to be sustained”) it would have doubled by 2020 and then continued even higher.
What does that look like? Well, merely doubling the budget would create in 2023/4 (a year with residual higher spending due to Covid) a fiscal black hole of roughly £60 billion. Labour dares not raise any of the important revenue taxes even now, so have fun filling that.
Little wonder, then, that even a majority of Labour voters are pessimistic about Britain’s immediate future. The interesting question now is what happens when the Government’s thinking catches up; when the next election starts to loom in ministers’ minds and they realise that the programme in the King’s Speech really isn’t going to cut it.
Do Starmer and Reeves try to pivot to more drastic measures, to which their MPs did not pledge themselves in any manifesto? Or do they go the full Ted Heath, u-turning on the pain and hoping that pretending everything’s fine might work for them? It will be a fun five years finding out.
All of which should be a stark warning to any Tory leadership hopeful who thinks the Party can simply mouth the easy platitudes in Opposition and wait for the Government will sink itself. Because if we do, and the electorate is somehow moved to reward that at an election, this exact same process will happen to us, and even faster.