Given how much noise there is about Labour not sticking to manifesto promises and whether they will tax people they promised not to, the Prime Minister and Chancellor have made some bold calls in the run up to the Budget.
Their party’s relentless digital campaigning had them start the week with a communications hostage to fortune.
“This Wednesday, we will show the difference a Labour Government makes”
It’s a gamble.
The public may take the view in the next few days and months that the “difference” is negative. Most of our contributors and columnists on ConservativeHome this week have detailed the mismatch in Labour rhetoric before the election and the ‘hard-times-ahead’ message they have been pitch rolling now.
The Chancellor Rachel Reeves says “this Budget is personal to me”
It’s a personal bet.
It could be that she loses personally and politically – if it goes wrong. It’s hard to hear on one hand that this is a budget “for working people, from a Government for working people” when members of that government can’t clearly articulate who exactly “working people” are. I’ll come back to that.
It’s a big gamble because today, having made, and been trusted on, promises at the election, and having blamed the Conservatives for all their woes – they’ve finally got to do the big reveal and show us their hand. It reminds me of a song by the American artist Tim Rose, called ‘The Gambler’
“He said: Put your cards on the table boy and you stop all this messin’ round.
Show me what you really got, and you lay all that money down”
Every Government I’ve ever covered as a journalist sticks to a well-worn rule of thumb. You do the hard stuff, the unpopular things, first.
If you know you are going to have to raise tax to fund pay rises to union members, make huge public investments for vast unproven pet projects, and to do things on behalf of a group in society you define yourself – then get it all out of the way at the start of your time in office.
It’s particularly true for this Government because for all its huge parliamentary majority it has spectacularly squandered the honeymoon popularity most incoming governments get.
It’s still a gamble, but here’s the problem for Conservatives: it could pay off.
As all the smart observers of the Conservative leadership race have said, whether it’s Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch who win, relying on Labour falling apart will not save them. It would help, certainly, but alone it’s simply not enough. The Conservative Party has a monumental effort to make, together (and that’s still a concern) to turn their lousy deal of cards in July into a winning hand by 2029.
So how much harder will it be if Labour’s gamble today did pay off?
True they’d still have made promises they broke. They’d still have been disingenuous, even dishonest, about their real plans but there is a potential ace up their sleeve.
If enough voters think, in a few years, as a result of the measures today, they feel better off, that government is building things again, that their electricity is cheaper, that their food bills are lower, and as our columnist Dr Patrick English points out, public services have improved – then the electorate will simply not care about the many sleights of hand played to get there.
The electorate generally and genuinely valued Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme – right up to the point it inevitably had to be paid for, by them. Then they changed their minds quicker than our new Chancellor changes her hair. She’s smart enough to know by using the rhetorical ambiguity they used to win an election they can spin, over time, to achieve the reverse effect.
Explaining that however tough and awkward things were for them when they sat down at the table in 2024, if voters are told, and then start to think, they are better off, in say 2026, Labour could leave the table in 2029 with the winnings.
Do not assume that the rockiest start to a Government I have ever witnessed will stay rocky, that they won’t benefit and take credit for the good things the Conservatives left them. Their Investment Summit, trumpeting their success in getting millions the Conservatives secured before Labour came to office, is a clear example.
On top of that, expect the constant catalogue of all the bad things they tell you the last government left them to amplify and continue. It was, after all, Blair’s New Labour that understood if you repeat a line over and over again until everyone in politics is sick of hearing it, the public might just start to adopting it into their thinking.
“Giles it’s a ‘make the legacy stick’ strategy and you have to admit you lot have used it before” is how one of my Labour friends described it.
I’m bound to say from a communications perspective the strategy is sound. From a Conservative communications perspective, it needs to be confronted ever single time it’s uttered.
The commentariat have been wondering why Labour can’t satisfactorily identify who these “working people” Starmer is adenoidally “in service of’, actually are? I’ve always believed it was deliberate. They can make it mean whoever they want it to mean. It will be all the people that benefit from today but nobody who has to pay for it.
It might be a trick, but a trick that might work.
The gamble is can they win over enough of the public, to overcome the risk of annoying a whole section of others. If they can, then the Conservative fight back will become an even higher stakes fight with the potential for another big loss.
From the moment the new leader steps up on Saturday they need to get their poker face on and get in the game in a big way.