“Desperate stuff”
This is what the soon to be Prime Minister used as an aside to the then Prime Minister in the second TV election debate. Rishi Sunak, whilst tackling the economy had had the “audacity” to suggest that Sir Keir Starmer would, together with Rachel Reeves, tax anything they could upon entering Downing Street.
The electorate wasn’t listening to Sunak by then, and Starmer knew he could allude to it all being a last throw of the dice to put people off voting for his party. As he probably knew, by then it wouldn’t work, and it didn’t.
Six months on, and there’s a now whiff of desperation in Labour’s ranks about how they drag the British economy, kicking and screaming if needs be, towards growth, the main priority of this Government. There are even some privately questioning whether government alone can drive economic growth.
Fair’s fair, it’s not wrong to want the economy to grow.
It would only be a political pyrrhic victory if Labour fail in their attempt, because the public will suffer as a result. We all want the UK economy to grow, it’s just the Conservatives think, especially since the Budget, the Government are doing the wrong things to boost it.
Tax and spend, soaring borrowing costs, money to the unions but no productivity leverage, upsetting whole sections of the population with a huge tax burden, and all for an anaemic 5 year growth projection outlined by the Chancellor herself.
It was all born out of a “we know best” attitude recently eviscerated by a man they brought in to help them win power. Peter Hyman’s brutal assessment of Labour’s seven deadly sins was beautifully unpacked by Kamal Ahmed in the Telegraph this weekend and is well worth the read.
But something has happened. The Chancellor seems to have had a new year’s mood-makeover.
Rachel Reeves has returned from Davos and been seemingly reprogrammed. She spent yesterday touring the TV studios to offer a vision of optimism with a side order of ‘can do’ cheerleading. All ahead of a speech this week the contents of which seem to have been leaked using a sprinkler system.
In one of the more egregious bouts of political pitch rolling; if there isn’t a proposal about a third runway at Heathrow, there will be some very perplexed journalists in attendance on Wednesday.
But the message yesterday from Reeves was very clear: less doom and gloom and more boom and soon, please.
We are told to be optimistic about Britain’s potential, to admire her determination to “go further and faster in delivering” growth and that she’ll face down opposition, even in Labour’s ranks. She’s praised Donald Trump, saying the UK needs to learn from his “boosterism” and we should be “shouting from the rooftops” about Britain’s strengths.
If she’d said she wanted to confront the ‘anti-growth coalition’ I’d have sworn she’d been taken over by the spirit of Liz Truss. Sick though Truss clearly is over Labour accusations she ‘crashed the economy’, Rachel Reeves as one of her chief accusers, is getting worried how close to imitating that result she herself may be getting.
It cannot also have escaped notice that having spent months labouring the point that everything economic was all a bit awful, all the Tory’s fault, and still a problem, it’s rich she should suddenly urge others to shout about economic optimism ‘from the rooftops’.
So rich in fact, she’d probably tax it if she could.
Desperate stuff indeed.
But here’s the problem for the Conservatives: in her push to find and encourage any growth at all, Reeves has started to suggest things the Tories might actually approve of. For example the watering down her proposals on non-doms. One hopes the need for a third runway isn’t to facilitate the speedy emigration of more high net-worth individuals!
Come Wednesday, and if she does announce a third runway for Heathrow, I know plenty of Tories who’d back that idea. After all a Conservative government had the same idea in 2018. If Reeves wants to lead the charge now it might be one of those issues where a discussion about opposition for opposition’s sake becomes necessary.
What some Tories think would also be useful from our side would be an indication, or outline of how the Conservatives would boost growth if it were still in their hands. No, of course they can’t direct anything from opposition and detailed policy is not likely to come four years out from an election. However the mood is for something that indicates, since we are “under new leadership” that our plan would look different not only to Labour’s and Reform’s (if they have one) but to the Conservative Party of six months ago.
One Tory MP described laying out such a narrative as “’here’s what you could have had’, but without any ‘told you so’ vibe”. Another added, “it would at least be a demonstration of not just clear blue water, but a gulf in the approaches to get to the same end.”
I left that conversation with an advert for Sainsburys’ supermarkets in my head. It seemed to be a political plea to “Taste the Difference”.
Commentators might say “voters did – and didn’t like it”, but that is why it’s up to the Tory top team, to explain why their promotion of growth would not be Labour’s or a carbon copy of the Conservatives’ last one.