During and since the 2024 general election, we noted on this site how the scope of the economic debate in British politics has more or less collapsed. Furiously though they denounced each other and different as their nominal ideologies might be, in practice Rachel Reeves and Jeremy Hunt offered almost exactly the same tax-and-spend prospectus to the voters, give or take a few trivial exceptions (exempting pensioners from fiscal drag for us, whacking non-doms and private schools for them).
Now, one might argue that developments since then suggest that there is more substantive economic territory between the two parties than the election suggested. But whilst a Conservative government might have been able to get the Chancellor’s aborted (and still trivial in the grand scheme of things) £5bn in welfare cuts through, that’s about as far as it goes.
For the Tories clearly demonstrated in office that they were caught in exactly the same vice as Labour is now: relentless pressure to keep raising revenue spending well beyond what the economy can sustain. Given that what limited specific commitments we’ve had from the Party so far in this parliament include retaining both the triple lock and an unreformed Winter Fuel Allowance, there is no obvious reason to think things would be playing out differently had Rishi Sunak been returned to Downing Street.
I mention this because three consecutive stories in this morning’s Financial Times provided a stark illustration of how this collapse is not only still ongoing, but expanding beyond matters economic. They were: Sir Stephen Timms’ suggestion that the disability benefit system needs to be “overhauled to encourage more claimants into work and control costs”; Reeves signalling that she might expand her u-turn on pub business rates to other hospitality businesses; and Shabana Mahmood saying she has lost confidence in the chief of the West Midlands police over last year’s ban on Israeli football fans attending a match in Birmingham.
Timms’ announcement is surprising not because reform along the line he mentions doesn’t obviously need to happen, but because one of the major complaints of the mutinous Labour MPs who sank the Government’s last attempt to do so was that it was about controlling costs, rather than for any good Labour reason. Given that the Prime Minister buckled in the face of that rebellion, and is far weaker now than he was before he did that, it is a testament to the urgency of the problem that a minister has been sent out to tilt at that windmill again.
The Chancellor’s decision is emblematic of the same dynamic that played out time and time again under the Conservatives: the public have a strong preference for spending, but hate very often the consequences of that preference; ministers thus first scrabble for revenue, and then scrabble to carve sympathetic cases out of their revenue measures. The result is an increasingly complicated tax system which is set at a level high enough to be sucking the life out of the economy, but isn’t bringing in nearly enough revenue to make Britain’s spending trajectory sustainable.
Mahmood’s intervention (backed forcefully by Wes Streeting, who has demanded the chief’s resignation) is on different ground. But it again fits a pattern: if the de facto economic policies of the two parties tend to resolve in a direction which bears little resemblance to what the Tories say they want, the reverse is true on law-and-order.
It is scarcely news that the Home Secretary is widely held to be one of the most popular and effective members of the Cabinet, and not a coincidence that she is the most right-wing (and even if her solution to the shortage jail cells was to let people out and stop locking people up, that was also the Tory solution).
But her plan to “give home secretaries back the power to sack chief constables” is a significant development not only when you consider how noisily Labour opposed the Conservatives’ various public order legislation, but Sir Keir Starmer’s institutionalism. Had a Conservative minister proposed to give themselves like power, one can only imagine the pieties from the Opposition about the sanctity of the operational independence of the police.
Differences between the parties do remain, of which Bridget Phillipson’s crusade against a quarter-century of cross-party effort reforming the education system is probably the best example. But even there, the Government has had to pull back after a sector consultation didn’t go its way, and on the areas which are subject to the strongest pressures of public opinion – pensions, the NHS, taxation, crime, and immigration – the two major parties keep getting squeezed into broadly identical positions.
Such a narrow field of political consensus tends to signify one of two things: either a very stable political consensus, or a very unstable but stuck consensus. We are living through the latter. On tax and spending, immigration, and law and order, the irresistible force of public opinion is hardening into shapes which either contradict each other or are going to collide hard with an immovable object, be that our elite and institutional consensus around various international law commitments or a crisis in the public finances.
As and when that happens, the future will belong to whichever party or movement can not only devise a workable policy programme and sell it to enough voters to deliver it, but judge their timing perfectly. Because until a crisis moment arrives (à la the Winter of Discontent or Great Financial Crash), the voters will punish severely any party which breaks with the unsustainable status quo.