Things Might Not Get Better

Labour Falls from Grace

It’s never a good idea to expect too much from British politics, even in better times. As John Clees once said, it’s not the despair that gets you, it’s the hope. The general pattern for many years has been this: Conservative governments win elections, do whatever they can to hack away at the legacies of 1945, privatise whatever they can, enrich those who are already rich, until they reach a critical mass of corruption and incompetence that even the long-suffering British public can’t stand any longer.

And then finally they turn to Labour, because there’s no one else to turn to. And for a while Labour becomes the repository of the nation’s better aspirations, until disenchantment sets in and the Conservatives come back to continue the cycle.

On 4 July this year we reached that tipping point once again, as some of the most genuinely disgusting, amoral and useless politicians this country has ever seen finally got the electoral humiliation they deserved. But this didn’t necessarily mean enthusiasm for the winners. This was an election in which even Tory voters were prepared to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat. And those who didn’t - Brexiters, Bravermanites, and radicalized Tories who thought that Sunak’s party had become ‘socialist’, embraced Farage’s malignant lynx-eyed charlatanry and the pub-bore rants of Richard Tice.

Faced with choices like these, who could not feel, at the very least, a sense of relief at Labour’s electoral victory? What did it matter that that majority was shallower than the numbers suggested? Or that it would have been much less, had Reform not eaten into the Tory vote?

Labour were over the line. And if it wasn’t the start of a new era, it was the long overdue ending to an old and very stale one. The parliamentary maths gave the government at least the potential to be transformational.

And this is when the laws of British political gravity began to kick in. Because being a government is very different from a government-in-waiting. In opposition, you can follow Napoleon’s axiom of never interrupting your enemies when they make mistakes.

In parliaments with the likes of Gullis, Truss and Johnson, gravitas comes free of cost to any opposition leader who can keep a straight face. You can be forensic at PMQs, strategic and focused in your comms. You can write columns for the Sun. You can fly the flag, de-select leftwing MPs, and park so many tanks on Tory lawns that central office can’t even see out of the windows.

But in government you have to do things, and be something, and you have to be able to tell the people who voted for you what that thing is, and persuade them to accept what you are offering them.

This is always a difficult task for Labour governments, in a right-leaning country with a feral press that may print the occasional op-ed when Labour is in opposition, but cannot stand to see Labour in power.

The flagships of ‘respectable’ mainstream journalism such as the BBC and ITV will almost always subject Labour to harsher scrutiny than the Tories. And then there are the vast array of extreme right voices now operating on social media platforms from Elon Musk’s X to GB News, who loathe even the palest manifestation of social democracy.

Anyone who doubts the cynicism and downright depravity emanating from these circles should consider how quickly the worst of the worst - you know who they are - subtly encouraged and legitimised the summer’s pogrom/riots; tried to undermine the government’s response with disingenuous accusations of ‘two-tier policing’, and presented people who wanted to burn asylum-seekers alive as patriots and concerned citizens.

Or think about how - knights straight out of Camelot - they accused Labour of making the streets unsafe for women by letting prisoners out on early release, while ignoring years of Conservative misgovernance that had brought about the near-collapse of the criminal justice system

These people will never be Labour’s friends. They cannot and will not be placated. They have no moral compass, no concern for the truth or the common good, and they will use any excuse to bring a Labour government down.

This ‘honeymoon’ was even shorter than usual. The government had barely had time to rearrange the furniture when the right’s political killing machine cranked into action.

Put rioters in jail? Discrimination! Angela Rayner dancing? Lightweight! Take down Thatcher’s picture? Starmer hates women! On and on it goes, and it won’t stop till Starmer is standing at the podium outside Downing Street.

The polls show that Starmer’s personal ratings are now lower than Sunak’s, and Labour’s popularity is also dipping. Polls, schmolls, you might say. And what does it matter if a serious government is unpopular as long as it’s doing the right thing?

It matters, if the people on your side don’t believe that Labour is doing the right thing. Within two months, a government that promised to restore trust and service in politics is being battered with accusations of sleaze, nepotism and entitlement. Already cracks are showing in Starmer’s Downing Street operation.

This fall from grace is not necessarily calamitous. Labour doesn’t have to face the electorate for another five years. It has a large enough majority to get its business done. The question is, what business does it want to do? Some readers will be old enough to remember when George Osborne introduced his (in)famous ‘austerity’ speech at the Conservative conference in October, 2010, with the following words:

Conference, I come with good news and bad news. The good news is that we are in government after 13 years of a disastrous Labour administration that brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy. The bad news? We are in government after 13 years of a disastrous Labour administration that brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy. And once again we are going to have to clear up the mess.

Osborne thrilled his audience with promises of sado-economic ‘tough decisions’, because there is nothing some Tory voters like more than a good fiscal spanking. And through the pain - which Osborne and his cohorts would never feel - the Iron Chancellor dangled ‘the prize at the end: a reinvigorated, prosperous, united Britain of which we can all be proud.’

Fourteen years later, that prize is very conspicuously absent. And yet on 27 August, Keir Starmer gave a speech in the Rose Garden, in which he told the public:

I have to be honest with you. Things are worse than we ever imagined. In the first few weeks, we discovered a 22 billion pound black hole in the public finances. And before anyone says oh this is just performative…Or playing politics. Let’s remember. The OBR did not know about it.

This, Starmer argued, was why his government had decided to introduce a means-tested Winter Fuel Payment for pensioners, and it was also why:

There’s a budget coming in October…and it’s going to be painful. We have no other choice given the situation we’re in.

Like Osborne before him, Starmer urged the public to ‘accept short term pain for long term good’, and ‘the difficult trade-off for the genuine solution’ in order to ensure ‘an economy that works for everyone’, whatever that means.

As Yogi Berra might have said, it was deja vu all over again. Another government, another spanking. Where the Conservatives once justified their ‘tough decisions’ on the grounds that the Labour government had overspent, Labour blamed its ‘painful’ budget, on the ‘black hole’ left in the public finances by its predecessors.

Snap.

Though Starmer promised that those with the ‘broadest shoulders’ would bear the brunt of this, but everyone knows that these ‘tough decisions’ will fall, as they always do, on the same people: the poor; the vulnerable; the elderly; immigrants; asylum seekers.

We expect such things from Tories, but even Boris Johnson promised to ‘level up’, even though he didn’t, and probably didn’t understand what levelling up actually meant or why it was necessary.

Starmer pitched his sobriety as an alternative to the wild ‘cakeism’ of the last few years. But that is clearly not how it was received. The decision to make the Winter Fuel Payment the flagship policy of Labour austerity was a stunning own goal, which enabled Tory politicians and the Tory press to discover a social conscience that has been almost entirely invisible throughout the last fourteen years.

Even the Reform chancers wrung their hands in a bad-faith anguish at the fate of freezing pensioners in their constituencies, dying at Starmer’s hands, because they care so much.

Was this really the only way that Labour could save £1.5 billion? Did Labour have to keep the two-child benefit cap? Was it worth the political cost, not only amongst Labour MPs who did not want to be associated with these policies, but in terms of how these policies are seen by the wider public? Who were Labour trying to impress with this performative toughness? Why did Labour cancel funding to upskill 37,000 care workers in a sector where there are more than 152,000 vacancies?

There is no evidence that anyone in the government was even asking these questions. And so, in the midst of what should have been a triumphal conference, Labour has been haunted like Scrooge on Christmas Eve, by images of pensioners unable to turn on the heating, while the likes of Crooked Bob Jenrick and James Cleverly are out doing their bit for Age Concern.

All this was bad enough, and the damage was compounded by revelations of free clothes, and Arsenal and Taylor Swift tickets, which Starmer and his team initially tried to defend - most notably through David Lammy’s ludicrous claim that the Starmers needed to ‘look their best.’

When you are preparing to inflict a ‘painful’ budget on the nation, it’s probably best not to make arguments like this. Nor should you be protesting, as some have done, that Boris Johnson and his cronies got more freebies than Labour, and the Tory press never complained, etc, etc.

All this is true. But a Labour government that seeks to embody public service should not be accepting freebies from interested individuals. Or donations of £4 million from tax-haven based hedge fund companies.

In these circumstances, it’s entirely logical to ask what these donors will receive in return, and why the government is behaving like this. Because whatever your opinion of Starmer’s political project when he was in opposition, he at least seemed to be an astute political operator.

But these are strikingly amateurish, unforced errors.

I have no idea what advantages Sue Gray has brought to Starmer’s team, or whether she has done a good job or a bad one. There may well be some merit in the argument that a veteran civil servant was needed to coordinate the government’s political business. But neither she nor her salary ought to be a political story, and the fact that they are, suggests some serious disarray at the heart of government.

Because this isn’t just Westminster froth - it is the kind of leaking and petty plotting that rots governments from within. No one who has followed the Labour right’s destruction of Corbyn can be entirely surprised by this. Two weeks ago the Guardian published an extract from Anushka Asthana’s forthcoming book on Labour’s victory, which described how Morgan McSweeney and his cohorts conspired to bring Corbyn down by presenting him as an enabler of antisemitism:

After a few months working from a park bench, the group funded a small office in Vauxhall, and soon it reached out to former Labour advisers to work alongside them with a focus on online antisemitism. In an early review, they identified problem posts in hundreds of Facebook groups with links to either the party or leftwing politics. Some of these were aimed at Labour’s female Jewish MPs. They then farmed out the posts they uncovered to journalists who were themselves reporting on rising evidence of antisemitism on the left.

If Labour party officials are prepared to do that to one elected party leader, they are perfectly capable of briefing journalists about another for entirely different reasons.

This amateurism is not limited to domestic politics. Earlier this month, Labour were flagging up the possibility of supplying long-distance missiles to Ukraine before a meeting with Biden’s team in Washington. One warning from Putin, and one meeting later, and the missiles had vanished from the agenda. But now they’re back on the agenda, according to Lammy, or at least they might be, because who knows?

And in the Middle East, the UK, along with the US government and the European Union, have been haplessly complicit in Netanyahu’s maniacal strategy of endless war with everyone, which is leading the entire region towards the regional conflagration that many have feared. In Europe, Labour’s ‘reset’ with the EU has proved so timid that Starmer could not even bring himself to accept the 18- top 30-year-olds Youth and Mobility scheme.

There is also the question of immigration - always an instant hope-killer whoever is in power in this country. Starmer reacted quickly and decisively to suppress what was effectively a far-right insurgency. But since then, his government has embraced the same tactics that so many liberal governments use when dealing with the far-right: treat immigration as the central problem to be met with ‘strong borders’, repression, and exclusion.

Like Blair’s two governments, Labour now boasts of deportations, cracking down on criminal gangs, and new forms of ‘offshore’ processing of asylum claims. Starmer even offered £4 million to support the fascistic Georgia Meloni’s ruthless immigration policies, regardless of criticisms these policies have received from Amnesty and other human rights organizations.

There is not the slightest indication that Labour intends to counter the obsession with immigration, that has already done so much damage to the country, and the dehumanisation of ‘illegal’ immigrants that has been one of most damaging consequences of that obsession.

Nor is there any recognition from the government of the value that immigrants bring to the country. Consider the proposal from 141 British universities to reduce the numbers of foreign students in return for raising tuition fees. In the 2021/22 academic year, foreign students contributed £41.9 billion to the UK economy.

The numbers of foreign students are now falling, due to spousal and family visa restrictions and other factors. Does Labour - or the universities which are offering to reduce them further - really believe that British students, many of whom are already struggling to pay for their education, will be able to match that contribution, if tuition fees are raised?

Is this the price that Labour wants the country to pay, for bringing immigration numbers down?

In pointing out these inadequacies, I don’t want to gloat, or join in the ‘Labour has failed already’ chorus. After two months in office, no one can say that a government has failed - the Truss/Kwarteng wild ride being the exception.

The government has done some things right. It got very quickly on top of the pogrom/riots in August. It has resolved the doctors and railway strikes with pay rises. It has begun to establish a publicly-owned energy company, and committed to renationalising the railways. Plans are underway for an Employment Rights Bill, for a housebuilding program, for Louise Haigh’s Better Buses Bill, for the creation of a National Wealth Fund to invest in green industries.

These initiatives are not nothing, and certainly not anything you could have expected from their predecessors. But they have been overshadowed or ignored thanks to a succession of errors and doom-and-gloom messaging, and cronyism which the right has every interest in exploiting, and also by precisely the performative toughness that Starmer says he’s not doing.

Starmer is right not to over-promise. Politicians aren’t magicians. And even in a country that likes to believe in unicorns, they can’t wave magic wands and repair the damage of decades. The electorate is volatile and fickle, and also demanding.

It may take time to fix the things that are broken. But Labour doesn’t have much time. If it can’t make tangible improvements in peoples lives, and administer CPR to the UK’s ailing public services, then more people will lose their belief that ‘normal’ politics can change anything, and look for what is not normal.

If Labour continues to fixate on growth and fiscal rules as a prerequisite for any progressive change, the country will get worse and it will get nastier.

If a left-of-centre government mires itself in sleaze, while forcing ‘tough decisions’ down the throats of an exhausted population, there is no shortage of demagogues willing to present themselves as the alternative to a cold, detached political class that doesn’t care about ‘indigenous’ Brits.

In these circumstances, it is entirely possible that Labour’s majority could one day vanish as easily as it materialised, and voters could be persuaded to embrace some kind of Tory/Reform formation.

That is why we need a Labour government - and for better or worse it has to be this Labour government - to do better and be better. Yesterday, Reeves attempted to loosen the sackcloth, and promised there would be no return to austerity.

Let’s hope she means it. Let’s hope that the government can find the political courage to take this country to a happier place. But with Labour, it’s best not to hope too much.

It’s the hope that kills you.