Take what follows as a parable, then a warning.
An arm of British government has been in Tory hands for more years than residents care to remember. Having run the place into the ground, the blues do not repent. Rather than contrition, they offer belligerent arrogance. Surely, their opponents and critics think, surely voters will punish them? When the electoral fury doesn’t descend, a mood of political dejection starts to settle. Until one polling night, the Conservatives get the boot. At last! There are celebrations that evening. And when the newly elected Labour administration arrives for its first meeting, activists hand over roses. “Labour are red / Tories are sooo blue …” reads the tag. “We trust our services / Return in-house with you!”
Are we in post-general election Britain this Thursday evening? No: this is two years ago, in Barnet, north London. May 2022 was a historic moment for the capital’s politics: a London borough that had never elected a Labour administration in its 57 years of existence finally flipped. The back yard of Margaret Thatcher, a local MP for her entire Commons career, adopted what she would have derided as socialism.
No wonder Keir Starmer went hurtling up the Northern line the next day to claim the Tory scalps as his own. Just the year before, Labour had lost the Hartlepool byelection and he had reportedly considered quitting. Now he was back in the race. The rest you already know.
I reported from Barnet throughout the 2010s because to me it summed up the worst excesses of George Osborne’s economics. This suburb didn’t just accept austerity; it embraced it. Barnet farmed out a vast swathe of its services to private business, and claimed it was forging a new no-frills model for local government: the easyCouncil. In reality, it was creating a landfill of public service failure.
And it’s Barnet that offers the most revealing glimpses of the forces that will shape the early days of Starmer’s reign, good and bad. First, in the sheer spread of Labour Britain. The polls suggest that the Tories are about to get an almighty kick in their stronghold, and true-blue Barnet is no different. To the north lies Chipping Barnet, a seat held by a Conservative since its creation half a century ago. Not after Thursday evening. If you’re feeling especially 2024 and fancy an election flutter, you should bet Mr William Hill that it’ll go Labour, as will Hendon.
That leaves Thatcher’s former patch of Finchley and Golders Green, which pollsters believe will be among the most marginal blue-red constituencies in the country. A win for Labour here would probably mean Starmer gets a 1997-style supermajority.
Last week, I attended a hustings there, which took me back to my late teens doing a Saturday job in the local libraries. All was reassuringly Finchley. We filed past detached houses that the property websites claimed were worth £2.5m, and into an airy hall where late-evening sun streamed through blue-stained glass on to the light wooden floor. I was raised in the rather more downmarket constituency of Edmonton, where hustings can be held in a half-empty internet cafe. This, on the other hand, was full of retirees and parents still in their office suits.
We were in the Alyth synagogue, a reminder that this constituency is the most Jewish in the country, and the nearest the hall came to heckles was some loud tutting at a question about whether Palestine should be recognised as a state. The most striking thing for an urban seat was that I heard no questions about housing. Neighbouring this constituency is Dawn Butler’s Brent Central, which is 25% Muslim. I tried for a few minutes to imagine any candidates there talking about “hate marches” or constituents fretting about their pensions, as one did. I couldn’t – and in that lie some of the vulnerabilities of an electoral coalition that spans such disparities in economics and culture.
Labour’s woman here is Sarah Sackman, whom I met when she was standing in 2015. Back then, she worried about what Ed Miliband’s mansion tax might do to her vote; this time, I suspect, she’s had sleepless nights over Starmer’s pledge of putting VAT on private school fees in an area that has dozens of private schools. She did her best to allay the crowd’s worries about how welcoming Labour is to Jewish people.
In Barnet, the Labour council has just passed two years in office and the jubilation of that May evening, with its promise of power, has turned into the deflation of governing with scarce resources. Among its big problems at the moment is industrial action by mental health social workers that has been running since last September.
These are frontline social workers, who can deal with residents with serious mental illness, and they claim to be facing an exodus of staff: by their count, they have lost about 30 colleagues and 80% of their in-house experience over the past 22 months. They also claim to be dealing with a huge backlog of cases, stretching back months.
I spoke to one resident, Beau, who has been diagnosed with bipolar and borderline personality disorder, and applied for help in 2022. He showed me the emails since then, and they largely consist of him asking again and again for help. Finally, he says, two weeks ago he was given an assessment.
The council disputes these numbers and says that it cannot comment on individual cases, although it adds that it does “not recognise [Beau’s] version of events”. In any case, it has refused the social workers’ demands for a 10% retention payment. In a grim repeat of Tory days, it has brought in an outsourced agency to cover mental health work. The trade union Unison claims this is strike-breaking and says that, unless the council stops by a deadline of this Wednesday, it will start court action.
A council has to work within a set budget; Starmer and Rachel Reeves have opted to strap themselves into the Tories’ spending settlement. The result will be very little extra cash for day-to-day services in the early years of this Labour government. It will mean lots more arguments and battles exactly as in Barnet. Again and again, Starmer’s team will be taking on nurses, teachers, civil servants. It will be facing down lower-paid, loyal workers, many of whom will have turned out to vote for Labour this Thursday.
After one of their pickets, I spoke to nine of the social workers. Some could remember celebrating when Labour took the town hall, and they’d been talking about how they were going to vote this Thursday. No one said they were going to back Starmer, and it was largely because of their experience in this dispute. “So disappointed,” said one. Another said: “Two sides of the same coin.”
Barnet proves that you can kick out the children of Thatcher, but it takes much more than that to rid yourself of the ghost of Thatcherism.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
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