As Rishi Sunak and his ministers bounce from crisis to disgrace to mishap, the likelihood of a change in government feels like it is hardening into near-certainty. As everything falls apart, Labour’s leadership would like us to believe that the metaphorical cavalry is now on its way, bringing common sense, competence and the promise of change.
There is only one problem: when it gets here, we are told, its weapons will be rusty, many of its horses are likely to be knackered – and whatever the urgent challenges it will be confronted with, its commanders may well begin by doing precious little of any consequence.
For the last few weeks, senior Labour figures have been repeating the same message at an ever-louder volume: about the supposedly impossible state of the public finances, fiscal restraint and their determination to avoid any big tax and spending changes until the economy is thriving – which may take a very long time indeed. Their party’s £28bn-a-year climate investment pledge has already been scaled back and delayed. Now, while acknowledging the huge crises that grip health, education and no end of local services, they tell us that any expectations of urgent help must be damped down. “The only thing worse than no hope is false hope,” says Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary. Instead, we must trust shadow ministers’ good intentions, and their claim that the main answer has to be “reform”, whatever that means.
The definitive statement of this position arrived today, in the form of an Observer article by Keir Starmer. “Everywhere you look … things are broken,” wrote the Labour leader, but 13 years of austerity went pretty much unmentioned. “This is what happens when a government loses control of the economy,” he insisted, a contention that led on to a familiar emphasis on “iron-clad fiscal rules”, followed by a telling-off: “Frankly, the left has to start caring a lot more about growth, about creating wealth, attracting inward investment and kickstarting a spirit of enterprise.”
Starmer is relatively new to politics: his understanding of his own side’s history and essential political theologies often seems flimsy and cliched. So, by way of a reminder: whoever is in charge of it, the basic reason his party is different from the Conservatives lies in its century-old understanding that when it comes to poverty, inequality and all our other enduring social ills, “growth”, the animal spirits of the financial markets and the “spirit of enterprise” tend to offer insufficient answers, to say the least. The public sector exists for precisely that reason, and when it is in crisis, the fundamental reason is always to do with political choices to starve it of money. Here, though, Starmer offers another ideological about-turn: an insistence that what is needed is “reform” – not just because there is allegedly no new funding available, but because even if there was, to spend it would be to “simply service failure”.
Those last three words are quite something: given what they seem to say about our public services and the people who work in them, he and his people may yet regret using them. But they are the apparent basis of a newfound belief: that those services have to be “modern, innovative and focused squarely on the people who use them”.
This somewhat strange point – are there really schools not “focused” on their pupils, or hospitals not oriented around their patients? – is a thin echo of the kind of rhetoric Tony Blair began to use at the start of his second term, when he talked about “re-designing the system round the user”. But whereas Blair’s visions led on to specific – and often disastrous – changes, apart from his mentions of better mental health provision for young people and using DNA-sequencing in medical treatment, Starmer and his team’s plans are vague and platitudinous. Even if you accept that there might be something there, the fact that any reform takes years to introduce means they offer no solution to our current national collapse. One obvious example: in the wake of the government’s refusal to fully fund the public sector pay rises announced last week, would Labour carry on meeting a huge chunk of the costs via budget cuts, or somehow find the money elsewhere?
One last tension sits at the heart of Starmer’s positioning. Is the problem that he won’t be able to find extra funds, or that he doesn’t really want to? Moves such as changing the rules on non-dom status and the end of the VAT exception for private schools pack a symbolic punch, but they will bring in comparatively small amounts of money. Seemingly closing down other potential sources of revenue, Starmer has signalled a U-turn on plans to put up income tax for high earners, while Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has indicated she will not heed calls to put up capital gains tax. To state the blindingly obvious, the economy’s mixture of inflation and stagnation presents a confounding set of problems. But Labour seems to be responding to a moment full of urgency and political opportunity by energetically boxing itself in.
All of which leads to a very interesting question: if Labour wins, what will it actually feel like? Whatever is in its manifesto, and irrespective of the narratives that Starmer does or doesn’t campaign with, a victory will self-evidently be a huge moment, replete with at least a momentary sense of relief and euphoria. But on the current evidence, what Labour will actually do with power is less interesting than what the simple change in regime will trigger, whether Starmer and his allies like it or not.
The last 13 years have been so full of underinvestment, cuts and serial cruelties that from the moment they take power, calls for change will be overwhelming. Along with the party’s regional mayors, the Labour people who run councils, faced with a £3bn funding gap over the next two years, will rightly demand greater financial autonomy, and a level of funding from Whitehall that at last begins to make up for the cuts that they are still being forced to inflict on their communities. Whatever Starmer’s antipathy towards the green movement, its activists and organisations – such as Green New Deal Rising, whose supporters disrupted his recent speech on education – will sense the door being at least slightly more open, and push on it all the harder.
As a weak economy continues to make the case for renewed ties with the EU, there may well be a revival of the movement that pushed for a second referendum on Brexit, this time focused on membership of the single market. More urgently, I can easily foresee the kind of community activists who have parried the worst aspects of the Conservatives’ record on poverty and inequality – the people who run food banks, homeless shelters and all the rest – sooner or later making a great deal of noise about the intolerability of living with both a centre-left government and the continuation of such awful social problems.
As things stand, I am not sure Starmer, Reeves and Streeting will have the policies, authority or political talent to tell all these forces to keep quiet, something that particularly applies to a re-energised trade union movement, whose grievances have hardly been silenced by recent moves on public sector pay. Back in May, I interviewed Pat Cullen, the indefatigable leader of the Royal College of Nursing, who is now loudly decrying the fact that NHS workers are to get “the lowest pay rise in the public sector”. What, I wondered, did she want from a Labour government? “I keep going back to the people I represent,” she said. “I want to see them earning a decent wage.” The other thing she expected was a “long-term investment plan to get the NHS back from the brink”.
And could she envisage more strikes when Labour is in power? Not for the first time, there was a glint of steely purpose. “We pride ourselves on being apolitical,” she told me. “We’re not associated with any political party. It doesn’t matter which government comes in. If they turn their back on nursing staff – as this government has done – absolutely we will.”
Right now, Labour is emphasising two contradictory ideas. With one voice, it tells us that we cannot go on like this; but it then changes register, and suggests that is exactly what we are going to have to do. The howling tension between the two brings to mind a celebrated quotation from the Welsh thinker and writer Raymond Williams: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.” If Starmer and his team fail that test, they will only deserve all the noise and disruption that will thereby be let loose. So far, it has to be said, the signs are not good.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
