The cost of living crisis has been happening for so long now, it can no longer really be classed as a “crisis”. Crisis implies urgency, emergency, a state that cannot go on without intervention. But when that is not forthcoming, crisis simply becomes the new normal; especially if politicians treat it as such.
You would be forgiven for thinking it didn’t exist at all if you followed Conservative party conference last week. The prime minister’s speech seemed to be addressed to another nation altogether, one in which our main issues are how people identify their gender, small boat crossings, and green diktats. Those struggling are reduced to the “hardest hit” and are used to justify whatever policy he is trying to block or promote, without ever acknowledging what they are going through.
The cost of living crisis is a crisis of not being able to eat, stay warm or provide for your children. Food banks have become such an established fixture of the nation’s support system that they are, as Gordon Brown has warned, “taking over from the welfare state”. There are now also the grimly named “warm banks” – pubs, libraries and community halls where people can go to shelter from the cold, heat food and charge devices. At “baby banks”, new mothers cluster with their infants for nappies and other essentials. Then there are “bedding banks”, providing bedding for children who make up some of the million people in the UK who sleep on the floor or who have to share a bed with siblings or parents because replacing broken bed frames or mouldy linen has become a luxury.
This is a crisis with two histories, one short and circumstantial, the other long and structural. The Conservatives focus on the external causes of price rises – supply-chain disruptions and rising energy costs – and speak of cutting inflation and growing the economy as solutions. But the UK was already vulnerable to price rises as a result of years of impoverishing government policies. More people are in low-paid and insecure work. Food banks are increasingly visited by people in full-time work, because wages have slumped in real terms by about 37% since the financial crash.
Welfare has been cut over the same period of time. Food banks report that benefit sanctions and deductions have been a driving factor for the increase in need. Children go hungry as eligibility for free school meals (based on parental earnings) has been frozen since 2018, or as a result of long waiting times for initial universal credit payments.
As these currents overlap, the government engages in escalating displays of cruelty toward those living on the edge and minorities. Grotesque as that is, the reasons are obvious – the Tories know that after years of ramming through deregulation and austerity, the resulting inequality is by design, and they have no solutions, only fantasy and division.
Inequality. Now there’s a word you don’t hear much these days. Which brings us to a Labour party that, as its own conference gets under way, seems to have pivoted away from talking about inequality and class in a way that feels deliberate. You can almost see the editor’s pen, striking through all talk that might suggest that Labour – heaven forfend – is on the side of those living in poverty or being exploited by capital. The working classes have become “working people”. Class is a “ceiling” to be “smashed through”, rather than a material reality. Anything that might suggest that the party has any intention of intervening to correct imbalances would be too radical.
And so the opposition attacks the Tories over the cost of living crisis, but fails to address the structural issues behind it. The crisis is instead something that prevents people being able to achieve aspirations. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand that name-checks the cost of living crisis, but misdiagnoses it as a general economic malaise that can be treated with growth – something Keir Starmer defined to the BBC as his “single defining mission” on Sunday morning. In a previous interview, he said: “Frankly, the left has to start caring a lot more about growth, about creating wealth, attracting inward investment and kickstarting a spirit of enterprise.” But if you can’t afford nappies for your infant, I’m not sure this cuts the mustard. It provides neither practical, immediate solutions nor even the respect of compassion.
Aggressive reforms to the welfare system, higher taxes on wealth to fund such provision, and strong regulation of the labour market to improve wages and conditions would go some way towards alleviating the crisis. But they are either strictly off the menu or proposed with qualifying language and conditions. The party has one genuinely promising policy – a windfall tax on energy companies to lower consumer bills, which would help redistribute wealth from those benefiting from inflation to those struggling under its weight. It is a move in the right direction, but if not expanded upon, the cost of living crisis is once again treated as the result of an exogenous shock, rather than a corporeal fragility in our body politic.
Elsewhere in the Labour party, the effects of the crushing cost of living crisis have been translated into a kind of Judge Dredd phenomenon, with Yvette Cooper talking about the “total disgrace” of the “lawlessness” of shoplifting, and seizing the opportunity to flex her muscles on policing and security. It appears here that Labour has learned a lot from the Tories’ approach to immigration – if solving economic problems runs counter to your ideology, the next best thing is to shift the blame on to a broadly powerless group, and crack down. This dissonance is not lost on voters, who view both main parties as “out of step” with public concern about a crisis that is second only to the NHS in the list of most pressing issues for voters.
But there is still time. With every conference I have the same, now almost pitiable, hope that some of Labour’s promising policies, such as its new deal for workers, will be beefed up rather than watered down, into a targeted address that amounts to saying “we see you”. This is the party’s last opportunity. If no more is forthcoming at this point, there is little chance of an election time metamorphosis. “Politics is about priorities,” Rachel Reeves said last week. Ain’t that the truth. The next week will show whether, finally, Labour’s priorities are the same as the nation’s.
• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
