A month before the 1992 general election, which the Tories won even though many expected to see Labour in Downing Street, shadow chancellor John Smith set out his tax and spending plans in a high-stakes moment of political theatre.
His shadow budget was published in a “red book” that deliberately mimicked the Treasury’s own budget document, while Smith and his frontbench team even posed for pictures on the steps of the Treasury.
Labour gained a five-point lead in the polls. But it wasn’t enough. The Tories doubled down on their crude but highly effective “tax bombshell” campaign, capitalising on a public still uneasy about Labour’s overall economic competence. A month later, John Major was back in No 10.
It is a lesson that senior Labour officials still cite today. Despite the party’s 15-point lead in the polls, they insist they are taking nothing for granted. Winning back – and retaining – economic credibility is at the heart of absolutely everything they do.
“The most important thing is that we go into the next election showing that everything we are proposing is fully costed,” Keir Starmer’s official spokesperson told reporters on Wednesday. “That is our number one priority. That’s what we’re sticking to.”
But it comes at a cost. The latest of Starmer’s 10 leadership election pledges to fall by the wayside is his promise to abolish university tuition fees in England. The move, although due to be announced within weeks, did not emerge at the moment of his choosing, with local elections imminent.
Labour was “likely to move on from” its commitment, he admitted begrudgingly in a radio interview on Tuesday. “But I don’t want that to be read as us accepting for a moment that the current system is fair or that it’s working,” he added.
Party officials reject the charge from some on the left, and the Tories, that all of Starmer’s leadership pledges have been “torn up”, insisting that just three have had to be “tweaked” as a result of the dire economic circumstances (5p on the top rate of tax and nationalisation of utilities are the others).
They insist that Starmer still “stands by and believes in” the principles that won him the leadership. That is unlikely to give much succour to Labour MPs and supporters concerned that the Tories are painting the Labour leader as somebody who can’t be relied on to deliver on his promises.
It would be easier, some MPs believe, if they were able to tell voters on the doorstep what Labour does stand for, rather than what it does not. If when a policy is dropped, a fully costed alternative is ready to be announced in its place.
The party is undeniably cautious about announcing “big idea” policies too soon, out of fear that the Tories would either pinch them (see the windfall tax and the government’s childcare expansion) or trash them, suggesting they are unaffordable.
Starmer’s allies argue that he is halfway through setting out his five “missions” for government, and that by the summer the electorate will have a far firmer grasp of what Labour would do in office.
Yet even they concede that, despite the serious policy work that has gone into drawing up the missions, they’re not always cutting through, and the party has so far struggled to land an overarching narrative about life being better under Labour.
Starmer himself has urged patience. In an interview with the Guardian in January, he said Labour was doing a “huge amount of work” to prepare for government, and that by the start of 2024 everyone would know exactly what it would do in power.
But he has not yet succeeded in silencing the mutterings about whether the problem is not in fact the message, but the messenger. Many compare and contrast his leadership with the energy and enthusiasm that Tony Blair unleashed ahead of the 1997 election.
Yet 2023 is not 1997, his allies insist. The economy has been hammered, there has been a decade of austerity, families are struggling with the cost of living. Trust in politics, and politicians, is at an all-time low regardless of their party.
Labour officials argue that being honest about the state of the public finances – and what that means for policy promises – is key to restoring that trust. “But that does mean that there are Labour things we want to do that we can’t,” they admit.
