I cling for morale to the idea that there’s never been a period of Conservative rule as bad as this one: the external shocks of recent times, set against a degraded backdrop left by David Cameron and Theresa May, have been met by leaders as woefully inadequate as Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
Nevertheless, exactly 30 years ago, Labour leader John Smith, in a long Commons debate nominally about “economic issues”, made a case that we’d all recognise: “There is proof abundant that this is a government who are … deeply untrustworthy, hopelessly incompetent. Perhaps their most defining characteristic is an aggressive, bullying and dogmatic obstinacy which assumes that they are entitled to control our affairs without the slightest recognition of the expertise of others.” He rattles off crisis after crisis: Black Wednesday; energy shortages due to pit closures; the corruption and dishonesty laid bare in the Matrix Churchill affair; the “disaster waiting to happen in the privatisation of our railways”.
As much missed as he was, Smith, while he was leader, was considered quite staid – and John Major’s government was doing a lot of his work for him, just by being so visibly bad, beset by scandal, unable to keep control of the ever-worsening news cycle. So in that respect, he had a lot in common with Keir Starmer, but there was one critical difference: Smith was able to paint a picture that bleak because he took it as given that life under a Labour government would be better, unrecognisably so.
The break of the summer recess has thrown into relief how singular, how novel, the shape of the debate is between the government and the opposition. “This is absolutely terrible,” Starmer will launch – forgive the precis – and Sunak will shoot back, “you are bad with money, therefore, however bad this is, it would be worse with you in charge.” Starmer is blessed with a huge number of targets: schools or sewage, the cost of living crisis or the NHS. He can contend confidently that we’ve never had it so bad. Sunak, meanwhile, benefits from a media norm in which it is considered perfectly reasonable to slam the government on the front page, and still full-throatedly avow in the opinion section that this is somehow still Labour’s fault, for the crime of not fully costing for which they are over and again convicted without trial.
Labour typically responds by trying to demonstrate its fiscal responsibility, except this is too complicated to do meaningfully – nobody wants a bunch of numbers – so instead they fall back on simply dialling down their ambition, in the hope that promises will sound cheaper because they are smaller (on childcare) or slower (on the renewables revolution).
This leads to some absolutely bizarre outcomes, in which they are unable to commit to a promise even if it is more humane and cheaper: Yvette Cooper couldn’t, in July, rule out a Labour government using a giant barge to house refugees, such was her determination not to sound like the kind of bleeding heart liberal you wouldn’t want in charge of the purse strings. The Bibby Stockholm, which has so far cost £3m, housed 39 asylum seekers for four days.
It is, in fact, functionally impossible for the opposition to prove they’re the safer custodians of the public finances, when they’re this far from the last time they held office, except with the proposition, “how could we be worse?” So the shots make sense, but the follow-up is weak: Labour seems to think that ambition itself sounds expensive. Hope, progress, compassion, all the words associated with change and a sense of its urgency, have been recast as luxury items – and indeed, that’s how they’re treated in interviews, this relentless drumbeat of, “how can we afford to be any different?”
The new shadow cabinet has filleted out the more independent voices – Lisa Nandy, Rosena Allin-Khan – and brought in figures habitually called Blairite – Darren Jones, Peter Kyle. In fact, the handle is a bit misleading, since they’re actually just loyalists to today’s low-hope playbook, which was very late-era Blair. Landslide Blair, D:Ream Tony, the one they think they’re emulating, never surrendered to the Conservatives’ definition of realism.
Describing the government’s shortcomings should be the easy bit. Every day, there’s an event that should be epoch-definingly embarrassing, except that it is immediately superseded by something worse. Persistent underfunding, for which the prime minister was directly responsible, has left a significant number of children without classrooms. But as widespread as the chaos is, as few people as can have been left unscathed, it’s hard to hear it from people who get to the brink of promising better, then back away. At the moment, both sides are squabbling over who can best manage our despair.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
