No sooner had the exit poll dropped on election night than commentators were warning that Labour had a mountain to climb and there was no time for complacency. But Keir Starmer did not need telling. He has a mountain-climbing expression, all tense determination and hovering unease. Contrast the gung-ho simplicity of Boris Johnson’s “Get Brexit Done” with Starmer’s dogged mantra: “Let’s get to work”. Or set Tony Blair’s 1997 victory speech (“A new dawn has broken, has it not?”) against Starmer’s promise of “the sunlight of hope, pale at first but getting stronger through the day”. Pale sunlight is the perfect metaphor for Starmerite realism.
The election may have been more a rejection of the Tories than a love letter to Labour, but then there was so much to reject. Of the five prime ministers, representing five flavours of failure, David Cameron is this book’s villain and the deficit-cutting, neoliberal mania of austerity is the murder weapon. Brexit, Covid and Liz Truss made matters worse but austerity was the Tories’ original sin, cheered on by half the population at one point. The book opens with the Dickensian image of someone’s teeth falling out because he cannot get a dentist and proceeds grimly through food banks, NHS waiting lists, collapsing local councils and everything else that left even the most politically disengaged citizens with a sense of national decline. The Conservatives failed to conserve. The biggest question mark hanging over Labour now is whether Rachel Reeves can find enough money to repair the damage.
Things Can Only Get Better having been taken, Polly Toynbee and David Walker turn to another dance-pop hit for the title of The Only Way Is Up. Next to the sweeping gravitas of Will Hutton’s This Time No Mistakes or the granular prescriptions of new Labour MP Torsten Bell’s Great Britain?, the couple’s fifth book of the Tory era feels like a prosecutorial indictment of the last regime rather than a manifesto for its successor, with policy recommendations consigned to brisk bullet points at the end of each chapter. Picture the scene in Game of Thrones where the nuns parade Cersei Lannister through King’s Landing, ringing a bell and chanting “Shame!”
A great deal of prior knowledge is assumed. If you don’t know who George Osborne’s “Russian mate” or “the Glasgow bra queen” are then you will be frustrated. And if you do instantly recognise that they are Evgeny Lebedev and Michelle Mone, then little here will surprise you. Pinning the SNP’s stasis on “getting lost in a maze of gender” is both confusing and contentious while abbreviating Tony Blair’s famous slogan “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” to “tough on crime” is perverse.
Still, some reminders are startling, such as the fact that the wealth of the top 1% increased 31 times more than that of those in the bottom 99% between 2010 and 2021, while 30% of children were living below the relative poverty threshold. High ministerial turnover screamed dysfunction, with 16 housing ministers and 10 environment secretaries in 14 years. Who remembers the 49-day tenure of Ranil Jayawardena? Not me. As bad as the Tories’ actively destructive policies were, their loss of interest in constructive ones such as net zero, levelling up or the Social Mobility Commission, whose despairing members resigned en masse in 2017, were as damaging.
There are, therefore, no heroes among the cast of mediocrities, ideologues and mediocre ideologues (Iain Duncan Smith is coldly dismissed as “a man of simple conviction and simple brain”) but credit is given to Chris Skidmore’s sincere environmentalism and David Willetts’s work on generational inequality, and I found myself briefly warming to Jeremy Hunt when he snapped at James Dyson to stop whining about corporation tax.
The authors close with a temporally confusing fantasy of life in 2030. But who has achieved this? Keir Starmer’s name is absent, as in a movie that can’t feature famous brand names for copyright reasons. Meanwhile, the policy suggestions – reduce child poverty, decarbonise electricity, reband council tax, build more homes – are solid social democratic fare. Toynbee and Walker have come to bury the Tories and tramp the dirt down, which is a fine endeavour, but Starmer need not put this at the top of his reading pile.
• The Only Way Is Up: How to Take Britain from Austerity to Prosperity by Polly Toynbee and David Walker is published by Atlantic (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
