In about 10 days’ time, we are told, the deadline will fall on policy submissions for Labour’s draft manifesto. Reports over the weekend have highlighted senior party people insisting that a May election is still a big possibility, and fretting about a contest that could be called as early as 16 March. And besides, Keir Starmer’s accelerated timetable suits his marketing as the kind of leader keen on preparedness, prudence, and technocratic efficiency.
At which point, an inevitable warning: the content of Labour’s plan for government, in all likelihood, is not going to be terribly spectacular. To no one’s surprise, Starmer’s advisers have been briefing journalists that “financial discipline will run through the document”. Proposals that have come out of Labour’s policy forums will seemingly be ruled in or out depending on whether they can stand up to Tory attacks. The only extra taxes in play – on non-doms, private schools and private equity “dealmakers” – will raise less than £10bn a year, which also puts a lid on any big policy ambitions. To cap it all, after months of briefings about its possible demise, the party’s plan to spend £28bn a year on green investment may well be even further diluted and delayed.
The leadership’s deep conviction is that this approach is the only way they can win. As Jeremy Corbyn led his party to 2019’s near-death experience, they point out, far too many people saw Labour as reckless, profligate and in the grip of ideological mania, an impression that lingers. The coalition government of 2010-15 also casts a long shadow: despite the wreckage left by the austerity that is still blitzing local services, a lot of voters need only to hear words such as “borrowing” and “deficit” to think that the sky is about to fall in. Liz Truss’s short time in office completes the picture: voters have a fear of politicians opening the way to national financial ruin, and those anxieties must be respected.
After four consecutive Labour defeats, these issues demand to be treated with a certain nuance, even by Starmer-sceptics: getting the British electorate to return centre-left governments is onerously hard, and all this has a ring of truth. But the result is a politics characterised by chronic smallness. As proof of his supposedly huge sense of purpose, the Labour leader habitually points to his “missions” – among other things, to “get Britain building” and “break down barriers to opportunity” – but what sits under them often looks either equally vague or comparatively tiny. In the past few weeks, shadow ministers have made a lot of noise about such policy minutiae as supervised tooth-brushing for kids, and a new register for children who are absent from school. On a bad day, it looks as if Labour has decided to offer as little as possible in the hope that the Tories find nothing to attack, and even the most timid swing voters then help Starmer to victory.
Such caution has started to lead in a dismaying direction. Once, all the party’s big figures would have self-identified as economic Keynesians, well aware that in difficult times, investment led by the state is the one dependable way of getting things moving. Now, Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, seems to be drifting deep into the most tight-fisted kind of supply-side economics – which means, for example, that the key to solving the housing crisis is a mere relaxation of planning laws. Nothing of any substance can be done, it seems, until the animal spirits of the private economy are revived – and even borrowing to invest has to be subject to specious fiscal rules, which is a strange position for a party of the centre-left to be in. Last week, there were reports that if Jeremy Hunt cuts taxes in the forthcoming budget, the effects on the state’s fabled fiscal headroom will be so dire that the green investment plan will in effect bite the dust. If sinking Tory chancellors end up dictating Labour policy, something will surely have gone very wrong indeed.
Here, then, is the Starmer’s project’s defining tension. As far as he and his people seem to see it, smallness is Labour’s most dependable way not only of winning, but then sustaining the public’s trust: the programme initially followed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which included sticking to Tory spending projections for the first two years, is often cited as the proof. But that comparison does not really work. Will there soon be an equivalent of New Labour’s great rush of initial change: the minimum wage, Scottish and Welsh devolution, Bank of England independence and Sure Start, all either rolled out or launched in the Blair government’s first two years? It does not look like it.
We are, moreover, a long way from the 1990s’ easy optimism and favourable economic conditions. The defining features of British life in 2024 are bound up with an overwhelming sense of shabbiness and decline: cancelled trains, aborted infrastructure projects, bankrupt councils, potholed roads, rivers full of sewage. And however much it tries to dial down public expectations and insist that change will have to wait until a second or third term, a Starmer administration will be judged – probably fairly quickly – on whether it makes any material difference to all that.
From day one, an incoming Labour government will also be faced with a barrage of hostile rightwing noise, from a coalition of forces – the Mail and Telegraph, GB News, whichever political organisation Nigel Farage may have decided to lead – that could well have finalised its takeover of the Conservative party. The arrival of every so-called small boat will be held up as evidence not just of failure, but rampant government wokery; every Labour slip-up and mishap will be hailed as a terminal disaster. The new political right, let us not forget, tends to trade not just on prejudice, but the understandable resentments of people and places that fundamentally feel ignored. If you want to draw their sting, the only way to do so is by starting to convincingly mend what has been broken. Put another way, you cannot build any sort of good society – let alone support for it – when you are still surrounded by rubble.
Not that anyone seems to be listening, but there are credible economic voices making the case for large-scale, debt-financed public investment; they point out that it would actually have the opposite effect to the financial ruin Reeves and Starmer now seem to fear, firing exactly the growth – and tax receipts – they want. There are also serious Labour figures advocating the kind of big fiscal changes – such as a wealth tax – that might loosen the party’s self-imposed straitjacket. These things highlight a fear that ought to be nagging at Labour people, whatever the party’s huge poll leads and rising hopes: that even if political smallness initially gets Starmer and his allies over the line, it could sooner or later be their undoing.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
