If you have ever been bored and on the internet, you may have played a “who said it?” quiz, in which you are asked to consider two comically similar orators – say, Donald Trump and Elon Musk – and guess which one really uttered the quote. I find myself playing that game a lot lately, except rather than choosing between similar-sounding celebrities it is the Labour party and the Tories.
Recent weeks have seen the Labour leadership give soundbites that could easily be mistaken for the words of a Conservative minister, most notably when discussing the social security system. In a speech to the centre-left Demos thinktank last week, the shadow work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, stressed “a life on benefits” would not be an option under her party. It is not simply that such a statement is clearly nonsense – if “a life on benefits” is even possible, it is less a life of luxury and more one where claimants can’t afford toilet roll – but that it is not even original. Kendall’s phrasing was almost identical to the words of the work and pensions secretary, Mel Stride, who, in November, said, “Benefits shouldn’t be there for ever if they’re not required.”
Meanwhile, as the number of people who are out of work long-term continues to rise, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, appears to be aiming not only to mimic her counterpart, Jeremy Hunt, but to outdo him. Asked what she would do differently to the budget last week, Reeves told the BBC that, among other measures: “We need to get people back to work. There are 700,000 more people due to be on sickness benefits”, as if the problem with the past decade of Conservative rule is that it has been too soft on benefits claimants.
Anyone who is surprised by this has not been paying attention. Every time Keir Starmer has refused to commit to repealing a Tory benefit cut over the past year, and every robotic delivery of the dog whistle of being on the side of “working people”, has given the same message: the grownups are in charge and they can give directions to the local food bank.
In many ways, this is old ground for the Labour party. When George Osborne framed post-2010 austerity as a means to fix Labour’s “out of control” benefits bill, the leadership at the time – first Ed Miliband and then interim leader Harriet Harman – adopted the narrative with the air of a sinner looking to repent, culminating in the party abstaining from the vote on the government’s toxic welfare bill. In 2015, Reeves – then shadow work and pensions secretary – famously declared Labour was “not the party of people on benefits”.
Such capitulation is in part a rational response to a media ecosystem in Britain that enables a small group of rightwing newspapers to shape Labour’s policy agenda, painting the party as economically unsound the minute it attempts to make ordinary people’s lives slightly better. But it is also a trap of the party’s own making. Starmer’s narrow emphasis on “fiscal responsibility” – and Reeves’s unnecessary commitment to the government’s flawed fiscal rules – enables the Conservatives to set the agenda and buys into, rather than challenges, established wisdom on the legitimacy of public spending. It is not a coincidence that the spending that is deemed irresponsible is typically for the benefits system or wider welfare state. Tax breaks for a CEO’s investment portfolio are prudent, while funding for a disabled person’s care worker is wasteful.
We see this again when Labour parrots the government’s economic language. In response to the budget, Starmer declared “the national credit card is maxed out” while Reeves opted for the old chestnut, “There’s no magic money tree.” Adopting such framing is not just economically illiterate, it fences Labour in for how a future government can raise funds and spend them. Before you know it, Reeves is announcing that – now that Hunt has taken her non-dom tax revenue policy – she intends to pay for the NHS and school breakfasts through (wait for it) “future savings to public spending”. Who needs a wealth tax when you can squeeze councils facing bankruptcy?
Put together, such narratives have very clear implications. They tell us that under a Starmer government, the wealthy will never be asked to pay their fair share in tax. When pushed, it is those with the least – poor, sick and disabled people – who will be expected to give the most.
There is an argument that Labour will be different once in power, that the attitudes currently on display aren’t real values, but rather a sensible caution the party must display in order to be electable. Perhaps. But if Labour cannot find its moral compass when it is almost 30 points ahead in the polls, it hardly will when it is buried under the weight of day-to-day government. That Rishi Sunak has just hinted at further tax cuts for workers paid for by a squeeze on benefits makes it even more pressing for the official opposition to actually present an alternative.
Besides, the narrative that the Labour party carves out now does not exist in a vacuum, the equivalent of chip paper that’ll be in the bin the morning after election day. It permeates the political culture, stoking a race to the bottom and encouraging the public’s worst instincts while pushing the dial further away from the change that’s needed. If you reinforce the fear that disabled and sick people are a burden on the struggling taxpayer, there is less pressure to address real insecurity such as low wages and crumbling services once in office. If you put the responsibility for the gaps in the labour market firmly on the individual now, there will soon be less focus on the structural issues – from long NHS waiting lists to poor housing – that are actually causing them.
When the election comes and the Tories are at last ousted, a Labour government will have an unenviable inheritance: a population that is sicker and poorer than a decade ago and a public realm that is in rapid decline. But a nation’s health is not defined by its material conditions alone. It is defined by its social fabric: whether each of us is willing to chip in for the good of the collective, and our attitudes towards those who appear different or have less. There is much discussion about how Reeves wants to make Britain attractive for the rich, but perhaps it is time to focus on making it appealing for the poor. In a parallel universe, there is a Labour party that is putting as much effort into courting the votes of benefits claimants as bankers. In the end, some people matter and others don’t.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
