In his headline speech to the Labour Party Conference, Keir Starmer tried to draw the dividing line in British politics between his own government and the Conservatives, the party of ‘easy answers’.
It’s a good phrase because it’s half-true. By the end of their time in office, the Tories’ attempts to deliver a vaguely-conservative policy agenda had devolved into a collection of threadbare fictions. But the more important part was missing; there were few difficult answers in Starmer’s speech.
There was the occasional flash of clarity, such as when he slipped in a line about new energy pylons needing to be above ground if they were to be affordable (although one wonders how many Labour MPs, sitting on slender majorities in newly-won rural seats, will buy it).
For the most part, however, it had the same schizophrenic quality as Rishi Sunak’s keynote address to the Conservatives in Manchester last year. Now, as then, the prime minister du jour spoke compellingly but vaguely about the scale of the challenge, but concretely only of trivial chaff.
The similarities are not a coincidence. As I’ve noted elsewhere, both major parties are trapped on the Overton Tightrope created by waxing public expectations of the state and waning means of paying for the state we already have. The result is an increasingly illusory politics: Labour pretends letting franchises lapse is nationalising the railways, the Tories feigned that targeted exemptions from vast stealth taxation were the same as tax cuts.
Hence Starmer’s miserable start in office. His and Rachel Reeves’ attempt to create wriggle room by blaming the Conservatives has run out of road faster than many people will have expected. But the bigger point is that it was always going to run out, and it isn’t at all obvious that Labour ever had a plan for what to do when it did.
Reeves at least recognises that the simplest panacea would be growth, which would create more space for spending today in the expectation of increased tax receipts tomorrow.
But on the key measures (productivity, real wages, and per capita GDP), this country has been stagnant for a long time, and the roots of that stagnation stretch back even further. Breaking out of that cycle will take radical medicine – much more radical than Starmer and Reeves seem to think, or at least to believe their party will swallow.
Yes, planning reform is good. But as I’ve explained previously on this site, the reality of Labour’s headline commitments on new towns and the green belt fall far short of the party’s soaring rhetoric, and won’t deliver a fraction of the homes required to make a difference to the crisis. Starmer mentioned ‘planning passports’, but Labour doesn’t seem yet to know what those actually are.
Meanwhile, other policies push in completely the other direction: the Renters’ Rights Bill, like Michael Gove’s Renters’ Reform Bill, will make people homeless (amusingly, Starmer even got the bill titles confused in his speech); Ed Miliband’s latest crackdown on landlords will do the same.
Beyond housing, it’s a similar story. The Race Equality Bill will open up vast new frontiers for lawyers to pursue claims against public services like the one that helped bankrupt Birmingham City Council, whilst new employment protections will gum up the labour market.
If a politician has to try and sell voters on pain today, it makes sense to claim that it’s in service of jam tomorrow. But no path to the jam was laid out in Liverpool today; the tough decisions Reeves is making, and Starmer is defending, are about balancing the books in the short term and creating space for relatively trivial giveaways such as the new school breakfast clubs.
Starmer must shoulder his fair share of the blame for his rancid poll ratings. Labour deliberately chose to fight the election on the vaguest possible platform, maximising their vote at the expense of winning public consent for any drastic reforms.
But in his defence, there has not yet been a Winter of Discontent moment that would make such a manifesto saleable. The trap binding our politics is so dangerous because fundamentally, the policies strangling British growth are popular. The public want more spending and even if they support housebuilding in the abstract, that tends not to translate into supporting particular developments where they live, which are always the wrong homes, in the wrong places.
Too many in Labour seem also genuinely to believe, or at least have believed, that simply not being the Conservatives would be enough to put things on the right track. The Tories definitely made their fair share of mistakes in office. But the idea that they should simply have spent more, irrespective of Britain’s actual fiscal circumstances, is absurd – especially when Labour are similarly unable to turn on the taps.
The result is already shaping up to be a Labour politics as wraithlike as its Conservative predecessor. Reeves insists that there will be ‘no return to austerity’, for example – but defines this merely as a guarantee of real-terms increases in spending across the parliament. Yet at the very same moment, Labour denounces Tory ‘austerity’ on the NHS – despite a 41% increase in real-terms cash spending on it between 2010/11 and 2023/4.
Little wonder, then, that Starmer took refuge in the small things, as Sunak did. But the critical difference is that the latter held office at the end of an extended period of Conservative rule. It’s remarkable to see a new government start there, because there is nowhere to go but down.
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