It is incredible how similar Labour’s year in power has been to recent Conservative governments. It seems more and more likely, week by week, that Morgan McSweeney might be cast out, with Starmer following after. The question now on everyone’s mind: what can Labour do to avoid the electoral fate of the Tories?
I think this question – the one all politicians are trying to answer – is the wrong one. Politicians have been aimlessly chasing after popular announcements and positive press for so long that they’ve forgotten to plan for anything. They are in this mess because they have not set a direction to fix the country and actually tried to deliver on it.
The political mindset, instead, must shift: four years remain in power. Labour must ask themselves how much good can be done to improve the country in that time. Ignore the next election and focus on the now. Focus on solving the fundamental problems: energy prices, cost of living, NHS waiting lists, our broken immigration system and crime. And solve them in the four years you have left. Set aside the polling, make choices that will change the dial on these issues meaningfully. If you make the right decisions, such as radically reducing planning laws and designating emergency prisons, you will improve the country. That is the duty of government – the baseline expectation. National interest must come first, especially at times of crisis. The irony is, of course, that doing this would mean short, sharp pain for many voter blocs, but once the effects are felt, electoral chances will also improve.
Take today’s announcement on small modular reactors. Our electricity is both extremely expensive and utterly tentative. In January of this year we were one power station away from mass blackouts. The situation has not improved. Given this, the Government is finally moving ahead with stable and clean power, reducing the absurd regulations we have on small modular nuclear reactors. This is good news – if they’re deemed safe in the US, they’ll be deemed safe here. But the bad news is that this still means no new reactors until the early to mid 2030s – and that’s on government timelines. In other words, expect delays.
One of the biggest sins of the previous Conservative governments was to simply avoid making any tough decisions in their final death rattles of 2023 and 2024. Rather than make bold, ambitious rolls of the dice, they preferred to chase the safest policies they could. This didn’t improve the country, and didn’t win them points afterwards with voters that don’t really remember any of these measures. The best that can be said is that these may have helped avoid total electoral destruction for the Tories (which may still be on the horizon regardless, if they commit the same sins of half measures and chasing polling).
Starmer’s most moral route through this – the one voters expect – is to tackle the fundamental problems head on. To do so would be ambitious and daring. It means passing wide-ranging legislation and tearing up useless systems. It means presenting a genuine image of the future and bringing people behind it.
We are in a country where hundreds of thousands of people are regularly marching for diametrically-opposed positions in the capital, where flags adorn bridges and lampposts across the nation, where frustrations are bleeding over into increased support for political violence, where the consequences of decades of decline are coming to roost. People want solutions, they want actual material changes on the things they care about, they want to belong to a national story that actually relates to reality and a national effort that builds a safer, more successful country in which to live. They want to see a way out of this failure. Though the issues are popular, there are no popular low hanging fruits left for solutions. Our politicians are going to have to upset vested interests, lobbyists, sections of the public, their own dinner party guests, to just get things done.
If politicians read the above and think it can’t be done, that no one will do it, they will continue to make the same mistakes. Fixing the country will require politicians ready to face reality, to tell a national story and take risks. If they don’t, they will continue the same doom loop the Conservatives found themselves in: looking for free lunches, realising there are none and choosing the politically expedient options – all of which resulted in catastrophic failure for the country and their party.
