Labour’s inflexibility has backfired
The government has hedged itself in and ruled out options.
Everyone knew about the mess the Tories are in after five prime ministers and fourteen years of weak or incompetent government. The surprise of last week’s local elections is the shocking state that the Labour party is in after just nine months back in government.
The Thrasher and Rallings calculations of National Equivalent Vote Share for The Sunday Times put Reform UK on 32% last week, Labour on 19%, the Conservatives on 18% and the Liberal Democrats 16%. The trend is worst for the party in government. In England, Reform are up 17% and the Liberal Democrats up 3%. The Tories are down 8% on their share last July, but the Labour party is down 15%, nearly twice as much.
At the simplest, an overall majority losing 84 Labour MPs had Reform in second place at the last general election. They have cause to be worried about their re-election. Especially since the most vulnerable of these Labour MPs represent the areas around where Reform did best such as Hull, Grimsby and, of course, the lost Westminster by-election in the northwest.
To nobody’s surprise, the Prime Minister is coming under pressure from across the Labour spectrum to change course. So far? the best Sir Keir Starmer has come up with is to promise to go “further faster”.
The Labour leader is correct that he is in possession of a parliamentary majority which should guarantee him over four years to win back the public’s support. The last possible month for the next general election is August 2029. His undaunted determination will be vindicated if the nation reaches the sunlit uplands by then but not if it turns our that his government is accelerating past its “milestones” towards a cliff edge.
This government has had a characteristic tendency to hedge itself in and rule out options. No increases in the major taxes of VAT, NIC and income. The Chancellor to serve a full term. Red lines in improving relations with the EU. Equal partnership with Europe. A second State visit for Trump. The fiscal rules are fixed and immutable.
This inflexibility may be a praiseworthy attempt to restore trust in government by a disillusioned electorate but it has backfired. It means that there is more outrage than ever when the dogmatic ministers come up with policies they did not warn about. Every Labour canvasser will tell you that the withdrawal of the universal winter fuel payment “came up on the doorstep” in a bad way.
Having implied that “working people” will be exempted from pain, the government has no alternative but to target individual interest groups. The clawbacks are a Treasury beancounter’s dream, rejected by previous political chancellors but indulged by Rachel Reeves the economist. Those hit include pensioners, welfare recipients and farmers and others, for whom there is perhaps less sympathy: non-doms, users of private schools, and employers paying NIC.
As Labour pumps a little more into the public sector and unionised pay, private business feels victimized with no compensating gains elsewhere. There is no common cause that “We are all in it together” as the New Labour slogan once had it.
Growth is the government’s watchword, but its policies often seem to obstruct it with home grown red-tape, regulation, and inconclusive policy reviews.
Far from encouraging the talented to come to this country, as other European competitors are doing, the Home Office’s grim-faced absolutism, dancing to Reform’s tune, is turning them away. Meanwhile, legal immigration remains at record levels, while fallaciously debated around the separate and numerically smaller issue of illegal immigration, especially in boats across the channel. Reform UK is left to set the agenda while the government refuses to lead a nuanced national conversation about this central issue of our times.
The same goes for environmental and climate change policies. Ed Miliband, the mastermind of Labour’s green strategy, is largely hidden away while, as Tony Blair put it in more polite terms, energy consumers are told to suck up the inconvenient consequences. The British public is still in favour of fighting climate change but in the absence of thanks, explanations, or fresh thinking, the argument is reduced to what Reform UK calls “net stupid zero”.
Labour’s trouble is that its leaders are failing to create a narrative around what they are doing and why.
Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour team inherited rotten economic circumstances and set about, unimaginatively but sincerely, trying to put them right. They put too much blame on the Conservatives. It was not all their fault. The British economy has been struggling since the credit crunch of 2007/2008, taking further hits from Brexit and Covid.
Labour’s backward-looking narrative contained no vision for the future beyond the simple word “Change”. Last week, voters concluded that Labour is no different from its predecessors, had not delivered change and decided to look elsewhere.
Labour activists want sensitive adjustment to circumstances rather than disconnected policy shocks, reassertion and stealing the clothes of opponents. The ex-Cabinet minister Louise Haigh wrote in The Times: “Ultimately, we must be more confident in our own values, not chased off the pitch by Reform. On the other wing of the party, the influential wonk Jonathan Rutherford is working at the Tory-inclined Policy Change think tank on “the future of the left”. He says what is needed is “not milestones and missions but a fundamental reset”.
Sir Keir Starmer gave a text book example of how he does not get what is expected of him, the morning after the election. Rather than address the disappointing results directly, his media team set up an appearance with apprentices at the defence contractor Leonardo, which is Italian owned.
Presumably, the idea was to capitalise on the approval for Starmer’s competent handling of Ukraine, Trump and other international relations. But the prime minister did not make a speech or spell this out, so this aspect of the visit went unnoticed and unreported. Besides, the outcome of the council elections suggests that the voters outside the Westminster bubble take such prime ministerial duties for granted in normal times.
Equally, Starmer’s championing of apprenticeships over university was inept from a man who has graduated from two universities himself. Why is Labour’s instinct to make it a choice, setting one type of higher education against another?
Labour sticks with its leaders. Starmer is sure to lead his party into the next general election, unlike Kemi Badenoch or Sir Ed Davey. That will not stop internal frustration mounting.
The local elections should be stimulus enough for fresh, positive thinking. If not, the Prime Minister has been given another golden, or rather orange, opportunity to explain what he stands for and where he is leading the country
President Donald Trump’s arrival is a crisis, upsetting assumptions about our national security, challenging science and the rule of law and threatening to plunge the world into recession.
Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves should not let this crisis go to waste. Adapt or die.