The UK’s crises are deep, yet the solutions on offer are horrendously shallow.
The Conservative Government is a pathetic basket-case of hate – scapegoating migrants and disabled people for their 14 years of failure, while whipping up culture wars over rainbow lanyards or sex education in schools. They flounder in the polls and deservedly so.
The country has been through the worst cost-of-living crisis on record. Child poverty is soaring, as is homelessness, NHS waiting lists remain outrageously high, low pay and insecure work is endemic; everywhere you look there is crisis: councils collapsing into bankruptcy, universities on the brink, and shortages of nurses, GPs, dentists, social care workers, teachers, you name it.
Into the fray comes brave knight Sir Keir Starmer, the Leader of the Opposition, and almost certainly the next Prime Minister. But he is not being carried into Downing Street on a wave of enthusiasm – more of a disconsolate shrug. Despite the unpopularity of the Conservatives, Keir Starmer has a personal rating of -20, according to new Ipsos polling.
Against this backdrop, Starmer launched his six pledges on Thursday. They are deliberately modest and broad, a reflection of the calculation made by Labour strategists that people have lost too much faith in politics to change things. Starmer himself conceded “they’ve beaten the hope out of people”, and so having simple short-term targets is about rebuilding trust.
People have watched Rishi Sunak make five pledges in 2023 – and only achieve one of them, one he had nothing to do with achieving and which was forecast to happen anyway: halving inflation.
Starmer has of course also contributed to the lack of trust in politics himself. Here was a man who sat in the Shadow Cabinet of Jeremy Corbyn, and not only wanted him to be Prime Minister, but called him “a friend” (then later said they weren’t friends after all).
Just four years ago, Starmer stood to be Labour leader on a platform which included scrapping university tuition fees, defending freedom of movement and higher taxation on the rich to fund public services – all of which he has since U-turned on.
Those were all part of his largely junked “10 pledges” – so if they can be so easily discarded, it’s understandable that he might not be believed today.
So what of the six pledges? They are largely inoffensive, positive even, but woefully inadequate to meet the problems we face.
In an economy racked by insecure work and low growth the pledge is “tough spending rules, so we can grow our economy”. As the economist Jonathan Portes writes, “the idea that ‘tough fiscal rules’ are remotely sufficient to deliver ‘economic stability’, let alone growth and improved living standards, is self-evidently nonsense – as the experience of the last 20 years shows”.
A decade-and-a-half of spending restraint and austerity has resulted in low growth and falling living standards. Labour needs to maximise investment, refund public services and boost social security if the economy is to grow.
The pledge to cut NHS waiting lists promises “40,000 more evening and weekend appointments”, but where are the extra staff coming from? Asking existing overworked NHS staff to do even more overtime is a recipe for more burnout and even clinical errors.
The launch of a Border Security Command to “smash criminal gangs” neglects the fact that desperate people will always try to get here, and the gangs can exist because safe and legal routes to claim asylum don’t.
The establishment of Great British Energy – a publicly-owned energy producer – is welcome, but the funding is insufficient to achieve the necessary scale. And Starmer has already significantly diluted Labour’s green investment plans.
Talk of “crackdowns on antisocial behaviour” and “tough new penalties for offenders” jar with the already existing backlog in courts and overcrowded prisons. Especially when Starmer spent yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions criticising early release schemes.
Finally Starmer pledged to recruit 6,500 new teachers by “ending tax breaks for private schools” – a just redistribution from privilege to the schools that educate 93 per cent of our children.
But the reason that the Government has not met its teacher recruitment target for years, and teachers are leaving the profession in record numbers, is because of falling real pay and rising workloads. Without addressing pay, it will be hard to meet the staffing shortages right across the public services.
Labour has calculated that modest steps to rebuild trust may be necessary, but the paradox is that trust will also be broken, and disillusionment with politics entrenched, if things don’t improve. People know that things are in a mess so you need significant change, not modest tinkering.
Clement Attlee’s Labour government took office in 1945 after the devastation of the Second World War, with debt two-and-a-half times what it is today. Facing that challenge, they didn’t moderate their vision. They recognised that the scale of the problems required big solutions: the NHS, the welfare state, mass council housebuilding, legal aid, public ownership of gas, electricity, rail and telecommunications.
Starmer has set out his first steps, but in government he will discover that giant leaps are needed. Today was sticking-plaster politics, but Britain needs extensive surgery.
Andrew Fisher is a former executive director of policy for the Labour Party
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