On Thursday, voters will have a historic opportunity, not just decisively to evict one of the worst governments this country has ever endured. They will have the chance to replace it with something altogether different: a Labour administration characterised by integrity and a respect for public office, an understanding of ordinary people’s lives, and an honest desire to make Britain a fairer and greener place. Such simple ingredients, but ones that have been missing in action for the past 14 years, to the detriment of us all.
Only three Labour leaders have won majorities in the past 100 years. If the polls are proved right, Keir Starmer looks set to become the fourth, an extraordinary feat just five years after his party suffered its worst electoral defeat since the 1930s. Voters should seize this chance to inflict a heavy electoral loss on the Conservatives for their ruinous period in office, and positively endorse the alternative future that the Labour party offers.
Austerity, Brexit, the pandemic, Rwanda
A global financial meltdown; a pandemic; then an energy crisis: the last 15 years have been characterised by a series of painful external shocks. But every Conservative prime minister since 2010 has acted to make things immeasurably worse. First came the austerity years. David Cameron and George Osborne used the cover of the financial crisis for their ideological pursuit of a thinner welfare state: the chronic underfunding of the NHS, the cutting of financial support for low-paid parents in order to pay for tax cuts disproportionately benefiting the better off, and the erosion of services for vulnerable adults and children. The excruciating results are evident today, from the record numbers of people waiting for NHS diagnosis and treatment to rising levels of child poverty and rough sleeping.
The financial crisis should have been the wake-up call that prompted politicians to recognise the structural economic issues facing Britain: low levels of business investment, sluggish productivity growth, and some of the highest regional inequalities of any wealthy nation. Instead, the right flank of the Conservative party, led by an opportunistic Boris Johnson, promised the country that leaving the European Union would magically solve all our economic woes and transform an underfunded NHS. Of course, no such thing materialised. Brexit has proved the very definition of an own goal; it has made Britain poorer, more unequal and undermined exports and investment, all while sucking up political and diplomatic bandwidth and eroding our influence on the world stage.
Johnson’s premiership was also plagued by a sordid disintegration of standards in public life, from the official spread of misinformation to the Partygate fines that resulted from him breaking his own Covid regulations to the multitude of ministers who broke the ministerial code. The tenure of his successor Liz Truss came to an end after just 49 days, after her chancellor announced billions of pounds of unfunded tax cuts that led to the pound crashing. Rishi Sunak has prioritised trying to ape Reform with an immoral, unworkable, expensive plan to strip asylum seekers of the right to claim refuge by detaining them and deporting them to Rwanda.
Johnson won a healthy majority in 2019 off the back of promising to fix the country by getting Brexit done; since then, Conservative governments have only deepened the cost of living crisis and undermined public services. In recent months, local and byelection results have highlighted just how angry many people are. Sunak deserves not just to lose, but to lose badly.
Reform, caution and regaining trust
The flip side of a bad Tory loss is a decisive Labour win. Some point to evidence that anger at the Conservatives has not evolved into unbridled enthusiasm for Starmer; Starmer’s net approval ratings are higher than Sunak’s, yet remain fairly low in the context of Labour’s overall poll lead. Labour does, however, deserve a positive endorsement from the electorate, including in Scotland where the SNP has a very poor track record in government on education and health.
Starmer has transformed Labour from the party led by Jeremy Corbyn. He has confronted the antisemitism that had flourished in the party, to the extent that the equalities and human rights regulator found that the party had acted unlawfully in its treatment of Jewish members. The regulator consequently took Labour out of special measures 16 months ago: a vital step on the road to government. He has made changes to the party rulebook with a focus on winning elections rather than internal wrangles. The party has, however, been accused of applying disciplinary processes differently to internal critics. Starmer must be careful not to stifle healthy dissent in Labour’s broad parliamentary church. He also needs to provide clearer answers, including to women in his own party, on how exactly Labour would protect women’s rights to access single-sex spaces, services and sports given the lack of clarity in existing law.
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Labour’s manifesto is, in many ways, an exercise in cautious incrementalism, as Starmer suggests in his article in today’s Observer. That is because it has pursued an election campaign focused on winning the trust of voters for deliverable change, rather than promising that things will be radically different as soon as Starmer steps over the Downing Street threshold. Its pledges give a sense of its priorities: more NHS appointments and cancer scanners; more teachers in schools; free breakfast clubs for all primary schools; new guarantees for minimum standards in neighbourhood policing; and a publicly-owned green energy company to help catalyse the shift to clean power. All positive, and all achievable, but unlikely to be enough to meet Labour’s impressively ambitious missions that include securing the highest sustained growth in the G7, moving to zero-carbon electricity by 2030, building an NHS fit for the future, and ensuring every child can fulfil their potential through the education system. But they are concrete steps along the way.
Labour has been criticised for following the Tories in failing to be honest about the scale of the fiscal challenge facing the country: shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has effectively committed herself to the same debt target as chancellor Jeremy Hunt, and to a baseline of Conservative spending plans that include further deep cuts to public services. But it was always going to be extremely difficult for Labour to level with voters about just how bad that baseline is when Conservatives are effectively pretending cuts are not happening.
Labour will have to confront the fact that delivering the growth key to transforming public services and restoring a half-decent safety net is likely to require more public investment than it has allowed for. It will require raising more through revenues such as capital gains tax, or more borrowing. That is a conversation with voters that will have to happen as part of resetting trust in politics and moving away from the populism-infected Conservatism of recent years. But a Labour cabinet filled with people from a mix of backgrounds with real experience of the issues faced by voters would be well placed to do that.
Tough challenges lie ahead
If Labour wins, its task will be far from easy. There is much that will make governing Britain in the second half of the 2020s a more difficult prospect than the last time the party conclusively defeated a Conservative government in 1997. There are all the long-term structural economic issues that have gone unaddressed, alongside other urgent challenges that have fallen by the wayside. With the honourable exception of the Liberal Democrats – whose candidates deserve support wherever they are best placed to defeat a Conservative opponent – there has been too little talk of social care in this campaign; that so many older people go without the personal care needed to live dignified lives and that without fundamental reform of the system this will only get worse.
Young people today face far more hostile financial circumstances than their parents’ generation: some of the most expensive housing costs in Europe, and a lifetime of repaying tens of thousands of pounds of tuition fee debt; this will serve to widen the gap between those who can rely on family wealth and those who cannot. The educational attainment gap between children from poorer and more advantaged backgrounds, already widening before the pandemic, is opening up further in its wake. Overhanging this is the climate crisis and the fact that without immediate international action the world will become increasingly uninhabitable.
Make no mistake, the challenge facing Britain’s next government will make winning the election look like child’s play. Starmer knows this, which is why Labour’s campaign has not been filled with the joy and light that some of us quite understandably crave after the hard times of recent years. But know this when you cast your vote on Thursday: there remain tough times ahead, but only a Labour government can begin to deliver the real change that Britain so desperately needs.