Labour’s staggering incompetence is no surprise after years of performative Opposition
They thought it was going to be easy. They truly believed that all our troubles came from having the nasty Tories in charge. Replace the Bad People with Good People – compassionate sorts who were kind to immigrants and cared about the poor – and all would be well.
The reason that, three months in, Labour already feels like a fag-end government is that its MPs came to believe their own attack-lines. They did not acknowledge that, in politics, everything has a cost. They were unprepared to make (as opposed to talk about) tough choices.
Labour had convinced itself all that was needed was good will. There would be growth if the state invested more! We could improve public sector productivity by giving government employees pay rises! Only the prejudices of Tory district councillors stood in the way of more housing! Criminals would behave better if they weren’t locked up! The EU would respond in kind if we were nice to it!
Maybe our two-party system is to blame. In countries where coalitions are customary, most politicians have an interest in being honest about the trade-offs inherent in government, and only those with little prospect of office pretend that things are easy.
But in Britain, the adversarialism inherent in the layout of the House of Commons creates different incentives. Those incentives can be seen in the very job title of the Leader of the Opposition. Other than during wars or pandemics, Leaders of the Opposition are expected to oppose.
In many ways, this is healthy, serving to keep ministers on their toes. But imagine spending 14 years decrying every government initiative as selfish or stupid. You would hardly be human if you did not come to believe that, once your lot took over, things would automatically improve.
These same incentives make governments reluctant to incur short-term unpopularity for the sake of long-term prosperity. Because they know that the Opposition will howl down any difficult policy as needless sadism, ministers hang back from reforms that everyone, on some level, knows to be necessary.
If you asked the leaders of our main parties, in the strictest privacy, to list the challenges facing Britain, I suspect there would be a measure of consensus.
Their lists might not overlap precisely, but all sides would agree on the core problems: the ratio of workers to pensioners is becoming unsustainable; we have the highest industrial energy costs in the developed world; output per worker lags behind comparable countries; our courts make it impossible to deport illegal immigrants; our national debt stands at 100 per cent of GDP without including student loans, PFI debt and public sector pension liabilities; we don’t build enough infrastructure; the supposedly emergency spending that accompanied lockdown has become permanent.
Even without the antagonisms inherent in first-past-the-post, these would be daunting challenges. When Vladimir Putin, then at the height of his popularity, tried to raise the pension age in 2018, his government nearly fell. If a tyrant who has closed down opposition parties can’t do it, what hope for an elected minister who will be consistently decried from across the chamber as personally wanting pensioners to die?
Perhaps understandably, both parties take refuge in trivia. Arguing about obesity strategies or hunting trophies lets them look busy while ignoring the big issues. We have not built a reservoir since 1992 or a nuclear power station since 1995, but we have raised the age for using sunbeds to 18. Wages for the median full-time worker are 6.9 per cent lower today than in 2008, but we are creating a football regulator. The capacity of Heathrow Airport has been frozen since 2000, but we have banned plastic straws.
I had hoped that, at least in some fields, Labour might use its huge majority to display the toughness it boasted of in opposition. It could have ended the triple lock without losing many votes, because few pensioners vote for it anyway. It could have reversed the growth in mental-health related sicknotes without being accused of murder. It could have brought the dysfunctional NHS into line with European healthcare.
In the event, it has baulked at every challenge. Instead of tying its public-sector pay rises to improvements in productivity – something it might have done as a Labour government with a fresh mandate – it ponied up unconditionally, and was astonished when other unions threatened strikes.
We see the same conceit, the same belief that being well-intentioned is what counts, in Labour’s attitude to freebies. Starmer’s double standards are so brazen as to be almost comical. Dominic Cummings being paid £140,000? An insult to every public sector worker! Sue Gray getting £170,000? “I don’t believe my staff should be the subject of public debate”.
The same self-righteousness guides more consequential decisions. Labour MPs had convinced themselves that the Tories were protecting non-doms because they were “looking after their rich friends”. They are genuinely nonplussed to learn that pushing plutocrats into emigration leads to a net fall in revenue.
They saw VAT on schools as making posh parents help deprived kids. Again, they seem utterly unprepared for the possibility that, when the cost of accommodating more children in the state sector is added to the shortfall once their parents work shorter hours, the net impact might be negative.
They had talked themselves into believing that the Rwanda scheme was a brutal gesture aimed at Right-wing tabloids. Now they are scratching around for an alternative destination, impelled by precisely the same logic, namely that, if France won’t take illegals back, and if our courts won’t return them to their countries of origin, they must go to a third country.
A party accustomed to the easy pieties of opposition is struggling with responsibility. Ed Miliband bans North Sea drilling and then declares, in apparent astonishment, that “it is deeply disappointing” to learn of the closure of the Grangemouth refinery.
Rachel Reeves complains that Tory borrowing was pushing up mortgage costs, but wants to change the rules to borrow another half a trillion pounds – as though an accounting trick somehow means that it would not need to be paid back.
No wonder she is so obsessed with being the first female Chancellor. That, at least, involves neither complexity nor trade-offs.
There is a lesson here for the Conservatives, now gathering in Birmingham. A good Opposition leader must think strategically rather than tactically, forgoing cheap hits so as to avoid the embarrassment that Labour MPs now face for doing what they recently criticised.
All six original leadership candidates failed their first test, opposing the restriction of the winter fuel payments. They forgot the basic Tory principle that benefits should be a last-ditch option for those who lack income or assets, not a universal entitlement. They ignored the reality that a future Conservative government, inheriting a bankrupt country, would almost certainly be unable to restore the allowance.
Perhaps, given the demographics of the party members whose votes they wanted, a certain opportunism was inescapable. But opportunism can be habit-forming.
Suppose Labour goes ahead with its plans to build more houses on the uglier parts of the green belt, which accounts for a disproportionate share of the diminished number of Tory MPs and councillors. Will their leader be strong enough to make a principled case for the housebuilding that, deep down, we all know to be necessary?
In recent years, voters have preferred sweet illusions to bitter truths. The lockdown exaggerated that tendency. No politician dared point out that paying people to stay at home would mean higher taxes and prices.
But there comes a point when illusions run out. Ireland reached it in 2010. At the rate Labour is going, Britain will reach it in 2026. By then, the Tories will need to have established themselves in the public mind as responsible. Are they up to it?