The decisive general election in July should have changed the mood of day-to-day British politics. A government has been installed for the next four to five years with a well-nigh impregnable majority.
After the turmoil of the past decade, the electorate surely does not want to be troubled again until full term – they simply want the politicians to get on and sort things out. Politicians should be using the next few years for regrouping, rethinking and developing the vision thing.
Vision for the Labour government should mean identifying what their slogan “change” means. How they are going to make our society better and wealthier, both absolutely and in comparison to competitors. The opposition parties need to work out how they can align their different values with what the voters are looking for.
In the UK, Labour and Conservative politicians seem to have grasped that they now have time on their side – in contrast to much of the news media which seem addicted to re-animating old battles, as if nothing had changed. Unfortunately, the politicians are not using their time wisely. On both sides, they are pre-occupied with revisionism rather than offering hope or change for a better future.
For Labour, Sir Keir Starmer is suggesting he will need two terms, that is until 2034, to take the country back to where it was in 2010. He has made no bright promises or pledges bolder than that. His “Missions” are touted to “end sticking plaster politics” but they are all corrective, with opening statements embellished with words such as “secure”, “boost” and, no less than three times, “reforming”.
The Conservatives are taking their time over their uninspiring leadership contest, in which second-tier ministers have no messages for the country at large, posturing exclusively for fellow Tory MPs and the increasingly obscure party “membership”.
A longer contest may have been wise, even though it will leave the Conservatives without a new leader or chancellor to respond to Labour’s budget on 30 October. But, having chosen to delay the choice, why severely limit open consideration of the candidates at the party conference? The leadership contest was the only point of the Tory conference this year, except for post mortems on the worst election result since 1832.
The national mood and pervasive fear that Britain really is broken are not going to be lifted by either of the main parties. Starmer is promising that “things will get worse before they get better” and openly looking forward to a “painful” budget, complete with an advance down payment of reduced support for ten million pensioners.
After an obligatory nod to their election defeat, the Conservative candidates for the leadership are essentially telling the voters that they have just made a mistake and that, given the chance, they would do it all again, except with new faces in charge.
Starmer’s head of strategy, Morgan McSweeney, is said to be working on how Labour can win the next election from the day he first found his desk in Downing Street. He knows that “are you better off now than you were four years ago ?” remains the defining question in electoral politics.
From devaluation, through the three-day week, the winter of discontent, black Wednesday and the credit crunch to Trussonomics, no modern British government has survived economic catastrophe at the subsequent general election.
The Conservatives fell behind Labour when Boris Johnson’s Covid rule-breaking was revealed and there was no way back for them after the hair-raising events of October 2022. These two factors explain Starmer’s sober, prosecutorial demeanour and his government’s efforts to stabilize the economy by following Treasury-led orthodoxy. Sensible measures perhaps, but both relate to the past not the future. The country is suffering from an absence of positive leadership.
Waiting for growth, mostly to be driven by the private sector, is likely to take a long time especially when a grim survey of present circumstances has resulted in de facto cuts rather than spending on the new government’s priorities including infrastructure, defence and the green new deal.
It could be that the Chancellor Rachel Reeves will surprise us all with some transformative ideas in the Budget. If so, she is keeping them secret. If there is no fresh economic disaster it might just be enough for one more election win if she is in a position to argue “You are no worse off”. But no more than that, especially with no green shoots to point to.
The Conservatives should have no such concerns at this stage in the cycle. Negativity about what the government is doing only licences the incumbents to blame their predecessors.Labour is bound to go on blaming the last fourteen years of Conservative government, just as the Conservatives spend their term blaming the previous thirteen years of Labour government. Politicians find this excuse for policy irresistible.Voters are bored by it.
An opposition this far behind with so long until the next major election should recognize that its previous offering failed. Polling shows that most voters, including Conservative supporters, are not interested in the return of tax cuts, leaving the ECHR, re-instating Rwanda deportations or getting Brexit done. They are worried about the state of the NHS and the cost of living. Touting old policies for revival amounts to a dog rolling in its own vomit. At best, the wannabe leaders embracing the past may delay a few defectors to Reform UK but they will not reverse the rise of Nigel Farage’s upbeat nationalist revanchism.
Ronald Reagan offered “Morning in America”, Barak Obama promised “Hope, Bill Clinton came from a Town called that. Harold Wilson relished the white heat of technology and the swinging sixties. Margaret Thatcher restored the UK as a world power. Tony Blair welcomed everyone into the New Labour big tent, David Cameron was aiming for the “sunlit uplands”.
In comparison to these successful leaders, Starmer is prime minister by default. If he does not start promising a brighter future soon, and the Conservative cannot make their compass point to better times, the short term will have triumphed over the long term, leaving the nation in dire need of other leaders from other parties to plot the way ahead.
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