Starmer must be honest about the pain ahead
All eyes are on Graham Brady’s postbox as we begin another week of “will they, won’t they”, the game in which we guess whether enough Conservative MPs will try to remove the leader they know isn’t right for the job.
I am increasingly inclined to think they won’t, and that consequently we are facing a cross between a government and a hostage situation: the prime minister gaffer-taped to a green bench and his backbenchers in balaclavas. There will be sops to rebels and sweeteners to red wallers; low-level pork-barrelling of new schools here and regeneration funds there; megajoules of Westminster energy absorbed by machinations and rebellions. Means to an end that few believe in: the continuing premiership of Boris Johnson.
For Her Majesty’s official opposition this is a moment of hazard. The danger is that, buoyed by the continuing travails of the Conservative Party, Labour falls into its comfort zone of berating the “same old Tories” and thinking that they can cruise to office on a wave of loathing for the government. So rich is the offering of Conservative incompetence and sleaze that there is enough to keep Labour’s outrage machines chugging away for quite some time. Just before an election they might whip up a few big spending pledges: 10,000 new teachers, 100,000 new doctors, a million new homes; some large and delightfully round numbers to lure voters over the line.
It’s a path to power, but the wrong one. For the right course, the Labour Party would do well to heed the wisdom of their former leader. Last week Tony Blair gave a speech in which he decried the “gaping hole in the governing of Britain where new ideas should be” and warned that “without a radical shift in policy, we face a steady, inexorable compound decline, similar to the 1960s and 1970s . . . we are relegating ourselves to a league which is poorer, less prosperous and less powerful”.
Leave aside for a moment your possible antipathy to Blair. On this he speaks the truth. His most insightful line: “Not a single thing we need to do to turn our fortunes around will come without political pain, and our politics shows few if any signs of preparedness to tolerate that pain.”
If Keir Starmer wants to win an election, and win it in a way that provides him with a mandate for doing transformative things, he must show not only a preparedness to tolerate political pain but a frankness about the national pain that is necessary, too.
Suggesting that the British public might have an appetite for pain in this, the year of our Lord 2022, may seem odd. We have endured years of spending cuts, the rupture of Brexit, the calamity of the pandemic. Further pain? This would seem to be over-salting things. Yet my feeling is that many of my countrymen and women have a yearning for some bracing truth-telling; an appetite for the kind of leadership that forensically picks through our national problems and how we might address them.
We are tired of Boris’s boosterism, sick of the endless politics of the present political scene. Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Johnson frets about banning “wine-time Fridays” while huge problems moulder away in the long grass: the mountainous national debt, sluggish productivity, a buckling NHS, a tottering social care system, the question mark over what on earth Brexit Britain means, or how on earth we reach net zero emissions by 2050.
Against these giant challenges we see pygmy politics with no clear plans, and the mismatch is frightening. This presents an opportunity for Labour. Instead of claiming to be the grown-ups, they must show it. Instead of churning out tweets tutting at the latest Tory screw-up, Starmer and team should be preparing a plan for government that confronts the hard decisions others have ducked.
They should be assembling a “brains trust” to answer the nation’s questions on pension reform, NHS reform, the size and scope of the state. Looking at Labour’s front bench I am reassured by the presence of serious politicians: Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, Lisa Nandy, Wes Streeting. Now they need the plans - dry, costed, robust but seriously ambitious - to turn the head of middle England.
In some areas Labour is already showing the level of ambition required. Ed Miliband is an estimable shadow secretary of state who has done a lot of deep thinking on climate change. On the importance of investing in gigafactories or greening the steel industry he is compelling. But let’s face it, this is pretty pain-free stuff. We hear much less on the painful territory of how our own lives must change to reach net zero. What of road pricing? Gas boilers? Air passenger duty? What incentives, or penalties, will there be to encourage us to travel and heat our homes differently? More specifics will scare some horses, of course, but a cogent plan requires specifics.
When sketching the future of our economy, Labour is drawn to the pain-free, romantic rhetoric of ensuring that, in Starmer’s words, we “buy, make and sell more in Britain”. Their visions are of men in oil-splattered boiler suits, spanners in hand; their plans are to buy more British. I understand the emotional pull of all this but Labour must be prepared to admit the politically painful truth that most industries in left-behind places cannot be “levelled up” with a Whitehall bung, and that often it pays to play to existing strengths in the great conurbations around Manchester, the West Midlands and - gasp! - London.
The most politically painful but urgent task must be to grab the nettle on NHS reform. In his conference speech last year, then shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth sang a lot of the familiar tunes about “the Tory threat to our NHS . . . privatisation by the back door . . . a two-tier health system”. He splashed theoretical cash on a children’s health and wellbeing strategy, improvements to maternity care, smoking cessation help and a shopping list of other services.
This easy, pain-free agenda feels rather like rearranging deckchairs as the good ship NHS descends under the waves. Pouring more money into the health service is not going to cut it. We need a complete rethink of how the NHS is funded and structured, whatever the political pain involved.
Criticise Blair if you will, but few could deny that he, like Thatcher before him, pushed through the political pain barrier to achieve nation-transforming things, such as the introduction of the minimum wage. The same determination has been missing for a long time. The former prime minister laments that “for years, policy, for both parties, in the sense of a relentless search for the right answer . . . was abandoned. Politics became all about politics. Not about ideas”.
Time in opposition moves fast. However juicy the latest Conservative scandal, Labour must go easy on the politics and prioritise the ideas. The rewards for party and nation will be far greater.
The Times
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