ANDREW NEIL: If you’re expecting a Labour landslide, you must have missed Keir Starmer’s word salad of mind-numbing banality
Tory MPs like to agonise over whether the next General Election will be a repeat of 1992 (when the Conservatives under new leader John Major surprisingly won a fourth term on a much-reduced majority but one big enough to last five years); or 1997 (when the Major government was wiped out by Tony Blair’s first landslide and the Tories spent 13 years exiled in the political wilderness).
In reality, it will be neither. Tory hopes of clinging to power are fading. Labour is clearly favourite to win the next election. But it will not be by a landslide.
British politics, of course, is especially febrile these days and things can change fast (only 16 months ago, Boris Johnson was still riding high in the polls as prime minister and looked set to lead a two-term Tory government). So all predictions can be based only on what we know now, assuming no unforeseen major change.
And what we know now, with some certainty, is that the Tories are too far gone to scrape home again as they did 31 years ago. There has been no Rishi Sunak bounce since he became Prime Minister, no sign that he’s brought any kind of X-factor to the job, only the increasingly settled view among voters that he leads a government without direction, vision, ideas or purpose — a government, in short, already past its sell-by date.
But widespread Tory unpopularity doesn’t mean a Blair-style Labour landslide for the simple reason that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair, who offered a fresh start after 18 years of increasingly tired Tory rule without any desire to roll back those parts of the Thatcher revolution which had ended Britain’s long post-war decline — and whose appeal cut across differences of class, region and party affiliation in ways that Starmer can only dream of.
Most of Starmer’s five missions, such as an NHS ‘fit for the future’, safer streets and more meritocracy, are ambitions that every politician in every mainstream party would subscribe to
So the prognosis is for a Labour government with a decent working majority after the next election; not a landslide but one big enough to last a full five-year parliamentary term. Anybody who thinks Labour can do better than that needs to consult Starmer’s ‘five national missions’ speech in Manchester this week.
It was a word salad of mind-numbing banality, replete with boilerplate platitudes (‘national renewal for a new national purpose’), management-speak gibberish (‘delivery-focused cross-cutting mission boards’) and meaningless drivel (a more ‘empowering, catalytic’ government). These are not the words of an Opposition leader connecting cleverly with the British people and on his way to a landslide.
They are the obscure musings of someone too removed from the language and concerns of plain folk and surrounded by an equally remote clique of advisers, not one of whom had the gumption to take him aside, rip up his Manchester address and present him with a text that potential Labour voters could actually appreciate. Where was blunt-talking Angela Rayner when he needed her?
Starmer might at times be his own worst enemy, but those on whom he relies for advice are doing him no favours. Alastair Campbell would never have let Blair near any of this.
The paucity of new thought from a party in opposition for 13 years — and hence having had plenty of time on its hands for new thinking — is baffling and breathtaking.
Most of Starmer’s five missions, such as an NHS ‘fit for the future’, safer streets and more meritocracy, are ambitions that every politician in every mainstream party in the land would subscribe to. How you realise these ambitions is another matter and on this Starmer has, so far, been silent.
Another of his ‘missions’ is to make Britain the fastest growing economy in the group of major economies known as the G7. This is a strange irrelevance. Of course we need more economic growth (on this he is at one with Liz Truss!), but it’s not some kind of international competition.
We have no control over the growth policies of our competitors. Suppose some decide to prioritise growth even at the price of higher inflation. Do we really want to follow them down that dangerous route so we can boast about being the fastest? Just to ask the question is to answer it.
There has been no Rishi Sunak bounce since he became Prime Minister, no sign that he’s brought any kind of X-factor to the job
It would be sensible, of course, to aim for higher growth than the 2.5 per cent trend growth we’ve traditionally enjoyed in the good times. That would be a tough enough target.
But to outgrow everybody else in the G7 over a ‘sustained’ period? It’s childish. I’m surprised his canny Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves allowed him to say it.
The mission to have zero-carbon emissions from electricity generation by 2030 is even more ludicrous. Labour thinks it can do this with a multi-billion pound investment in more renewables — a doubling of existing onshore wind capacity, a trebling of solar power and a quadrupling of offshore wind.
Good luck in getting all that through Britain’s sclerotic planning procedures in time for it to be up and running (assuming Labour takes power in late 2024) within six years of Starmer moving into 10 Downing Street.
Even if green miracles do happen, the electricity grid still wouldn’t have zero carbon emissions.
Until the technological challenges of storing electricity in huge quantities are resolved (saving the surplus when wind and solar generate more than we need), the grid will still need natural gas as a ‘balancing’ source of power when renewable generation is weak. A party taking the prospect of power seriously should know this.
Perhaps more disturbing than Starmer’s vacuous missions is what’s not attracting his missionary zeal. The eradication of poverty, which still scars so many parts of our land, might be thought a natural mission for a Labour leader. But there was no mention of it in Manchester.
Nor was there anything on housing, so often linked to poverty. The current Tory Government has lost the plot on housing, neither building enough new social housing to improve the lot of the poor, nor enough houses for sale, so young folks cannot afford to get on the housing ladder, producing a permanent ‘generation rent’.
The mission to have zero-carbon emissions from electricity generation by 2030 is even more ludicrous
You might think a Labour leader would have something encouraging to say about both housing shortages.
There could be method, however, in Starmer’s gobbledygook madness. Framing so-called missions and barebones policy initiatives in unintelligible vacuity can cleverly hide the fact that you don’t really have much of substance to say because you are too hemmed in by current economic realities.
It is an unnoticed irony of the brief Truss interregnum that it didn’t just put the kibosh on Tory tax cuts. It’s done the same for Labour spending. The markets have made it plain that borrowing to cut taxes is unacceptable. Interest rates will rise, sterling will fall, pensions will be in jeopardy.
But the markets will be equally unforgiving if a Labour government tried to borrow more, when the budget deficit and national debt are already at historic highs, to go on a spending spree.
The roof would fall in, just as it did for Truss. Given that constraint, perhaps it makes sense to witter on about ‘national renewal for a national purpose’ after all.
With the usual caveat that, by definition, we cannot foresee the unforeseen, the likely outlines of British politics for this messy decade are becoming clearer.
Labour doesn’t so much win the next election as the Tories lose it. Labour is in power with a working majority for a Parliament but not a landslide that would guarantee it at least two terms in power.
For Labour to be re-elected it would need to show good stewardship of the nation. This will be healthy for the country.
The Tories will be out on their ear, deservedly so many will say. But not necessarily for a long time. Labour’s majority will likely be sufficiently modest to make a Tory return to power before the decade is out a possibility.
The Tories will have a Parliament to re-charge their batteries, pick a new generation of leaders and try to re-establish their relevance. That, too, will be healthy for the country.
A change at the next election seems almost baked in to British political expectations. The country might have had enough of the Tories, even if it is not gagging for Starmer. But it does not fear him in the way it feared Jeremy Corbyn.
It is an unnoticed irony of the brief Truss interregnum that it didn’t just put the kibosh on Tory tax cuts; it’s done the same for Labour spending
His five ‘missions’ will be widely seen as a big improvement on the ten Corbynista-style pledges he made to get elected Labour leader three years ago.
They were quickly junked once he was safely in position, suggesting he was just as pragmatic (or untrustworthy) as the man he says he loathes, Boris Johnson.
He will not be able to drop his missions so easily and it’s likely that, if he gets into Downing Street, he will start disappointing us from Day Two.
For all the ludicrous grandiosity of their framing, they touch on matters that really matter to the British people. His ability to deliver on them will determine the longevity of his administration — and any prospect of a Tory comeback before the decade is out.
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