The Nightmare Before Christmas

What difference would it have made if Jeremy Corbyn had become Prime Minister just before Christmas? The bumptious Matt Chorley at the Times recently imagined a Corbyn-led government as both dithering and hyper-interventionist but above all "crankish", which is another way of saying that he is still suffering nightmares about it. Of course, what he really feared was not Carry On Social Democracy but opportunistic "disaster socialism", in which crisis provided the excuse for radical change to the social and economic order (this is clearly projection by those who relish disaster capitalism). Ironically, this concept enjoyed a brief vogue last year among British liberals and the soft-left who wished to dismiss the assumed utopianism of Lexiteers, though it has been revived in the US in a more positive way lately to suggest that the pandemic might nudge the country towards a better social safety net. Amid the stale jokes and gratuitous insults, Chorley did at least concede a good point: that we have even less idea of what a Starmer-led government would look like.

Jeremy Corbyn in Number 10 is obviously a counterfactual, but it's one that allows us to think about what a Labour government might have considered the outer limit of the possible: how far it could have pushed the Overton Window under propitious circumstances. This is useful in that it may provide an benchmark against which to measure Labour's offer at the next general election. I have no doubt that the offer will be more modest, and not just because of Keir Starmer's emphasis on competence (i.e. a change in personnel rather than a change in policy), but the gap between the two provides the basis for a critique of substance rather than form. An important caveat with this counterfactual is that a Corbyn-led administration might also have been less radical than expected, not just because of resistance by the establishment and likely sabotage by the PLP, but because of Corbyn and McDonnell's own caution and desire for consensus. But that's boring. Instead, let's imagine that they followed their instincts in full and that they specifically saw the Covid-19 crisis as an opportunity to advance the recognisably socialist policies that would give Matt Chorley night-sweats.

As a "new broom", any non-Conservative goverment would probably have paid more attention to the national risk register and contingency plans on taking office after a decade of Tory mismanagement than the Johnson regime did, if only as part of an audit of the previous administration for the purpose of easy point-scoring. This means there would have been a decent chance that some of the holes in the planning would have been spotted earlier (the first reports from Wuhan were on 31st December, the first WHO bulletin on 5th January) and that rectification might have been initiated some weeks before March (e.g. buying ventilators and replenishing PPE supplies). It's also worth noting that senior public health officials operate in a political field. It's not pure science. We saw that with their willingness to indulge the nudge unit and "herd immunity" in the early communications, which was a concession to Tory ideology and the assumed preferences of Number 10. In contrast, I suspect they would have assumed a Labour goverment to be more supportive of a strict public health approach and would have advised accordingly. This means there would be have been more likelihood of an earlier lockdown.

A Labour government might have insisted that all care home staff remain in situ and isolated with residents. This would have made sense in terms of shielding and reducing infection (we now know that agency staff moving between homes was a key vector in the spread), but it would also have highlighted the failings of the care sector. It would have disrupted the agency labour market, required increased staffing to allow rotating shifts and prompted calls for state support as care homes at the margin of profitability became unviable. This would have intensified the "crisis in care" that has been developing over the last decade and allowed a Labour government to accelerate its plans for a National Care Service. Consistent with this approach, a Labour government might also have had the good sense to rule against elderly patients in hospital being returned directly to care homes in the early stages of the pandemic rather than being tested and quarantined in the under-utilised Nightingale hospitals.

Responsibility for test and trace could have been immediately assigned to local government and existing regional public health bodies. The "world-beating" app would have rightly been relegated to an adjunct of the programme. This would not only have marginalised outsource providers like Serco and inexperienced figureheads like Dido Harding, it would have provided the foundation for a more thorough devolution of power from Whitehall. That the Health Secretary, Matt Hanock, wants even more private sector involvement in public health going forward, despite the failures to date, shows the sort of nerve that you would hope (absent the failures) a Labour government would display, but in the opposite direction. This devolution could be extended to local job guarantee schemes, to provide useful (but non-coercive) work and training during the developing recession, and an expansion of local authority resources and responsibility for workplace inspections in respect of both employment rights and public health and safety (those Leicester sweatshops).

The GCSE, BTEC and A-level mess could have been avoided by awarding grades based on teacher assessment and then allocating university slots pro-rata across all schools, so that a "bog standard" comprehensive got as many places per capita as Eton in the first pass. Russell Group universities could have been obliged to set quotas on offers between state and independent schools, so the latter would only get 7% of the "cream". This would have met the ostensible goal of the infamous algorithm - to ensure student demand matched the supply of places - while also making a real contribution to social mobility. It would, of course, have marked a radical departure from the systemic bias of the past and thus relatively disadvantaged private schools, but a reforming Labour government should relish that. Having made such a change, it would be palpably unfair to then revert back to the old system next year. Indeed, the smarter parents of the privately-educated would be looking to transfer their 16 and 17-year olds to the state sector. The independent school sector wouldn't disappear overnight, but it would probably rapidly shrink to focus on pre-14 education.

Though the Conservative government did act to provide business and income support, the manner in which it did so produced lots of omissions and anomalies that have led to individual hardship, particularly for those in the more "flexible" sectors of the economy that the Tories have historically lauded. The design of an across-the-board taper for the furlough scheme means that we are now facing the prospect of rapidly rising unemployment and poverty in a matter of weeks, affecting all sectors. The obvious opportunity for a Labour government would have been to cut the Gordian knot of wage support by introducing a universal basic income (and associated tax clawback for the employed) as a temporary measure. The cunning plan would be to allow this to run on naturally until the recession was over, rather than terminate on a specific date, which would inevitably lead to calls next year for it to be made permanent and for the rump of Universal Credit to be disassembled into separate, contingent benefits.

One reason for a UBI would be to make the churn in businesses easier. Rather than committing to propping up firms, a Labour government could argue for reduced state support for capital in favour of increased support for labour, the better to facilitate exit and entry. Failing firms could fail gracefully, while freed-up labour would have the confidence to reject poor quality and precarious jobs and could instead opt for further training or explore freelancing. Ceteris paribus, this should lead to an improvement in national productivity, though that may be initially obscured by the effects of the recession and the changes in working practices that the pandemic appears to be triggering. However, such an approach would also provide a more flexible and forgiving environment for those changes to work through and would also help maintain aggregate demand. A UBI would require reform of the taxation system were it to become a permanent feature, but that could be deferred for a couple of years to allow the principle to be established.

Just as the Second World War made salient both Beveridge's "five great evils" and the potential for change, so the pandemic has shone a brighter light on the vulnerabilities of the health and care sectors, the inequities of education and the precariousness of the economy, while also revealing that there is a magic money tree after all. Things could be different and the political battle leading up to the next general election is likely to focus on whose vision of change or continuity catches the electorate's imagination. For all the revolutionary talk of the sunny uplands of Brexit and the "levelling up" of the North of England, it has become apparent over the last 8 months that the Conservatives remain the party of entrenched privilege and social neglect. What is less obvious is whether Labour is still the party of reform and progress outside of neoliberal technocracy. In particular, you have to wonder why Keir Starmer isn't taking the opportunity afforded by the pandemic to build a public consensus for the sort of radical change that pushes beyond the 2017 and 2019 manifestos (National Broadband now appears a quite modest idea).

One of the characteristics of Labour's 1945 manifesto was that it was comprehensive, even if it was light on detail in many areas. At the time, this was seen as entirely appropriate to the circumstances: the UK needed root-and-branch reform and it was the broad thrust of policy that energised voters not the minutiae. In 2019, the party's manifesto was dismissed as over-stuffed and incredible. This was not just an unflattering comparison with the Tory's sketchy offer of "Get Brexit done", but a conservative lament against comprehensive change: a view apparently echoed by many in the Labour party, including the soi-disant "soft left". Where the two differed is that the 1945 version could skip the detail because much of it had already been publicly discussed, for example by the 1942 Beveridge Report and the plans for the NHS. Labour failed to adequately prepare the electorate between 2017 and 2019, but the pandemic has perhaps now achieved more in this regard than any number of reports and social media memes could. The question is, will Starmer build on this or will his critique remain "I would have done the same, just more competently".