We've reached that stage in the political cycle where commentators are beginning to wonder why the government keeps screwing up. The immediate prompt for this was the passing of the latest welfare bill, which generated a minor backbench revolt and a "dilution" that means it isn't as stunningly mean-spirited as originally intended. Beyond the theatrics of Westminster, the government continues to pursue its programme. Not the one it was elected on, but the one it intended to enact all along, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the received wisdom of twenty years ago, hence ideas such as a national ID card have resurfaced while a rebranded Sure Start has got Polly Toynbee trilling with delight.
There are obviously tonal differences between Blair and Starmer, and these have even been offered as an explanation for the current government's struggles. For example, Stephen Bush has decided that the Prime Minister has no real interest in policy beyond justice and security, which was a useful insight when made by Oliver Eagleton in The Starmer Project in 2022 but seems otiose now. Starmer's brief was to recover the Labour Party from the left. That he then won the general election was a bonus, but it's churlish to condemn him for being narrow-minded and dull when those were the qualities necessary to fulfill the original brief. There is a hint in Bush's reading of Starmer that the chief cock-ups, notably the Winter Fuel Allowance imbroglio, can be laid at the door of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Simon Wren-Lewis is baffled that the government didn't recognise that tax rises were inevitable immediately on taking office. He doesn't mention Rachel Reeve's crap impression of Captain Renaud, shocked to discover what a mess the Tories had left, which would have reinforced the point, perhaps because he wishes to find an explanation for the Chancellor's behaviour that doesn't highlight her cynicism (if nothing else, those tears mean everyone will try not to be mean to her for a week or two). The best he can come up with is: "that they accepted that George Osborne was correct: the size of the state under New Labour was too large, and he was essentially right to shrink it. This meant Labour in government would be a more competent version of a post-Osborne Conservative government."
But rather than accept the charge of the left that there is an ideological congruence between this government and that of the 2010-16 period, Wren-Lewis insists that this was simply a political misjudgement. Likewise he attributes the government's attempts to outbid Reform on immigration to error: giving undue salience to the issue and echoing Nigel Farage's lies about the impact on public services. At this point you might wonder if telling "lies" is evidence of misjudgment or maybe something else. Starmer's track record of deceit and dissimulation in his ascent to the party leadership can lead one to assume that he has no fixed beliefs, but you don't accidentally employ the language of Enoch Powell unless there is some base sympathy.
Simon's prescription for the government to turn round its unpopularity is to be more honest about the need for tax rises, to "plausibly argue that while everyone is promising lower immigration, only they are doing so in a way that doesn’t damage the economy", and finally to start admitting that Brexit has been a mistake. The latter should be emphasised not only because it is true, and will become more evident to voters over time, but in order to remind voters that Farage was one of the chief authors of that calamity. For good measure, he also suggests pointing out that the chaos of the Trump administration is a harbinger of what we could expect from a Farage premiership.
In his final analysis, Wren-Lewis is pessimistic, anticipating that the government will not raise taxes sufficiently, that they will continue to ape Reform on immigration and that they will fail to be open and honest about the costs of Brexit. Given that he set out to explain why Labour have made these mistakes in office, you might feel a little short-changed. Insofar as he points the finger, it is to suggest that Morgan McSweeney may be less clever than his mates in the media suggest and that Starmer hasn't understood "the difference between being in opposition and government". But naivety on the part of Starmer is no more explanatory than the trope of the king's evil advisor.
Andy Beckett, whose modus operandi is to ask innocent questions, focuses not on the economic logic for tax rises but on the moral case for redistribution. He often overdoes the disingenousness. Thus he is correct to point out that "Creating a more egalitarian society and politics – which by definition means redistribution from the powerful – was Labour’s original purpose", but there are surely few people, even in the party itself, who imagine that egalitarianism continues to be a motivating force rather than a mere shibboleth. The mantra of New Labour, and centrist political parties in most other developed countries from the 1980s onwards, was that growth would deliver improved public goods, and thus ameliorate inquality, but that we must therefore prioritise wealth creation and so coddle the wealth creators.
It was, in effect, the centre-left version of trickle-down economics, with the state providing a more concrete presence than the invisible hand of the market. The problem, evident to all since 2008, is that underlying growth was anemic, artifically amplified by financial speculation in the preceding decades. The steadily-encroaching climate crisis has called into question whether growth is even viable, and we may find ourselves struggling to stand still as decades of under-investment cause the fabric of public life to start falling apart. If the cake can't be rapidly enlarged, then inevitably politics will turn to the question of how big our relative slices should be.
The answer to the question "Why is Labour so afraid to admit that we must tax the rich?" is therefore quite simple. It remains committed to the idea that wealth must be coddled. To that end, public goods must be rationed so that the state's share of GDP doesn't rise and ideally falls. What Beckett describes as New Labour's strategy of redistribution by stealth (the minimum wage, family tax credits etc), but which would be better called "trickle down", is no longer viable because economic growth will not produce tax revenues sufficient to address the growing demand for public goods. The reforms suggested to boost productivity, such as deregulating planning, are hopelessly inadequate, while the one available change that would boost the economy quickly - completely reversing Brexit - is politically unpalatable.
The Blairite Philip Collins thinks that we are facing an era of small party politics and thus of coalition government. The fragmentation of support in the opinion polls is real enough, but we shouldn't imagine that this reflects a greater volatility among voters. The British system was built on two mass parties that acted as informal coalitions: the "broad church" in Labour's case. Together with the trope of the swing voter, this gave the impression of structural stability and marginal shifts. Underneath was a wide variety of views across the electorate and often vicious contests within the parties themselves. What has happened since then is that both main parties have become narrower and more intolerant of dissent, largely due to Brexit (the Conservatives) and the war on the left (Labour). The inevitable consquence is that voters look elsewhere.
Collins's future preference is for a grand coalition of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, though with the implicit rider that the Tories return to the sensible centre, leaving the crazies to Reform and the lefties fragmented and ineffective across the Greens, various independents and whatever vehicle Corbyn and Sultana manage to launch. What this daydream ignores is that so long as MPs are elected on a first-past-the-post basis, Nigel Farage is more likely to be a king-maker than Ed Davey. Indeed, a Labour-Reform coalition is far from being improbable. Collins may be right that Labour supporters are "inveterately hostile to a deal with Reform", but that doesn't apply to the PLP.
As this point it is worth recalling that Simon Wren-Lewis saw the government echoing George Osborne and apeing Nigel Farage as misjudgements, as evidence of Starmer's political naivety. The troubling reality may be that just as there has been an ideological congruence between Labour and the Tories on the need to privilege wealth since the 90s, so there is now a meeting of minds between both parties and Reform on the need to lower immigration and welfare rolls. And don't expect the Lib Dems or Greens to mount an effective opposition to that emerging consensus.
We're facing a future in which no one party can command anywhere near a majority of the electorate, not because there aren't policies that command public support but because the cartel isn't prepared to put them to the vote - most obviously a meaningful wealth tax, but also nationalisation of utilities - and will happily fragment the party system if it means the same people can stay in power through increasingly squalid coalition deals. In Lampedusa's The Leopard the famous maxim is that everything must change for everything to remain the same. In reality, it was a change in outward forms, the compromise of the fading aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie, not a change in the fundamental class relations of capital and labour. To maintain the privileges of wealth, the British party system will be broken apart.
