The Tories could just have scuppered Keir Starmer’s chances

 On tax cuts, public spending and Covid lockdowns, the Labour leader’s attack lines are becoming rather blunted

Source - Daily Telegraph 17/11/22

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In the early months of the 2010 parliament, David Cameron’s coalition government succeeded in establishing the narrative that the structural deficit was all the fault of Labour overspending, rather than the drastic collapse of tax revenues caused by a recession which itself was sparked by the global financial crisis. Labour at the time was too focused on electing Ed Miliband leader to rebut any of these claims, and so lost a crucial argument.

Now the shoe is on the other foot and Keir Starmer’s party has been making hay with this government’s various self-inflicted mistakes, which have resulted, among other things, in a receptive audience willing to believe pretty much anything about the Conservative Party.

A couple of fascinating examples spring to mind. The first is the opprobrium Labour’s front bench poured on Liz Truss’s short-lived administration for seeking to implement unfunded tax cuts and spending increases without the imprimatur of the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR). You might say this particular criticism was justified, given the chaos that engulfed bond markets.

But today we see a different, much less convincing approach. Having moved swiftly on from criticising Truss for attempts to put more money in pockets (the opposite of austerity), Labour is now targeting Rishi Sunak for seeking to apply the fiscal discipline (via austerity) that Truss eschewed. Thus, both profligacy and austerity are now the enemies of the People’s Party, which begs the question: what does Labour actually think? 

This confused philosophy is underwritten by a particularly cynical assertion that is wheeled out whenever a front bencher appears on the morning media round: all our problems were caused by Truss and her former chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and all the remedial measures announced by Jeremy Hunt today are aimed at repairing the damage caused by that fiscal event.

Yet there’s a key factor that Labour seems determined not even to mention: Covid lockdowns. 

While there were lockdown sceptics in Boris Johnson’s government – Sunak among them – there were none in Labour’s ranks. Indeed, it’s safe to assume that a Labour government would have embraced the principles of enforced school closures, confinement in our homes and being paid to do no work even more enthusiastically, and for longer, than did the Johnson government, even after the vaccine programme was rolled out. So the eye-watering, unplanned and unanticipated bill for all of that would have been even higher than what it actually was. 

Questions about his approach to lockdowns might not plague Starmer now, but they will at the next election. And that isn’t the only trap set up for him. In hiring Tony Blair’s health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, to review efficiency in the health service, Hunt is making an impression of cross-party consensus without the permission of the other party. It’s a political chess move that we’d usually expect from the likes of George Osborne.

Then there is the large (and I must say welcome) increase in NHS spending, which leaves Labour without another of its preferred attack lines (until the heat of the election campaign, when it will issue its traditional “The Tories plan to privatise the NHS” press release). Moreover, reports of the death of the triple lock guarantee on pensions and the end of inflation-level increases in benefits turned out to be premature, making the “Tories are in it for themselves” argument a lot less convincing. 

There’s no doubt that Hunt and Sunak face an extraordinary challenge. They need to focus voters’ minds on the real reason why Austerity 2.0 might be necessary (namely Covid) – and that is key to whatever hopes the Tories have of winning back lost ground in the next two years. In the meantime, Hunt has produced a package that one could easily imagine having been presented by his Labour opposite number. 

If voters can see that, Labour will find the work of defining itself against the government much harder than originally thought.