On everything from the Lords to gender politics, they cannot resist the unserious and unpopular
Source - Daily Telegraph 28/12/22
This year’s Christmas number one – an execrable rehash of Band Aid’s Do They Know it’s Christmas? – once again involved recycling an old chart-topper. Nostalgia may be the norm at this time of year, but it seems a little much to extend the festive regression to the field of policy.
And yet Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour has come to specialise in unconvincing cover versions of New Labour’s greatest hits (read: worst excesses). The old class war element is back; performative fights with rural and middle-class voters. There’s that familiar Blairite mixture of cronyism and radicalism – we’ll abolish the Lords, but not before the disgrace of putting Tom Watson in there. Perhaps Sir Keir has a war in the Middle East planned for his first term as well.
Even that vintage cause célèbre, fox-hunting, is on the agenda again; though this country pursuit has long since morphed into trail hunting, where hounds follow a pre-laid scent rather than a live fox. On Boxing Day, shadow Defra secretary Jim McMahon, MP for the loamy acres of Oldham West, regaled The Guardian with his party’s ambitions. Labour, he vowed, would block any remaining loopholes associated with trail hunting.
Majority public opinion might support such a gesture in the abstract; but two minutes’ consideration suggests Labour would be wise not to re-poke that particular hornet’s nest. The Hunting Act 2004 consumed an astonishing 700 hours of parliamentary time; more than the invasion of Iraq – perhaps as much an indictment of the lack of scrutiny over that war as a symptom of ill-conceived hunting legislation. Tony Blair later wrote of his deep regret for the ban; as did the barrister who drafted it.
Where, exactly, are the gains in targeting the last vestiges of this tradition now? Labour has a serious problem in non-metropolitan areas, which it needs to win, especially given Scotland’s changing electoral mathematics. After their victories in 1997 and 2001, Labour boasted more than 100 rural MPs reaching far into Tory heartlands. Now only a couple of rural seats sit in Labour hands.
In 2015, after David Cameron promised a free vote on hunting, the Countryside Alliance sent platoons of volunteers to beef up the Tory ground operation, contributing to that year’s narrow majority. So re-angering an energetic and well-mobilised minority might not be the wisest move. And fundamentally, is this really how people want police resources to be used, rather than, say, dealing with burglaries or violent crime?
Then there is Labour’s private schools’ plan. Withdrawing charitable status is another idea that plays well with Left-leaning supporters. Practically, though, it falls apart. Labour has yet to explain how it would educate displaced independent sector pupils when their schools (an estimated 150-200 of them) go bust without the VAT exemption. How will they raise the sums to fund these children through the state system, build more schools and replace the free money they get from private-school parents who currently pay twice over? We still have no clue.
Earlier this year, Sir Keir refused an application from Labour Women’s Declaration to host a stall at their party conference in Liverpool. Following the SNP’s alarming direction, he has promised to “update” the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) if elected, unashamedly prioritising the rights of biological males over those of biological women. It’s not just conservatives who feel betrayed by this; such legislation would further antagonise swathes of women, feminists and concerned men who would ordinarily be natural Labour supporters.
Sir Keir deserves credit for belatedly weeding out the worst anti-Semitism in his party; albeit after several years batting for Jeremy Corbyn. But there is a pattern of making a beeline for the tangential, unpopular and arcane rather than majoring on the key pressure points. Sir Keir insists that he will attack the House of Lords in his first term in office – continuing a Blairite undertaking that has already ushered in legions of cronies. Whatever your opinion of Lords’ reform, this would undoubtedly produce a constitutional quagmire dominating his early years in the job and starving mainline concerns of vital political oxygen.
Such policies may be a chunk of vegan meat to the Labour-Left, just as the hunting ban was Blair’s sop to his party for backing an immoral war, but donning New Labour’s once-new clothes smacks of weakness; especially without the vision and drive that the Blairites, for all their faults, possessed.
Instead, Wes Streeting mutters vaguely about healthcare reform while ruling out anything too radical, and Yvette Cooper offers little beyond nebulous promises to “make the Home Office work better” (why didn’t anyone else think of that?) Some would say it’s wise not to get too detailed too soon, but when voters are hearing more about radical side-projects than a coherent plan for government, it creates an impression of the student union, of a fundamentally unserious party playing politics by Twitter.
Perhaps change is inevitable, with Labour polling miles ahead. But while Sir Keir may slip in by default, eventually he will have to govern – and recent history shows how quickly loyalties can fray, and seemingly unassailable majorities crumble. Just ask the Tories.
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