Labour’s spending plans are crashing into reality

 Sir Keir Starmer faces the unenviable task of convincing his colleagues that they cannot again be the party of benefits Britain

Source - Daily Telegraph - 18/07/23

Link

In every conversation I have with politically-minded friends, including MPs from various parties, the same assumptions are made about Sir Keir Starmer. He’s reassuringly dull, on course to win the next election if not a majority, and he doesn’t intend to blow his one shot at Number 10 by letting the left of his party run riot.

For what it’s worth, I think these things are true. The question is just how far Starmer can push his loyal troops. How much of the “business as usual” message can they tolerate when central pillars of this Conservative government’s philosophy look set to be retained by an incoming Labour administration? 

Starmer’s insistence that he will maintain the two child benefits cap needs to be differentiated from, for example, Gordon Brown’s decision to respect the last Tory government’s spending plans for the first two years of a new Labour government. Activists and supporters could accept this modest price for the glory of actually being in power. What were two years after 18 years of Tory rule?

Starmer, in contrast, has not yet offered any prospect of the policy ending, either after a set time or when economic circumstances allow. It looks to the outside observer – and according to anonymous briefings, many Labour MPs – like a firm policy commitment. Whatever else a Labour government might do, however much its economic priorities change, it seems the plight of families surviving on benefits are not at the top of the priorities list.

It’s too early to say that this strange position is a misstep. True, it’s led to entertaining briefing to the press, but right now the only impacts that matter are those on the electorate in general, and those on the families currently subject to the rule. Perhaps Starmer has twigged, before many in his parliamentary party, that for all the anger directed at George Osborne in the first half of the last decade, there were many voters who saw some sense in the cap.

Although they received disproportionate media coverage, reports of large families subsisting on benefits enraged not just middle class voters, but the working class voters who were their neighbours, and felt their decision to hold down a job – frequently jobs – rather than subsist on benefits was devalued.

Taking up the cause of the targeted families, Labour MPs have made the case that child poverty has been made worse by a rule they see as vindictive and unnecessary. A previous generation of Labour MPs might have made the case that keeping people on benefits, rather than pressing them to find paid work, is the more obvious cause of child poverty, and that encouraging a system of permanent state subsidy only institutionalises long-term poverty.

It remains to be seen whether Starmer himself can make this case. For the time being, he seems happy sending the message that he won’t be a pushover when faced with the inevitable expensive demands for spending he would be faced with as Prime Minister. His Parliamentary colleagues, meanwhile, would do well to revisit the last Labour government’s fight over planned single parent benefit reductions after the 1997 election. 

This threatened cabinet resignations and a significant back bench rebellion. In the end the government won the vote and the argument with barely a dent in its polling lead over the Conservatives. The damage was minimised because Tony Blair and Brown had a thought-through strategy and could promise their party better times eventually if it just held its nerve.

Is there such a strategy behind Starmer’s comments? If there is, he needs to share it with this shadow cabinet as quickly as possible. If not, he needs to come up with one. Declaring Labour a profligacy-free zone will work in the short term, but Starmer cannot afford to leave his party behind completely. The road to the next general election will be a rough one; victory will present a whole new set of challenges and threats. He will need the support, however qualified and reluctant, of his MPs and party members if they are to evangelise for his leadership on the doorstep and in the TV studio. 

It’s time to add some flesh to Labour’s bare bones austerity message.