Will things really get better under Labour?

Labour’s honeymoon didn’t last long. Keir Starmer won power less than three months ago with a vow to ‘change Britain’. But the Labour government’s missteps over the last few weeks – not least the ongoing row about freebies – makes it hard to distinguish life under Labour to what came before.

‘Vanity snappers’, free posh frocks and taking thousands of pounds of hospitality tickets while telling voters that hard times are coming: what did Starmer expect voters were going to make of this politically toxic combination? Taking ‘unpopular decisions,’ as the Prime Minister pledged to do, sounds good, but the trick is to present these in a way that makes you seem steely and determined, not – as with the winter fuel payment cut – as cruel and nasty.

The Tories made such a mess of their final years in power that many voters were prepared to give Labour the benefit of the doubt in the July election. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, seemed fairly normal, as politicians go. Keir Starmer appeared dull but dependable. Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s now head of political strategy, seemed sane. But the sheer clumsy gaucheness of Labour’s first weeks in office – and the belief that they can never be wrong while droning on about Tory blunders – have blown much of the goodwill away already.

Labour disciples – and even first-time Labour voters – will be doing their best to reassure themselves that it’s still early days. These missteps are, they’ll say, just the sign of a government finding its feet after years in the wilderness. Labour will soon get a grip, they insist. They’re deluding themselves – and falling for what economists call the sunk costs fallacy: the tendency to continue with an endeavour we’ve invested effort, or time into, even if the costs of doing so increasingly outweigh the benefits.

Labour voters aren’t the first – and won’t be the last – to do so, and to pin their hopes and dreams on something, only to find themselves disappointed. When I was a lad growing up in the 1980s, my dad bought a tape cassette recorder. This was a big outlay on our family budget, but my old man insisted it was essential: he needed it for listening back to his own singing voice, as a member of a barbershop chorus and a spin-off quartet. But this thing turned out to be something of a monster: when it wasn’t chewing cassettes, it was wiping them. It produced a brown matter that lingered on the fingers. It often played back what you’d taped with a gargling, underwater effect.

My dad, though, would not, could not, admit what was plain to see: the recorder was a dud. The receipt had been long lost anyway, he said; Currys was too far away to return it. It would have to do. Even if the recorder played him back singing the bass part of ‘Coney Island Baby’ as if he had been delivering it at the bottom of the beautiful briny sea, he refused to face reality. As the recorder got more and more useless, he would blame the innocent cassettes, scribbling notes as to their supposed lack of quality on the cases: ‘Abba – Dodgy!!!’ was my favourite. I thought of writing to the band in Stockholm, suggesting it as the title of their next album.

A film, TV series or book release, that generates unmerited hype but fails to deliver, is another example of this ‘sunk costs’ phenomenon. Walking out of a cinema or theatre, even slipping out during the interval in the latter case, was always a bold move, but with the ruinous price of tickets nowadays it’s inconceivable. There must be something to enjoy in this, we tell ourselves, in spite of all the evidence otherwise. Perhaps the cinematography, or a particular actor, or the rococo scrollwork across the top of the stage will make it all worthwhile in the end? Fat chance.

When we watch films in the privacy of our own home, things should be another matter. But they aren’t. ‘Well, I don’t like this show,’ we tell ourselves; ‘but I’ve watched the first twelve episodes and so now I have to put myself through the agony of the next thirty-six’. Why? There is no contract. There is no fine for bailing out. Netflix don’t have detector vans out monitoring what you do, or don’t, watch. If you really have to know the ending, most films, TV series and books have readily available synopses on Wikipedia, which take a matter of seconds to read. Yet still we plod on, and pretend we’re having fun.

Something similar can happen in relationships. ‘I knew from the second date it wouldn’t work but I was still with him five years later,’ a friend once told me. I was once introduced by a good friend to the supposed new love of his life, someone clearly ill-suited to them, whose very presence brought a tired, pained smile to his face. Things didn’t work out in the end, of course. But it took far too long for him to realise.

Labour’s supporters are now busy trying to deceive themselves that things really will be different under Keir Starmer. Things can only get better, they say. They are deceiving themselves when the truth is plain to see. Labour have only been in power for eleven weeks. Maybe they really will turn the tanker, and astound and confound us all. There I go again, against all the evidence. I should’ve learnt by now. We all should: Starmer promised change, but life under Labour is simply business as usual.