Is Labour really a credible government-in-waiting?

How long do you give it before Labour abandon their promise of golden hellos for new teachers? Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson has insisted their proposed £2,400 welcome bonus wheeze will be fully costed, funded by a tax raid on fee-paying schools.

It is not yet clear whether Labour has considered that putting private education beyond the reach of tens of thousands will mean many pupils pouring into the state system, at a cost of hundreds of millions every year. Nor whether party strategists realise they may be slightly overestimating how far they can make the £1.6 billion raised annually from this levy go.

Undoubtedly, recruitment and retention in the profession is a challenge. Teacher vacancies in England are almost twice their pre-Covid level. But surely the more worrying development for our children’s education is the vastly increased loss of learning days thanks to both a 60 per cent rise in teacher sick days last year and repeated strike walkouts.

The average number of sick days taken was 6.3, up from 3.9 days in 2021, while this week will see the sixth round of industrial action in 2023. Most teachers received a 5 per cent pay rise for the present academic year; the government has pledged to increase starting salaries to £30,000. Labour now appears to be upping the ante.

But Labour’s promises should be taken with a fistful of salt. Away from the Tory psychodrama, the opposition have been quietly abandoning many of the grand plans unveiled over the past couple of years.

Let’s begin with Starmer’s 10 pledges, based on the ‘moral case for socialism’, announced during his leadership bid. Reintroducing free movement, nationalising rail, mail, energy and water, raising income tax for the top 5 per cent of earners, scrapping tuition fees – all have since been ditched.

According to one former Starmer aide, he pledged them while campaigning to lead the party, not the country. Apparently, these are the sorts of ideas that play well with party members and affiliated (trade union) supporters, but are less popular outside of the National Executive Committee. But the flip flopping has left staunch Labour supporters struggling to discern what his party stands for.

When grilled by Andrew Neil in March 2020 on whether the tuition fees pledge would make it into a general election manifesto, Starmer insisted: ‘They’re all pledges, Andrew, so the answer to these questions is yes’. In that same interview, he expressed a commitment towards bringing utilities back under public ownership. A year later, he told Laura Kuenssberg: ‘I never made a commitment to nationalisation’. 

But this pattern is emerging outside of promises made in the dying days of the Corbyn farce. Last week Lisa Nandy rejected rent controls, while Starmer ruled out free school meals for all primary school pupils. Labour’s £28 billion-a-year Green Prosperity Plan was recently watered down and rumour has it the party is planning a similar retreat on universal childcare. 

The list goes on. Last September, it called for a sharp increase in the Digital Services Tax, a 2 per cent levy on money made by search engines, social media services and online marketplaces catering to UK users. This has been scrapped amid fears of a US retaliation. Abolishing the House of Lords – gone. Retaining Universal Credit – gone. Ending the Lifetime Allowance – gone. In fact, one thing the Tories have done right is to compile a dossier of Labour U-turns over the past three years, now available on their website.

Much of this is par for the political course: the Tories have hardly stuck rigidly to promises made when Boris Johnson secured his stomping majority, and they’re the ones in government. We are building up to manifesto season, and the expectation should be that parties cost their various promises, scrapping the ones they can’t. It is politically advisable to ditch bad ideas now and, if you’re the opposition, not to introduce any that will risk spooking voters. The party learnt this lesson the hard way in 1992, following John Smith’s shadow Budget.

But it also indicates that there is no ‘moral case for socialism’. Thirteen years of Conservative government has left Britain with an increasingly regulated economy, high taxes, a bloated state and a national debt equivalent to over 100 per cent of GDP. Real wages, growth, output have all stagnated. Catastrophic failures by the Bank of England have left us with productivity-sapping zombie companies and stubbornly high inflation.  

Labour cannot pour lighter fluid onto the Tories’ failed economic model with more money-printing, more spending, more tax rises. Their U-turns are a reminder that fantastical ideas – rooted in the notion that the government can solve all our problems, and protect the many by clobbering the few – will collide with reality sooner or later.

If these policies are being abandoned for fear they won’t be popular, that is to be applauded. Perhaps Labour could throw their harebrained plans to block new licences on oil and gas exploration onto the scrapheap, too.

Rachel Reeves has gone to great lengths to get business on side, to promise growth, to insist on sound money. Perhaps we should welcome that one of the main parties has embarked on such a project. But the question remains whether Labour can really lay claim to being a credible government-in-waiting.