In life, as in film, you need a baddie. Whether it’s Dr No, Nurse Ratched or Voldemort, without someone to root against you have no story. In government, the bad guy (domestically at least) tends to be your predecessors. The Conservatives spent the best part of 14 years blaming the Labour party, with a pitstop in between to dump on their erstwhile coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats. Labour certainly didn’t help themselves by leaving that infamous note, meant in jest, declaring ‘there is no money left’; the Tories in turn left the mini-Budget for Keir Starmer.
Soon, however, we will have a new (old) villain. Labour has apparently briefed that the Voldemort of North London – Brexit – will play the antagonist in the upcoming Budget. A pantomime crowd might cry ‘it’s behind you!’, given that the vote to leave was nearly a decade ago, but to many our departure from the EU really is the root of the country’s ills. Putin, Covid and the financial crash may bear some responsibility, but it’s Brexit that exacerbated all three of these and then some. It’s the arch baddie, the Spectre for the political left.
Making Brexit the villain, however, is a mistake on two fronts.
First: narratives must be coherent, and this narrative is not. We communicate through stories because it’s how our brain best understands events, whether in our own lives or the external world. We order events and experiences to better understand them, often reshaping our own memories to fit a new narrative. Any story must make sense, have a clear arc and minimal contradictions. How often do we hear or read about an event and say to ourselves ‘that just doesn’t sound right’? You don’t need the intuition of Dirty Harry to know something is off with Labour’s Brexit narrative. As any movie detective will tell you, if the suspect changes their story halfway through the investigation, they’re guilty.
More damaging to Labour, though, may be the second failed element of their Brexit blame game: the logical conclusion of their own argument is surely to vote for a different party. For those who nod along to the Chancellor blaming tax rises on an event nearly ten years ago, they will surely say the clear answer is to rejoin. This is the logical conclusion of Reeves’ own argument. If such drastic tax cuts dent the economy further, erode people’s cost of living and cause businesses up and down the country to curtail hiring, then shouldn’t we rejoin? But this is not Labour policy; it is the policy of the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. The underlying message of the Budget will be ‘go and vote for another party’.
The attempt by Labour to squeeze the left of their vote isn’t inherently stupid. Starmer’s party is trying to hold together a coalition of voters from the last election which was united only on the principle of wanting the Tories out of power. Anyone would struggle with this task. But attempting to do so by using an argument that is neither coherent nor self-supporting seems potentially disastrous. The truth is that Labour were left with a challenging economy, the highest taxes in decades, and most of what could have been cut already removed by George Osborne’s austerity programme. To top this off, they began their time in power by hitting employers with a massive tax rise and have been too slow to deal with burdensome regulation and a poor planning system. They are now trying to correct for these mistakes with very few cards left to play. They know the truth, but just won’t say it.
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