Fear of the Labour party has long been the most powerful Tory weapon. During every election campaign, the Tory strategy is to talk up the threat of Labour: the demon-eyed Tony Blair, ‘Red’ Ed Miliband or the Corbynite menace. Tories, for all their quirks and flaws, keep the other guys, the dangerous ones, out of power.
Rishi Sunak may struggle to revive this argument at the next election. The economy is in recession, the NHS is collapsing, national debt has doubled. After four Conservative prime ministers, public services are in such a state that strikes don’t make much difference. When things go back to ‘normal’, the trains, border control and ambulances are still in crisis.
Some interesting solutions are, at least, floating around. How about allowing NHS patients to refer themselves to specialists, cutting the burden on GPs? Or letting victims decide the punishment for antisocial behaviour? How about an Office for Value for Money, to stop so much taxpayers’ cash being squandered? But all of these are coming from the Labour party, which can claim to be providing fresh ideas in a way that was unthinkable just a few years ago.
It doesn’t help the Tories’ credibility that the government has stolen so many Labour ideas
Sir Keir Starmer can be accused of being a stupefying bore whose leadership strategy doesn’t go beyond tut-tutting at Tory errors. But this play-it-safe lawyer, the first knight of the realm ever to lead the Labour party, is hard to demonise. He has spent the past three years fighting Corbynites and winning. Many of his victories have barely made the news: out of 77 Labour selection battles under his leadership, for example, only one openly left-wing candidate has been selected. He has ended Momentum’s momentum.
If today’s polls were tomorrow’s election results, the number of Tory MPs would halve to about 140 while the number of Labour MPs would roughly double to 400. All this could lead to something of a Blairite restoration in the next parliament. The new faces would be the likes of Heidi Alexander, who quit as an MP under Corbyn and is back as a candidate for South Swindon. Hamish Falconer, son of the Blairite peer Charlie Falconer, has been selected for Lincoln, and David Pinto-Duschinsky, a former Alistair Darling adviser, for Hendon. They are all standing in winnable seats.
Even if voters are sceptical about whether Labour’s policies stand a decent chance of making things better, it’s hard to point to radical, heavy-spending, class-war ideas that would make things demonstrably worse. Tories can’t warn about a Labour tax bombshell when their own tax bombshell has already gone off. Sunak’s agenda involves tax-and-spend levels rising beyond anything attempted by any peacetime government, which makes it easier than ever for Labour to pose as the more responsible, moderate force.
While Ed Miliband spoke about an economy of ‘predators’ vs ‘producers’, Rachel Reeves rejects this language. The shadow chancellor, a former Bank of England economist (and child chess champion), claims to have met 387 chief executives in 18 months. ‘I don’t want to increase income tax,’ she says. ‘And I’ve got no intention of doing so.’ Polls show that voters believe her more than they do the Tories, who pledged not to raise taxes in 2019 before taking them to an all-time high.
It doesn’t help the Tories’ credibility that the government, in its ideological exhaustion, has stolen so many Labour ideas that it previously loudly attacked. When Miliband proposed an energy price cap, David Cameron said it was something out of a ‘Marxist universe’. He had a point, but Theresa May copied the idea anyway. When Reeves proposed a windfall tax on banks, Sunak said it would ‘deter investment’. He was right, but ended up implementing it anyway. Now Jeremy Hunt is using phrases like ‘unearned income’ (Labour-speak for investment income) and tells the Commons he has ‘no objection to windfall taxes’. Reeves’s work is done.
All of this gives the impression that Labour is winning the arguments, as a prelude to winning power. Are these bad ideas, or not? For as long as the Tories are unable to say, it’s harder to cast the next election as a choice between two different visions.
Labour frontbenchers are also taking some of the best Tory ideas and themes. Jon Ashworth, shadow work and pensions secretary, this week visited Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice and ended up deploying language that IDS once used against Gordon Brown. ‘The longer a young person is left workless, the greater the risk of a life on the margins,’ he said. ‘To do nothing about [that], as is currently the case, means writing people off.’ Inaction is not just a waste of money, but ‘a monumental waste of the potential of the British people’. All true. But it is odd to hear the old Tory attack lines coming from Labour lips.
And on the NHS? ‘Yes, it’s collapsing,’ says one Tory senior figure. ‘But we cannot be the party to apply the changes it needs. We’d just be hated. We don’t have the energy or political capital.’ This is a common refrain: that the Tories have kicked the can of NHS reform down the road so often that they have run out of road. If radical reform is needed, only Labour would have the ‘permission’ to implement the changes.
Enter Wes Streeting, shadow health secretary, and perhaps the most interesting member of the shadow cabinet. He isn’t playing it safe. Whereas successive Tory leaders waved pompoms for the health service (Matt Hancock went to work with an NHS badge on his lapel) Streeting adopts a different stance.
‘You won’t hear me pretend that the NHS is great, that somehow the timeliness and quality of NHS care – which is currently appalling – is the envy of the world,’ he told journalists last year. ‘Patients know it isn’t true and NHS staff know it isn’t true.’ It’s no sustainable long-term solution, he added, ‘to pour ever more taxpayers’ money into a 20th-century model of care’. He told The Spectator’s Isabel Hardman last year that he intends ‘to be the patients’ champion’ and have no patience ‘with producer interests, or with the sort of bureaucratic excuses that let patients down sometimes’.
Do such words add up to a coherent reform plan? Of course not, but Streeting was consistent on all of this even when his party was going through its Corbynite phase. Rather than seek the benediction of doctors’ unions (as Cameron did in opposition) Streeting has picked fights with the British Medical Association, complaining about a ‘something-for-nothing culture in the NHS’. When GPs voted to cut surgery opening hours, he told them they were ‘living on a different planet’. Starmer defended Streeting against his Labour critics.
Most voters think the NHS is broken and, by a four-to-one margin, think Labour is the best party to fix it
Most voters think the NHS is broken and, by a four-to-one margin, think Labour is the best party to fix it. Sajid Javid, a former health secretary, is planning his own report on what the NHS needs, but it’s telling that only a Tory who plans to stand down at the next election feels he can speak freely. (Streeting is understood to have sought Javid’s advice.) Streeting may yet emerge as the face of NHS reform, just as Ashworth may come to pick up the abandoned cause of welfare reform.
Even David Lammy, who was a semi-comic figure during Brexit, has behaved himself as shadow foreign secretary, backing Ukraine, Joe Biden, Nato and Israel. Corbyn’s eccentric foreign policy sympathies made for rich Tory pickings, but there are few such wrong steps now.
On strikes, Starmer has mostly stood back, neither condemning nor supporting demands. But when he did veer from this line of neutrality, it has been to say that the nurses want ‘probably more than can be afforded’. These words enrage the far-left, who accuse Starmer of being a Tory sellout. This, of course, suits his broader purpose.
Although Starmer has said that there is ‘no case for going back to the EU or the single market’, Tory Remainers – who would not be heartbroken to see the Brexiteers fail – are one of his target groups. They are represented by certain ambassadors: George Osborne, for instance, who declared last week that while he would prefer Sunak and Jeremy Hunt as PM and Chancellor, ‘it wouldn’t be terrible for the country if it were Keir and Rachel’. They are, he said, ‘more than capable of governing the country’. Claire Perry O’Neill, an Osbornite and former transport minister, went further. She quit the Conservative party this week, saying that Sunak’s Tories can no longer ‘deliver the big changes we need’. She lavished praise on Starmer.
The Labour leader, however, still needs to keep his own class warriors happy. His plan is to go after Sunak for his wealth with tailor-made attack policies. He says Labour would abolish the non-dom status that Sunak’s wife enjoys and the VAT-free status of the schools attended by their children. Neither policy would raise much money, but they exist as tools of party management. In the Commons, Starmer has his rich-boy taunts ready. The Tories are not really attacking back.
Yet the Starmer agenda is vulnerable. Does Streeting really have what it takes to apply the root-and-branch reform the NHS needs? Where is Reeves’s growth plan? Would academy schools be safe? Then there’s Labour’s wackier ideas: making misogyny a hate crime, creating a state-run ‘Great British Energy’, and possibly even bringing to England the same gender self-identification regime that Nicola Sturgeon has foisted upon Scotland.
As things stand, both sides are trying to play it safe – which suits Labour. The current trajectory points to a Blair-sized landslide for Starmer and a 1997-style wipeout forSunak. But the Prime Minister, who became Conservative leader without winning the party’s membership vote, feels constrained by his lack of mandate and the need to appease warring Tory tribes. ‘It’s so much worse because it doesn’t look chaotic,’ says one minister. ‘Clean and slick on the outside, but the corpse of a government inside.’
The Tories’ internal chaos is, of course, why Starmer’s low-energy strategy is proving so effective. He doesn’t need to land blows on a party that has almost beaten itself to death. Since Starmer has removed any residual traces of Corbynism from his party, it is impossible to portray him as a fanatic poised to destroy the country. Without a Labour demon to point at, the Tories’ only chance of avoiding defeat in 2024 will be to provide positive reasons to vote Conservative. Sunak had better get thinking.
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