'If Labour promises to spend, everyone but the Tories would be delighted'
As a rule, politicians like to show they know what the people want by offering to do what people are already doing.
So when the economy has tanked, mortgages and rents are sky-high, and most people are slicing their cheese-extra thin because it's gone up by 147% in the past week alone, the rulebook says that politicians should tell us they will save money.
It usually works. But 13 years after its last runout, the austerity dogma is not just boring, it's plainly and obviously wrong. It choked the economy, destroyed public services, and cost more in the long run.
But that rule is why Rishi Sunak doesn't understand why he's going to lose three by-elections on Thursday in the Tories' biggest humiliation since, well, last week. He doesn't get that the electorate are making cutbacks, and don't want their government to do the same.
And it is also why Keir Starmer has announced he's not going to end the child benefit cap, even though his party has railed against it and a study published today says it should be scrapped immediately.
Teachers, civil servants and train drivers walk out in biggest strike in decade
'Yes, but I'm a safe pair of hands' (Getty Images)Giving child benefit for just the first two children sounds like it helps people make wiser choices. People say 'live within your means', and forget that most families with more children than that are already stinking rich, and that the true social cost is not the £13 a week for 2nd and subsequent children, but comes in the shape of over-subscribed schools, creaking healthcare, extra car trips, a lifetime of CO2 emissions and a housing crisis.
In fact, capping child benefit stops domestic abuse victims leaving their abuser. It means the children of widows and widowers don't get a hot meal. It stops children whose parents have remarried doing as well at school. It puts up barriers to opportunity at every stage of someone's life, which is why it is astonishing that Keir Starmer, who only just promised to remove all such barriers, said he'd be leaving that one where it is.
But that's the rule. Don't say you'll spend. Say you'll find savings. Say you'll close loopholes. Don't frighten the taxpayers, Doris, or we'll never get to Downing Street. And following that stupid rule is why Sunak is going to lose horribly on Thursday and Starmer won't win convincingly enough to govern next year.
'Look, there is a way this is all Labour's fault. I just need to work out what that is' (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)More than 60% of people want to bring back free school meals for all. More than 50% want the child benefit cap scrapped. Compared to the 27% who want bankers' bonuses to go, and the mere 10% who think inheritance tax is unfair, those are walloping lumps of public support.
After 13 years of cutbacks, the public has noticed the welfare state is bleeding out. After a decade of Tory misrule, they have stopped listening to ideologically-driven gumpf from millionaires about how the national economy should be run like household finances. After the pandemic spending which was conjured up out of nowhere, more people have cottoned on to the fact that, if Britain was a household, it is one that a) owns a bank b) prints its own money and c) has the legal right to tell the bank manager to clear its debts.
As a nation, we have realised the cost of the NHS is nowhere near as high as the price we'd pay for not having it. That cutting spending on minor things, like potholes, costs us £1,000 to fix the axle after you smack one on the school run, or the work van is out of action for a week. The lesson that spending less means you get less could not have been rammed home any more thoroughly if George Osborne had carved it onto each and every one of our foreheads with a Stanley knife.
Miserablism might be the strictly-accurate way of looking at the next couple of years. But despite the polls, it won't persuade enough floating voters to do something different, and give Labour the landslide it would need to force through the massive legislative change the country needs. If realism inspired voters, then Boris Johnson would still be a Brussels correspondent. What does inspire - as Boris, and Barak, and Vladimir, and and Emmanuel would all agree - is hope. Give people that, and they will give you their country.
Starmer may be following political orthodoxy to be the safe pair of hands which won't turn on the spending taps, and that will probably comfort a few people that he can be trusted not to turn Britain into North Korea.
But what he must do, in the very next breath, is say what will happen next - that, as soon as the wind is in the right direction, there'll be investment in all the things that bring massive, long-term rewards - a sovereign wealth fund from green energy, a nationalised care service, free university tuition, a universal basic income that would make benefits redundant, and a realisation that public sector pay rises are the best tool a government has to create economic growth and drive up the standard of living. That's the way to get a thumping majority that will give you power for a decade.
Britain is ready and willing for radical change in a way it hasn't been since the landslide of 1945 that booted out Winston Churchill, who likewise didn't understand how winning a war meant he lost the election. The next Labour manifesto needs to have a realistic first paragraph about how tough it'll be for a bit, but then page after page of big-ticket, sweeping, once-in-a-generation policies that will offer voters the Britain they want to live in, rather than the one the Tories stuck us with.
Greggs, Costa & Pret coffees have 'huge differences in caffeine', says report
Keir needs to sell us a dream that isn't pure accountancy.
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
