This is the wail of the floating voter. I start every election a deliberate floater. An open mind staves off tedium. The only alternative is going on holiday. For a radical, to float is also to enjoy a moment of hope. Might there be, somewhere in the dark cloud of current politics, just a glimmer of light?
In their first week or so, most election campaigns hit rock bottom. So far in this one there are still no manifestos. Tuesday’s TV debate was truly ghastly. Rishi Sunak deployed the Brexit leaver’s tactic of twisting statistics. Keir Starmer’s pitch amounted to little more than a new feeder for the Downing Street cat.
The floating voter aches to hear something new, especially from an opposition that has been out of power for more than a decade. Radicalism was once in Labour’s DNA. Starmer might choke on the word socialism, but he leads the party of Keir Hardie, Herbert Morrison and Nye Bevan. His precursors gave us the health service and nationalisation, public corporations and town planning. Even the crypto-Tory Tony Blair brought in devolution and elected mayors.
Where is such radicalism now? The public’s view is that the Tory handling of the nation’s economy, and particularly its public sector, has gone seriously awry. Services seem everywhere in a shambles. Labour demands change, but appears uncertain of its direction and guiding ideology. There is a terror of saying where the party will emphatically differ from the Tories – a vague impression is given that a new set of ministers will somehow do better with the same circumstances.
But that they will is by no means clear. A classic instance is Brexit, to which most Labour MPs were opposed. The public now believes they were right. Yet Starmer dares not mention the word Brexit, and certainly not a sensible return to the single market. Equally, on defence he is frightened of being thought weak, and duly promises to renew Trident. Even many with experience in Britain’s defence establishment think this a stupefying waste of money. We can only imagine that Starmer lacks the courage to say what he and his colleagues really believe.
To a floating radical it is Starmer’s responses to Tory failures that have been most disappointing. Why does he not take pride in the public goods on which he hopes to spend taxes? He has trumpeted his ending of non-dom status, only for Sunak to agree with him. Why not be radical and go for the racket of London’s empty towers used as global tax shelters, or for the billions being stolen from taxpayers by residing in so-called “British overseas dependencies”?
Social policy in Britain after the second world war was revolutionised by Clement Attlee’s government’s welfare state. Another chunk was upheaved in the heady 1960s, when to be Labour was a time of radical bliss. After 13 years of Tory inertia, a new home secretary, Roy Jenkins, ended capital punishment (hanging had been abolished previously). He backed the reform of laws on homosexuality, abortion and divorce. He introduced the first legislation banning unequal pay, race discrimination and theatre censorship. All this he did in just a few years, not because the polls said yes or no, but because he knew it was time.
There is a clear need for a similar overhaul of social policy today. Britain is in the dark ages on drug legalisation and regulation – resulting in Scotland suffering one of the worst narcotic epidemics anywhere. Partly as a result, our prisons are so overcrowded that there have been cases of foreign governments refusing to allow the extradition of suspects to the UK on the grounds that to do so would be inhumane. The country has the highest incarceration rate in western Europe, and among the worst reoffending rates. Yet it is plain that Labour has no new policies on crime, punishment or drugs – merely an undefined promise to spend more money.
A similar upheaval is needed on state ownership. The ideology of privatisation has woefully failed to deliver adequate social care or utilities such as energy, water and public transport. Why not let Thames Water go bankrupt and start again? It was simply a mistake to hand public-sector monopolies over to private finance, and to hope that civil servants could regulate the chaos. But again, Labour has no set of principles to guide it in these cases.
One spark of radicalism has come from the shadow health minister, Wes Streeting. He has dared to advocate an alliance of the NHS with the booming private health sector. But to reform the NHS root and branch must go beyond party politics, and might conceivably embrace elements of insurance and payment, particularly in the area of wellness and prevention. But to work this requires a drastic restructuring under a cross-party consensus. Is Labour up to this?
So many of the issues in modern politics are no longer of left versus right. They need not be partisan. But the kind of ideas mentioned above require a readiness for radicalism wholly absent from today’s election debate, a debate fixed on the message of the polls and a quest for the safety of the middle ground.
Governments may hide their more drastic ideas from voters at election time. Harold Wilson did not breathe a word of his plans for radical reform in his election campaigns. But he respected a principle that has always vexed democracy. It is that elected politicians must sometimes do what they believe to be right, even when their voters may disagree. Just now that principle appears to have gone by the board. Promising nothing, cautiously, is hardly a platform for government.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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