Has Labour rowed back on its promise of universal free childcare? Coming so soon after Rachel Reeves tempered the green new deal pledge, telling the Today programme that “everything we do must rest on these pillars of economic and fiscal responsibility”, it sounds like the kind of thing it would do.
Labour says it never promised universal free childcare in the first place, and I went back to the primary text, a Bridget Phillipson interview from April: it’s true. She talks about reimagining early years care as part of the education system, which makes it sound universal and free. But she also references Estonia as a model, where parents are guaranteed nursery places, but pay according to their means. The quality of the care is high, wages and qualifications are higher, and the sector is seen as a critical element of child development. This is in contrast to the Liz Truss and Jeremy Hunt model, where nursery is a place to park your child while you earn money, so the drive in the sector is to keep wages low and child:staff ratios high.
I’ve actually seen the Estonia model, although it was in Berlin, and 10 years ago: a hangover from reunification, East German universal provision overlaid with West German means-tested access. All the nurseries were good enough that people didn’t opt out, and none of it was expensive, even for affluent people. I was struck not just by how happy everyone seemed with it – already, back then, in contrast to the swingeing costs we faced in the UK – but also the socially cohesive effect of parents from all classes putting their most treasured thing in the same place.
I’m not against that model, but when you add together higher wages for nursery staff, guaranteed places, affordable prices, better provision for parents doing long or irregular hours and a higher quality of care, it doesn’t sound cheap. So if everything rests on the pillars of fiscal responsibility, it doesn’t sound true.
Critically, Labour’s plan sounds both less generous and less likely to happen than the Conservatives’ notion, which is to guarantee 30 free hours per week from the age of nine months.
Is the gamble that everyone under 40 is so sick of Tory government that they’ll vote Labour whatever the promise? The polls seem to bear this out, but when parents are spending more on nurseries than mortgages, the sheer pressure of that might be decisive when the time comes.
My happy place is to default back to the question: when will Labour realise that you cannot inspire voters by ceaselessly counselling caution? But you cannot consider that seriously without making a proper reckoning of how much the Conservatives have polluted the ecosystem of campaigning.
The Tory idea of more free hours from a younger age won’t happen. The 30-hour model is hanging by a thread anyway, where the fees of the kids under three cross-subsidise the free hours of the kids over three. If everyone over nine months has 30 free hours, nurseries will go bust and people won’t be able to find places, whatever they’re entitled to. Better, cheaper childcare won’t happen, just like the 40 new hospitals that won’t happen, like the levelling up that isn’t happening, like the taking back control didn’t happen, like the £350m-a-week for the NHS didn’t happen, like the restabilisation of the public finances that emphatically didn’t happen.
We parse these differences between Conservative prime ministers – Rishi Sunak is a jam tomorrow person, they say, unlike chaotic Liz Truss and blowhard Boris Johnson, who were jam all over everything, now, people. But the underlying reality of the project they share is that the jam is fake and tomorrow never arrives.
This intense relaxation around breaking promises enables Sunak to simply lift anything that sounds popular – Phillipson suggests breakfast clubs, it’s in Hunt’s spring budget. “Parking his tanks on her lawn,” the commentators say, using the lexicon of the olden days, when people only said things they intended to do. Now, when a Tory pinches your idea, it isn’t cunning political plagiarism, it merely invites the idea into the graveyard of things that, by dint of having been promised, will never happen.
How does an opposition party meet that challenge? With secrecy? By floating decoy ideas? How do you insist on this fundamental difference between your parties, that you are sincere and they are not? It’s a genuine conundrum, with no obvious fix. All that’s certain is, not like this: not by making continuous downward adjustments to the ambition of your project, as the fiscal envelope tightens.
Which brings us to the crunchy bit of the Tory toxification, that fiscal envelope. Yesterday, yields on two-year government debt rose by 26 basis points; debt repayments are growing faster than any other element of government spending. Labour, seeking to regain a reputation for fiscal responsibility that it failed through its own negligence to protect during the Cameron years, has started to vocally prioritise prudence. This lends it an aspect of complete impotence, peddling a message: “Whoever you vote for, in the end, the markets are in charge. Don’t listen to your heart. Listen to your mortgage.” Psychologically, Labour has elided the markets with the rightwing media, and assumes they’ll be out to get any Labour government, and must be pre-appeased.
I don’t think that’s true. The high gilt yields are merely a logical response to the conclusion we’ve all reached; if you’re going to lend money to chancers, grifters and nihilists, you want to make it expensive. Labour should bet on itself to restore stability and ultimately prosperity, rather than essaying this Blairite script, “everything you want, so long as it sticks within our predecessors’ spending promises”.
Times have changed, Tories have changed; their spending is wild and their promises are meaningless.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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