As they fail on every front, the Tories play the best card they have in their hand: managing expectations. Take this week’s three byelections: every Tory MP you meet says, with a glum face, it’s a wipeout, game over. So if Labour wins Selby and Ainsty, that’s priced in, move on. But if Labour fails to overturn a 20,000 Tory majority, watch the narrative turn to “Starmer’s weakness”.
Time for some perspective. Even the prospect of winning a rock-solid Tory seat should remind doubters of what has been an epic climb by Labour from the despair of its 2019 near-death experience. Labour’s leader had a strategy mapped out from day one, and nothing has distracted him from it: two years to fix the party, ruthlessly expunging any who damage it; a set of five cast-iron missions; and fiscal discipline, avoiding all spending traps ahead of the manifesto. And the result is an astounding 20-point lead. Are Labour people satisfied? Of course not. We see glum faces among the left-leaning commentators, who say Labour will only win as the result of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss catastrophes. They want to know a Labour government will be transformational, exhilarating, brave, inspired: instead they complain of extreme caution and affronts to Labour values.
But this is the time to remember May 1997, and how euphoric that Labour victory felt. Understand that the closer Labour gets to the winning post, the greater its fear of one false step, one fatal slip. It won’t matter how excellent Labour’s policies were for the poorest people in Britain if it returns to the miserable opposition benches. Keir Starmer has said from the outset that winning is his purpose.
Public mistrust of Labour’s management of the nation’s money is why Labour lost and lost again in our lifetimes: fiscal indiscipline is the danger, so we wince as Starmer and Rachel Reeves tighten the bolts on the Treasury chest. But wince we must: the more painful the spending thumbscrew, the more convincing to undecided voters. Though Labour is ahead in polls on every issue and Starmer leads Sunak on every quality, it’s on the economy where the gap is narrowest: Labour analysts fear trust in Labour on tax and spend is softest. That is why virtually no spending promises are being made, and why every question on funding or paying public servants is dead-batted with an apparent pledge to keep within Tory spending plans. It hurts, but there is a point to it.
Starmer’s comments about the two-child benefit cap on Sunday sent shock waves through Labour ranks: the party had attacked it time and again for affecting 1.5 million children, 1.1 million of whom are in poverty, yet now Starmer tells Laura Kuenssberg bluntly: “We are not changing that policy.” YouGov last week found 60% of British adults it surveyed support the cap, including, alas, a majority of Labour voters. Is Labour selling its soul for votes when it should be persuading people towards more generosity of spirit?
All this reprises the runup to the 1997 election, when the particularly nasty social security secretary Peter Lilley sang his “little list” of hates, including “young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing queue”. He laid a trap for Labour, which had pledged to follow all Tory spending plans: his cut to single parent benefits was to be implemented (like many of Rishi Sunak’s cuts), after the election for Labour to inherit. Unlucky Harriet Harman arrived as the new secretary of state for social security obliged to implement it. Though she softened the cut to apply only to new claimants, Labour felt it had to pass this first test of its honesty. That vote was an early blooding for many new MPs, and some wept on their way into the aye lobby, while 47 rebelled and many more abstained. (Tony Blair rewarded Harman by sacking her a year later.)
But, she told me this week, it was a political and economic necessity. Though the sum was small, “The international markets were watching our every move to see if we’d renege on our spending promises.” Was it really necessary for New Labour to tie itself so tightly to every Tory plan? In retrospect, I’d say probably not, but hindsight is a fine thing. Ken Clarke, the previous chancellor, laughed and said he had no intention of sticking to his plans. But Tories always escape much scrutiny – with a mighty media claque to hide behind.
Let’s remember what happened to single parents under Labour after that. Harman’s new deal for lone parents transformed millions of lives and opportunities, with new jobcentres offering support, not castigation; before long, all family benefits rose, as they always do under Labour, with working tax credits and child credits. There were the first ever credits to pay for childcare, enabling many more to take jobs: the support of 3,500 Sure Start centres followed. What will happen to three-child families under Labour? You can bet they and all others on benefits will end up far better off, because that’s what Labour does. But only when it wins.
Now here we are again with hyper-cautious Labour taking no risks and offending its own people. This time, when there’s so much less money than in 1997, voters know promises are not credible unless backed with hard cash. Of course we Labour people yearn for a promise to return to the single market, for wealth taxes and the revival of every moribund public service. But only winning matters, so every obstacle has to be swerved, as the Tories try to turn attention away from their failures on the cost of living, the NHS, the economy and the climate.
Labour will refuse to talk Brexit, electoral reform, benefits, trans rights, renationalisation or anything else distracting, and yes, in our corrupted politics, Labour does have to meet Rupert Murdoch. Rightly, Labour is constantly goaded and provoked to be better, but it’s perverse that complacency over Starmer’s strong lead has become a reason to criticise him for lack of boldness. Critics are too dismissive of his five missions: clean energy, growth through housing and green jobs investment, the NHS, safer streets and opportunity to break the class ceiling. These are at the heart of Labour’s for ever purposes. Fair pay agreements and unions in every workplace are radical. Expect any failing utility or rail company to fall into common ownership, without costing the public billions.
I too yearn for more, always more. But to the glums complaining Labour will be Tory-lite, lacking vision and ambition, remember this: we have just lived through 13 appalling years of austerity vandalism. Remember that every Labour government improves the lives of those with least, raises benefits, raises taxes on well-off people, leaves schools, hospitals and public life better, while every Conservative government trashes those things. Will it be enough? No. It never is. But my bet is that Reeves and Starmer will be bolder than anyone now expects. Without doubt they will do, as New Labour did, far more than they dare promise while tip-toeing towards the finishing line.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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