Lynton Crosby, the Australian political strategist who has run multiple general election campaigns for the Conservatives, is a font of striking sayings. From the ‘dead cat strategy’ (see Michael Fallon) to the idea you ‘can’t fatten a pig on market day’. But right now, it’s all about another of his shibboleths: the need to ‘get the barnacles off the boat’.
Now, I don’t even like to step into a pedalo, but Crosby is referring to extraneous policies that dilute or distract from a core message, and give your political rivals ammunition with which to attack you. Specifically, this relates to Rachel Reeves’s decision to water down Labour’s flagship £28bn green investment plan.
As our Political Editor Nicholas Cecil reports, a Keir Starmer government would, if elected, reach that annual sum by the second half of its first term, rather than straight away. The reason isn’t that the world has ceased growing warmer or green jobs have become less attractive, but because of Labour’s desire to reclaim a reputation for fiscal probity, or what Gordon Brown used to call prudence.
“I will never play fast and loose with the public finances,” Reeves insisted, criticising Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous “mini-Budget”. That she is so keen to do so speaks to a core Labour weakness with the public. The party has repeatedly gone into election campaigns with huge promises which voters take a look at and think, ‘might be nice, but I don’t think you can deliver on it’.
The most egregious example of this was when, partway through the 2019 campaign, John McDonnell decided Labour would fund a vast and uncosted compensation package for ‘Waspi women’. I’m not sure it was ever explained how this would work.
Now, to be clear, Labour is not scrapping its big green investment package, merely backloading it. And anyway, I think we ought to reserve a healthy dose of scepticism for the idea that Labour (or indeed any government) could mobilise £28bn of infrastructure investment a year from day one.
But this announcement tells us a few things. First, that Labour is prepared to play the fiscal rule game, even if that means postponing much-needed capital spending. Second, it is not afraid to U-turn some more. And third, that tight budgets will be a central feature of the next few years, if not decades, of British politics, in the face of rising demand for public services and a greater debt burden.
The question I pose is this: what does this tell us about how radical a Labour government (as the polls indicate) would be, and to what extent will a pared back manifesto and fiscal constraints hold it back? In 1997, a combination of Tony Blair’s caution, a relatively thin manifesto and the promise to stick to Tory spending plans for two years led to a somewhat limited set of achievements in the first term. Looking back, it’s amazing how much the 2001 election result was voters effectively saying: ‘we’ve put you in again, are you going to turn on the spending taps now?’
Of course, a radical manifesto is not a prerequisite for radical government. The 2010-15 coalition was thrown together by circumstance and turned out to be one of the most activist and reforming administrations in some time, though many of its changes (not least on tax) have since been undone.
Given the experience of the last few years in British politics, caution isn’t necessarily the least attractive offer in the world. And Labour always has to do a lot of reassuring. But Britain has a lot of problems that require solving. And history tells us that how a party behaves in opposition is not necessarily a guarantee of how it will govern, given half a chance.
