For nearly two years, polls have shown that people have had enough of the Tories. There’s a general feeling that after 14 years with the Conservatives in office, a change in the governing party is almost part of a natural cycle.
For this reason, we are facing a very strange and unprecedented election in 2024 in which the leader of the party the polls position as most likely to win is, so far, aiming to do so on the basis of what he’s not: providing very little, or any, detail on what he will do in office if he wins the election.
The central messaging of Keir Starmer’s electoral strategy is that he’s not Jeremy Corbyn and that Labour is not the disaster that is the Conservative party. Little prominence has been given to the huge potential of what a Labour government could do in government. Much talk of missions, aims and reforms is not, so far, concrete enough to demonstrate how Labour will face up to the worst and most toxic political inheritance any incoming government will have had bestowed on it.
Also, it hasn’t exactly inspired confidence that when faced with the mildest of challenges by the Conservatives and the media there has been a retreat on some key core policy commitments, not least the level of investment needed for Labour’s Green New Deal to address climate breakdown.
People know how bad things have become under 14 years of Conservative austerity and mismanagement of our economy. They are the people who have had to deal with more than a decade of frozen wage levels, price rises and collapsing public services. So, it’s best not to insult their intelligence by thinking they can’t deal with the harsh realities of what a Labour government will face and how tough it will be.
They know there won’t be an overnight miracle performed by an incoming Labour government. But they need to know what the Labour plan is and they need the back-up arguments for that plan, which they can use to convince others in their family, at work or at the school gate about what a Labour government will do to change their lives.
It’s good that there are many who believe that it’s just enough to get rid of the Tories and that they have faith that Labour in government will inevitably be an improvement. The problem lies with all those others who need more than that to get them to the polling station on election day and to vote Labour.
If there is a vacuum in the political debate both in the run-up to the election and also, as importantly, after the election, it will be filled by others. And this is my warning. There is a real and rising danger that this political vacuum could be filled by the far right. The polling figures for the Reform party demonstrate already how a far-right populist programme can pull the major parties on to a rightwing agenda.
In 2015, it was Nigel Farage and Ukip that polluted the politics of this country and already he is being given yet again the profile and easiest of rides in unchallenged interviews in the mainstream broadcast media.
In the election, Reform is highly unlikely to take any seats and is predicted, at the moment, to damage the Conservative party more than Labour. However, Labour should not underestimate the political opportunism of Farage and Reform. They may decide to do the same deal with the Tories that Farage did in the last general election and only stand Reform candidates in Labour seats, having secured some unprincipled commitment from the Tories to launch further attacks on asylum seekers.
The disillusionment with the Conservatives is on such a scale that the most realistic prospect will remain the election of a Labour government. The more significant danger from the far right then emerges if having placed their faith in Labour, people do not see the change in our society that they hoped for after the election.
People will be patient as they fully realise how broken Britain is, but the foundations of credible and radical change will have to be seen to be being laid early in the life of the incoming Labour government. People will need to see how there is a real strategy to restore the value of wages and incomes held back for so long under the Tories, how investment in our public services is taking place and how reform doesn’t mean more privatisation, and how the grotesque levels of inequality in our society are being reduced.
If Labour fails to set out early on a path of radical change to secure the all-round wellbeing and security of our people, then inevitably disillusionment will set in. The risk then is the potential for a significant shift in our politics to the right, with the return of a Conservative party, completely shorn of any traditional one nation Tories and under the dominance of the populist right both within the party and beyond.
A brief survey of what has happened recently in Europe demonstrates the trend of a rising right.
What is needed is for all progressives not to concede before, but to confront the arguments of the far right before they get a greater grip. What is needed is for Labour to embrace – not run from – the discussion of a progressive realism. It must set out a policy programme that matches the scale of the problems it will inherit from the Conservatives.
John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington, was shadow chancellor of the exchequer from 2015 to 2020
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