“We’re not pitching you a new Netflix series,” intoned Labour’s shadow business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, this week. “We’re not putting on politics as entertainment.” And certainly absolutely no one could accuse the extremely likely next government of that. The thing about a new Netflix series, of course, is that the streamer will want to have an absolutely nailed-down idea of how much it is going to cost and how it will be funded before it gets the green light. Weirdly, you have to do this if you are pitching Is It Cake?, but not if you are seeking to run the world’s sixth-largest economy. This means it’s possible that the thing the frontrunner party tells you is the manifesto is not actually a manifesto, but something else. Cake, maybe. Is it cake?
“We want to return to serious government,” Reynolds continued loftily, “to effective policy and to politics as public service, not as pantomime.” Right. One of the things we’ve heard for some time now is ordinary people saying they just want politics to be boring again – which is understandable, but always feels rather cargo-cultish. It is as though the fact that politics was boring back in the good times logically means that the good times can be restored by somehow making politics boring. I … don’t think it works like that. Without wishing to unleash any spoilers for the season ahead, the UK faces huge and deepening problems – and anyone who tells you they can be fixed by “boring politics” is selling something.
A number of sales pitches are available. If populism is claiming there are simple answers to complex problems, then pretty much every manifesto offered this election is a populist one. For my money, the most ominous thing that happened this week was the underplayed Institute for Fiscal Studies slapdown of another Labour frontbencher, this time Nick Thomas-Symonds, who had told an interviewer: “We’ve also been open, always, that we may open the books and discover that the situation is even worse than it is at the moment.”
Ah, “the books”. Please not “the books”. Just as it was not accurate for Margaret Thatcher to pretend that the public finances were entirely analogous to a housewife’s budget, so it is not accurate to try to flog people the idea that the United Kingdom is a small business the Labour party is apparently about to buy, sight unseen, while hoping it doesn’t find any nasty surprises in “the books”, or perhaps under “the bonnet”.
But listen, don’t take it from me. Take it from the IFS director, Paul Johnson. “Oh dear, oh dear,” he responded to Thomas-Symonds’s comment. “The old ‘we may open the books and discover the situation is even worse …’ The books are wide open, fully transparent. That really won’t wash …” It was Johnson’s familiarity with the books, in fact, that led his organisation to issue rebukes to both Labour and the Conservatives for claiming their manifesto policies could be funded by extremely “trivial” cuts to services or tax rises, when the reality is that they will require far more significant tax rises or cuts, likely both. One of these sins of omission is going to matter, and it isn’t the Conservative one.
During this campaign, no politician has said the plain fact: this country will soon not be able to afford even its current “lifestyle” (if I may deploy some mirthless air quotes), let alone the one to which Labour rightly aspires. The received wisdom is that Theresa May once told the truth during a campaign – justifying what was immediately branded her “dementia tax” – and tanked the election. It was, as always, more complicated than that, but it still passed immediately into strategy folklore. The British people’s appetite for fantasy was again held to be insatiable, and without any side effects.
As they draw to a close, then, the past 14 years of Conservative government can be characterised as an era where evasion as a presentational device became evasion as a policy position. Successive governments simply haven’t told the hard truths or done the hard work the country has needed. Nothing big has been done, except in the endless rabbit holes of constitutional politics the Conservatives have led us down. And those big things have only made matters worse.
Meanwhile, during that same period, there has also been just the vaguest sense that British people don’t like politicians lying to them. Lying is one of those things that undermines trust across the board, not just in the team that’s doing it. It was the same with Partygate, with MPs’ expenses and with the current election gambling scandal. Going further back, it was the same with the Iraq war. These things undermine trust in ALL politicians, and by extension in the democratic process, and if that’s unfair because one side was worse than the others, then feel free to go house to house explaining to normal people that they’re looking at it all wrong.
In the end, Keir Starmer’s Labour is asking an electorate whose trust in politicians is already the lowest it has ever been to take something on trust. And even his detractors should wish him luck and hope things can only get better – the country deserves it. Reality being what it is, though, people may come to resent the deliberate evasions of the would-be government sooner rather than later. Maybe the moment of reckoning can be covered up, or put off by some more evasions – “the books”. But if that fails, and the next government is left having to explain reality to an even less trusting electorate, then what can it say? Sorry, but ours were the good type of untruths? Let’s hope the public will understand, or the transfer of power will simply be a transfer of anger.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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