Are you familiar, dear reader, with the “Ming vase” strategy?
It seems to be a commonplace in inner Labour party pre-election discussion. It refers to the way that the man who is on the verge of being prime minister, and his chancellor to be, Rachel Reeves, are being so depressingly cautious in their electoral commitments that many natural Labour voters are asking themselves: what is the point?
Enter stage left Sir Keir Starmer, who has been told about the advice Roy Jenkins gave to Tony Blair in the run-up to the 1997 election. At that time, Labour were way ahead in the polls, but haunted by the fact that after “13 wasted Tory years” (1951 to 1964), Harold Wilson had only just won the 1964 election. Even more daunting was the collective folk memory of how the party had been misled by the polls into expecting to win in 1992, when the Tories, under John Major, made a successful last-minute dash to the winning post – undoubtedly helped by the ditching of Margaret Thatcher in 1990.
In the run-up to 1997, Jenkins, who had become a kind of mentor to Blair, had compared the latter’s position to that of someone entrusted with the perilous task of carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor: one slip could herald disaster!
A leader of the opposition on the approach to Downing Street finds that he has lots of friends he didn’t know about, and no shortage of advice. Some of this is evidently coming to Starmer from Blair, who seems to have passed on the Ming vase advice. (Those of us who knew Jenkins regard it as a characteristically Jenkinsian analogy.)
The obvious concern for the many who want Starmer and Reeves to be a lot bolder once they assume office is: suppose they mean what they are saying? Suppose, having crossed the polished floor and not dropped the vase, they continue to stick by the present government’s anti-growth fiscal rules, and persist in ruling out rejoining the European customs union and the single market?
And this at a time when the greatly respected British Social Attitudes Survey finds that just 24% of respondents say Britain should remain outside the EU.
The Labour leadership tell us they want growth. It is growth that is meant to finance the industrial and NHS revival which might rescue us from the continuation of austerity – which the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation tell us is built into the economic forecasts for the next few years on largely unchanged policies.
“Unchanged” essentially means ruling out increases in the major revenue earners – income tax, VAT and national insurance – and keeping fiscal rules which don’t allow sufficient flexibility for borrowing for long-term projects.
Blair’s mantra in 1997 was “education, education, education”. Starmer and Reeves’s equivalent is “investment, investment, investment”. However, for all the goodwill being generated by Starmer and Reeves with the private sector, what is being offered on the investment front so far is small beer – £7.3bn or so over the next parliament.
By contrast, Sir Brian Unwin, a former head of the European Investment Bank, points out that, during our membership of the EU, the EIB invested £150bn for infrastructure and other projects in the UK, about £6bn a year – not an entire parliament – leading to linked investment of two or three times that by the private sector. In that last, fatal referendum year of 2016, the EIB devoted £7.5bn to the UK, including expenditure on improving our sewage system.
The thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, in common with the OBR, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and Goldman Sachs, calculates the annual loss to our potential output at about £140bn, with losses of vital tax revenues of about £40bn a year.
By being recalcitrant over Europe, says UK in a Changing Europe, Labour has ruled out changes that would have brought the biggest boost to investment and growth. They are “tinkering around the edges of the current relationship with the EU”, and doing little “to address the continuing economic impact of Brexit”.
All this being said, one just has to hope that a large majority – if that is what it is to be – stiffens Starmer’s arm. Good riddance to the insanely ideological rightwing Brexiter Tories who have brought this once great nation to its knees.
Meanwhile, conscious that I may upset some readers with my criticisms of the leadership’s approach, I nevertheless feel the need to register yet another cavil while I am at it.
It is this: there seems to be a general assumption that Labour will be in for two terms, and will have time to come into their own during the second term. But how can they be so sure in these disturbing geopolitical times?
