Clement Attlee’s 1945-51 governments might have helped establish what eventually became a sort of post-war consensus on economics and the state, but the Attlee reforms began in contention, not consensus. His big domestic calls — the Beveridge welfare state and the NHS — were initially opposed by the Conservatives, who only regained power after they accepted those reforms. So, if Starmer is Attlee, as he claims, what are the transformative, mould-breaking changes he wants that his opponents reject?
Even allowing for Starmer’s prudent reluctance to reveal much of a policy agenda so early in the game, there is no reason to think that he is a man who will oversee and implement an era-defining transformation of state and the public realm. When you see children’s “Thank you NHS” posters in front windows, you realise we live in a word Attlee’s governments helped design. Starmer is a clever man with good policy advisers, but even his greatest admirers would struggle to suggest he has an agenda for changes that will still stand tall in British life in 70 years’ time.
A better post-war text for Starmer’s approach is in the continuity of economic policy that began under Atlee’s last chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell in 1950 and persisted under the Tories’ Rab Butler from 1951. The postwar consensus of “Butskellism” can be overstated, but for at least two decades after Attlee, there was little serious disagreement between Labour and Conservatives about how economic policy should work and the ends it should seek. Today, we live in another period of consensus, even though it is rarely acknowledged as such.
The unspoken truth is that Labour and the Conservatives today already largely agree about economics and — at least as important — how economic policy should be done. Since Tony Blair and Gordon Brown took power in 1997, UK economic policy has operated within rules they established. Politicians tax and spend as much as they think voters and the gilt markets will tolerate, under largely cosmetic fiscal “rules” conjured up and then broken according to the politics of the day.
Meanwhile, the Bank of England sets monetary policy and — sometimes — worries about inflation to provide real assurance to the markets. And in times of crisis, it is the Bank that provides the most important support for demand, even though stimulating demand is a deeply political business with the sort of distributional consequences that are more commonly made by elected leaders, not officials.
That policy framework, largely replicated in other advanced economies, has created the conditions that allow Boris Johnson to spend like a sailor in port, and all with the blessing of the IMF. Independent central banks have now spent more than a decade pumping new money into credit markets, pushing down borrowing costs and making it almost free for governments to borrow, borrow, borrow. To be clear, the Bank of England hasn’t deployed “extraordinary” monetary policy with the aim of supporting Government borrowing, but that policy has had that effect nontheless.
The economic case may be sound, but the political implications of quantitative easing are huge. Cheap money inflates asset prices, including housing, benefitting older property-owners and screwing asset-poor youngsters. It helps pump up equity prices — because money has to go somewhere — and arms private equity with barrels of “dry powder” to spend buying up companies and transforming the corporate landscape.
A Labour Party that wanted to offer a real economic alternative, a true fork in the road, would challenge that policy framework, look again at BoE independence and the role of QE. That’s what John McDonnell wanted, you might recall. But his successor as shadow chancellor, Annaliese Dodds, has made clear that while she’s aware of the side-effects of QE, Starmer’s Labour will defend the post-97 policy framework to the hilt: central bank independence will be the foundation of Starmer’s economics. As for fiscal policy, Labour would conjure up another set of rules “targeting a balanced budget over the cycle but still allowing for flexibility in times of crisis and for productivity-enhancing investment”. Which would sound familiar to a decade of Tory chancellors.
Dodds set that out in her Mais Lecture last month, a speech that got less attention than Starmer’s but which is essential to understanding the current Labour position. That position, made clear across the two texts, is that Labour wouldn’t do things differently but it would do them better. Industrial strategy. Regional policy. Supporting skills and investment. Saying nice things about small business. Agreeing that inequality is bad and should be reduced. The Labour agenda boils down to promising much the same as the Conservatives with better implementation and better results.
Which brings us to competence, and compassion. Accepting an economic consensus cuts down Labour’s options for attacking the Conservatives. It is banal for an Opposition to accuse an incumbent government of not doing enough to fix the problems of the nation: that is dog-bites-man politics that sways no-one’s vote. So Labour can only offer greater competence and greater compassion.
The first is simple to describe and near-impossible to deliver. How do you show people you can govern well when you’re not in government? Blair and (almost) David Cameron managed to convince the electorate they could run the country well despite a total lack of experience, but in both cases they were helped by incumbents who were (harshly) seen to have overseen catastrophes of incompetence: Black Wednesday and the credit crunch.
And while it’s still very early in the political story of Covid-19, voters are so far showing few signs of penalising Boris Johnson for his errors over the pandemic. Current polls show the Tories edging ahead of Labour and Johnson’s approval ratings now higher than when he entered No 10 in 2019. Embracing lockdown caution and the stunning competence of the vaccine rollout mean it’s possible that the PM who oversaw more than 100,000 Covid deaths might not pay a major political price.
Of course, that could change. Most voters don’t currently see the pandemic as a political event and they’re not really thinking about an election that’s still nearly four years away. Perhaps the slew of inquiries that must follow the outbreak will reveal culpable failures by Johnson and his party. But betting the 2024 election on a public inquiry isn’t a coherent strategy for Labour. And remember those predictions about how the deadly mismanagement of the Iraq War in 2003 would doom Blair in 2005?
Starmer’s other route will be the familiar Labour promise of compassion: trust us to do things better than the Tories because we’re nicer and we care more about you and your family. Again, there are limits to how effective this will be against Johnson. First, it’s another dog-bites-man political cliché: every Labour election campaign in modern times has come down to promising to protect the NHS from wicked Tories. Even if voters hadn’t heard that line before, this time they may well be offered the chance to vote for wicked Tories who have showered the NHS in record-breaking sums of (borrowed) money. Compassion may still favour Labour, but it won’t be enough.
And so to culture, then. When there is no significant political division about economics, what’s left to fight about? Values, worldviews, social issues, and who understands and likes the country best. Both the 2016 referendum and the 2019 general election proved that for some voters at least, culture and values trump economics. Some people voted Brexit aware that it might mean foregoing some national wealth; similar imperatives helped turn bits of the Red Wall blue for Boris.
Johnson’s Conservatives understand that, which is why they’ve largely ditched fiscal conservatism and decided to forget the history of Margaret Thatcher signing the Single European Act and promoting the Single Market. Instead of the “markets uber alles” approach that Starmer now alleges, Johnsonian Tories make a hard-edged cultural appeal to people who used to vote Labour by instinct and tradition. Thatcher won over working-class Labour people by promising to make them richer. Johnson’s offer is less about wealth than freedom: a sovereign nation you can be proud of again. For some people, the nation’s precise GDP matters less than the flag that flies above it.
This is why it’s sensible for Starmer to try to talk up his economic differences with the Conservatives, because focusing on the truth — that those disagreements are fairly minor — inevitably shifts the conversation to cultural dividing lines. As leader, he’s been very adept at sidestepping Conservative elephant traps that would force him to take a position on “woke” issues such as trans rights and free speech, which are of only minor importance to most voters. But some in his party are quite keen to fight over such things and every time a Labour MP joins the debate about pulling down statues or decolonising the curriculum or using the right pronouns, a small cheer goes around Conservative HQ. Witness the Labour “backlash” when some second-tier advisers suggested that the Labour Party might want to show voters that it — gasp — actually likes Britain and understands why some voters like the Union flag and being British.
Politics-as-culture-war is a battle that many (though not all) Conservatives would relish far more than Starmer would. Tory strategists see the image of Woke Labour led by an Islington lawyer as the best way to stop those Red Wall folk taking back the voters they lent Johnson in 2019. If Starmer’s consensual approach to economics succeeds in neutralising the issue as an attack line for the next election, you can look forward to Tories deploying ever more culture-war wedge issues in the hope of forcing Starmer to choose between the values of his progressive colleagues and the worldview of voters who want politicians to talk about jobs and hospitals and schools, not undergraduate debating points about “social justice”.
Keir Starmer is currently experiencing the downswing of a political pendulum that’s been accelerated by social media and our ever-shorter attention spans. For as long as I’ve been writing about politics, the media-political village has had a tendency to divide politicians into triumphant victors and dismal failures, with no room for shades of grey in between. But in a discourse made jittery by Twitter-immediacy, the jumps from one extreme to the other quicker and more jarring. A couple of weeks ago, my former colleague Stephen Bush wrote a smart and nuanced piece that included balanced reporting of some Labour discontent with Starmer; yet for all Stephen’s nuance and balance, within a few hours, the SW1A village had settled on a new consensus that Starmer is a duffer doomed to fail.
Before we reach that far-off next election, the Labour leader will see some highs and more lows too; I suspect he’s calm enough to treat those two imposters much the same. I also suspect that absent a huge change in the politics of Scotland, he’ll struggle mightily to secure a Labour majority at that election.
But ultimately, I’m less interested in the fate of Starmer – or Johnson – than in what their approaches to economics reveal about politics and policy today. The last few years have seen a lot of people talking about the death of our fifth c-word, centrism, cheering as consensual technocrats lose out to ideologues who supposedly have a better understanding of what The People want. But that narrative, like most, has been over-done. Between them, Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer are tacitly agreeing a modest, technocratic consensus over UK economic policy after the pandemic. What Works is quietly reasserting its dominance over the Will of the People.
At least on economics, they aren’t so much Churchill and Attlee as Butler and Gaitskell. Shall we call it Johnmerism or Starmsonism? Take your pick, but I’m happy to go with Centrism 2.0 — and a country tired of politics as demented soap opera will be too.
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SubscribeI would very much like to hear Starmer’s answer to these four questions;
Is Britain a racist country?
What is your definition of a woman?
Who should be allowed to live and work in this country?
Should children be told that their gender is an act of choice?
Bravo
But he is a politician and they don’t answer questions like that. There would be no point asking.
But the silence speaks volumes – especially in the red wall
The Red Wall is not obsessed with it. It’s just you.
I would very much like to hear Starmer’s answer to a fifth question:
When you look at that photograph of you and Angela Rayner ‘taking the knee’ during the BLM protests, I bet you feel REALLY stupid, don’t you?
I thought his facial expression in the knee bending photograph was one of extreme embarrassment in the knowledge that the image will follow him around for the remainder of his political career.
It will make for a great “Private Eye” cover, with a suitable caption, after any future c**k ups.
His bacon sandwich moment.
The grownup political analysis we get in the press (and repeated by the commentariat) may explain why the politicians we get are as poor as they are.
Arise, Sir Kneeler.
Because they certainly looked it. What a ‘red wall blooper’ that was
comment deleted – not relevant, sorry. (Agree with your post!)
Remember Starmer is a lawyer. I’ve never known a lawyer give a straight answer to any question.
Don’t hold your breath as you wait for the replies.
Sorry, downvoted by mistake & can’t undo it!
No, of course we are not racists. The UK is a country completely free of all racism. Nobody suffers any oppression on the basis of skin colour; all non-white people have complete access to equal education, never ever suffer any police hostility, are never discriminated gainst in employment and job interviews, all in all never experience any hostility in any area of life. I assume you agree with this.
Starmer may be better or worse than Attlee, his problem is that 2021 is not 1945. The ‘poor’ in England have more riches than many in subSaharan Africa. Britain is one of the most tolerant countries in the world. Most people are home owners or want to be. Average life span is over 80. Free healthcare is available for everyone. There simply isn’t the Dickensian social deprivation that the left wants to portray reality to be.
Inequality matters less when basic needs are met. If Bill Gates, Jeff Bozos and Elon Musk walk into a bar, average income of the population of the bar goes way high, and inequality widens. But no one in the bar will go hungry that night because of the presence of the ultra rich.So despite the loud noises of identity politics, millions dying of austerity, inequality that shame us all etc, there is no constituency for the hard left in the sixth most prosperous, very diverse, fair and tolerant country that has never liked extreme positions.
I have no idea of how good or bad Starmer is. What matters is whether he can recognise reality and offer something realistic that helps voters, rather than playing fantasy politics and fighting battles of rhetoric with imaginary enemies.
I agree with all that you say but at the end of the day Starmer is first and foremost a politician, and as he seems to have no charisma whatsoever he won’t be a very good one. Add that to his apparent lack of any principles and he isn’t going to achieve much.
My indelible image of Starmer is the guy down on a knee for Black Life Matters. Reminds me of the great line from Superman 2: “You are not the President. No one who commands so many could kneel so quickly”.
“Most people are home owners or want to be.”
Among those under 40, it’s very much “want to be”. While the Tories voted down a Labour amendment requiring rented properties to be of habitable quality. “No one votes for their landlord.”
Hilariously, there are a number of articles appearing across many media channels these days that accuse the Tories of stoking Culture wars.
The words pot, kettle and black spring to mind.
Agreed, it’s not the Tories grubbing around looking for slavery links in in any and every street name, or demanding the removal of statues, or asking for an annual day of repentance for the empire.
Seemingly the only acceptable response is to sign up to the wokery.
Spot on. I am a doctor and a university employee, but write under a pseudonym, knowing my university’s reaction to anyone who is not an extreme leftie, especially if an ethic minority breaks ranks from the fraternity of victim hood. Tories have had to enter the culture wars despite having other major problems to deal with. I for one am glad they are taking this on. Long overdue and very welcome.
I don’t quite believe that any university in the UK requires its employees to be extreme lefties, or even persecutes them if they aren’t extreme enough. But I’m sure you have citations for your insinuation…
‘when you come to a fork in the road, take it’ as Yogi Berra once said.
ALL ambitious politicians are populists of course, but Starmer has a mountain to climb.
Thanks to his position on Brexit under Corbyn’s Labour for many potential Labour voters, particularly those in the Red Wall seats, ‘London luvvie’Starmer is already damaged well beyond repair goods.
Let alone being a knee-bender, which action lost my potential vote forever.
“…few signs of penalising Boris Johnson for his errors over the pandemic.”
What errors? Please name some.
And by “errors”, I do not mean judgements made in good faith, based on picking from various sources of conflicting scientific advice. No actual errors that reveal something bad (you know, like Corbyn and the mural, the book forward, the wreath laying…). Or Blair’s constitutional tinkering or his abandonment of the Thatcher/EU rebate.
I agree that Boris has not made errors to the same extent as Blair. That would be impossible. But errors have certainly been made with regard to Covid, and many deceptions practiced on the British people.
It seems to me that the word ‘deception’ is a political word which means – “he has done things which I personally don’t approve of.” BJ has taken a sort of left-wing stance which says, “I don’t care about the thinkers and the people who can look after themselves. I care about all of the people who are frightened and can’t look after themselves.” So, the thinkers see themselves as suffering and being deceived. It is a matter only of perspective.
“BJ has taken a sort of left-wing stance which says, “I don’t care about the thinkers and the people who can look after themselves. I care about all of the people who are frightened and can’t look after themselves.”
Politics is not about ‘caring’.
Seems to me, the real question that needs to be answered is not about the Covid failings, but the cronyism.
Doing absolutely nothing whatsoever at all for 6 weeks at the start of 2020 instead of using the time to prepare a strategy of shielding the vulnerable which would have enabled us to avoid lockdown altogether if he hadn’t left the borders open out of a craven cowardice in the face of Chinese intimidation at the very start of 2020; after accepting the need for lockdown having done nothing for 6 weeks lacking the ability to work out that leaving borders open negates every effort of lockdown as coronavirus carriers poured into the UK from all over Europe and beyond in Spring 2020; failing to use the greatest resource available to him, the public, for ensuring the lockdown, shielding and rolling out the vaccine are as efficiently done as possible.
In other words, the same as every other Western leader. Don’t be fooled into thinking Britain’s vaccine roll out is good. It’s only good relative to other Western nations. https://www.physicaleconomics DOT org/two-times-six-weeks-of-ideological-
The problem I always have with analysis like this is that it is totally negative. So, let’s have an election next week. Who should we all vote for?
Note that I wrote “the same as every other Western leader”, which, I’m afraid, makes the reality even more negative.
No one had any idea of the scale of the pandemic in the ‘first six six weeks’ of 2020. The virus was not identified / sequenced until the second half of January so could not even be tested for. Even when we had sequenced the virus, no country had mass testing capability to measure the extent of infection in the population. The UK locked down at the same time as most other western countries (and at that point had not suffered any major hospitalisations or deaths). We were just unlucky in that we were already highly infected whereas Australia, Germany, NZ etc were not.
As for closing borders, only an idiot would of done that prior to evidence of mass infection, as it devastates the economy. Once we knew the extent of the pandemic it was too late to close the borders, it would of made no difference.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing
No hindsight was required at all.
From late January until early March, it looked increasingly likely it was going to be serious. We may not have known exactly how serious. But the point is, we did nothing, nothing whatsoever at all.
As for the borders, only an idiot would have let people walk through our airports, first from China and then from Italy and the rest of Europe when the disease was running wild there with absolutely no controls whatsoever at all throughout the entire pandemic from mid-January 2020 until about a week ago.
No, no hindsight was required at all. Our approach has been incredulously self-destructive as much as telling soldiers to march towards enemy lines with their rifles held above their heads. This is almost entirely self-inflicted and coming to terms with that over the next decade is going to be very difficult indeed. So difficult in fact that I don’t think we will have the psychological courage to do it.
You completely ignored my response and just repeated your original post.
‘We did nothing’ is just nonsense. Either you are not in the UK or are suffering from Amnesia. Go to the wiki page and it will explain in detail what we did. There were all sorts of travel restrictions and border controls. COBRA was meeting from January onwards and all sorts of further action were taken.
You don’t close the borders or implement a lockdown completely destroying your economy without hard evidence of imminent mass infection leading to high levels of sickness and death. We did not have that evidence or even sufficient suspicion until mid March. Once we saw what was happening in Italy and Spain we locked down, as did the rest of the Western (non Asian) world. By then closing the borders was pointless.
We just got unlucky, as unlike Germany, NZ, Australia etc we were already heavily infected. Your hysterical postings do not change the facts.
COBRA, what a joke, but not a funny one. I addressed all your points.
The point that you’re missing is that if we’d prepared to shield the vulnerable during the 6 weeks from late January until early March and then closed our borders or at least had strict controls with TESTS at airports then we might have avoided lockdown altogether. Instead we sent patients from care-homes back to their residences where they infected tens of thousands of other residents.
But there’s no point arguing with you. You’ve decided what you want to believe happened.
You cannot shield the vulnerable to any substantial extent when there is a population wide pandemic. No country has managed that.
Every country in the world sent hospital patients into care homes. The UK actually managed that situation better than most (we had a lower proportion of deaths in care homes than any other country in the EU).
You seem to of swallowed the left wing propaganda pushed out by MSM. Learn to do your own research, my friend.
Boris played truant from five COBRA meetings during that period. He was having his second fortnight of holiday in two months, orchestrating his departure from his wife (suffering from cancer) and preparing to announce the pregnancy of his girlfriend.
But, let’s imagine you are right and the government did its best to prepare during that crucial six weeks and events beyond human control rendered their plans useless. How do you then explain the failure to prepare between end of the first lockdown in May and the beginning of the next in November? Six months, or, actually around eight months because there was every possibility of preparing for an expected winter resurgence during the first lockdown.
No preparations for shielding, no online national school curricula, no preparations for socially distanced lessons and exams despite the disastrous cancellation of exams in summer 2020 and no testing facilities at airports. Eight months and nothing. Explain that.
The answer is, they did prepare. There was a detailed winter plan that was put into action. It largely worked. We have the biggest test and trace system in the world. We had sufficient restrictions to ensure the hospitals did not overflow and continued to treat non covid cases. The new variant tested the plan to its limits, but ultimately it worked. And we also continued with the world’s largest and most successful vaccine roll out.
You have taken as fact the MSM’s assessment of the government’s performance. Would it surprise you to learn their assessment is not an objective one? Most of the media and public institutions are left wing, or at least left of centre. They have a vested interest in trying to undermine the government. I would encourage you to research the facts directly and not rely on ‘editorial comment’ provided by institutions who are politically opposed to the government or depend on manufacturing hysteria to generate an income (or in the case of the MSM, both)
What a strange person you are telling an Unherd reader they are indoctrinated by MSM.
I made four points for you to explain. You have failed to respond to a single one. And nobody knows if shielding would have worked with a detailed plan and facilities in place.
Interesting exchange, but to be frank I doubt very much that closing the borders would have made much difference. The virus was already here and quite widespread before the Government were really aware of it. This is because the Chinese lied and lied and lied, and are still lying. We really do not know exactly where this virus originated (the Wuhan Laboratory is almost a dead cert) nor when it originated, but it was several months earlier than we are being told.
As to here a major mistake was discharging patients back into Care Homes, but to be fair that was not a Ministerial decision, but was the NHS. Where I take issue is with the fact that we have been deprived of all our Liberty for almost a year on the back of this stupid notion that you can ‘defeat a virus’. It’s absurd. What saddens me greatly is that so few are prepared to challenge this march to authoritarian tyranny because there will dawn a day when it is used again by a Government for less benign reasons. As b*nking Ferguson remarked ‘we didn’t think we could get away with it’ – NO, you da*m well shouldn’t have been allowed to ‘get away with it’. That’s the problem.
It was Public Health England not the NHS that advised the government to send home care home residents. However, this problem occurred in all Western nations suggesting that there has been a large amount of communication and co-planning (conspiring!!) on how to deal with the virus; all Western nations have brought upon themselves this crisis. You can blame China but who allowed China to become so powerful that it could pressure the WHO to pressure our governments to keep their borders open? Answer: We did! Would you blame a rabid dog for biting you or would you blame yourself for trying to stroke it?
Closing the borders was more or less everything. Taiwan closed its borders in January; they knew the Chinese best and weren’t going to take any chances. Korea, Australia, Japan etc., followed suit, which is of course why they are suffering far less than Western nations whose arrogance prevented them from seeking the advice of those Asian nations’ scientists and politicians who understood the situation better.
But tell me, what is the point of putting a population into lockdown when you are allowing millions of people who may be infected from all over the world to enter your country?
The UK locked down at the same time as Australia, Japan and every other non Asian Western country. Unfortunately for the UK we were already heavily infected at that point, whilst those other countries were not (other than Spain, France, Italy and USA). It was simply bad luck for the UK, which I know people struggle with as an explanation. They want someone to blame. They want certainty of causation. Life is rarely that simple.
Once the UK was infected, there was no point in closing borders.
Again, you’ve failed to realise I’m not specifically picking on the UK or on the Johnson administration. I’m criticising the entire Western approach.
However, you’ve given me cause to add a point to the 4 points you’ve failed to address. That is, why then have we closed our borders now? The other, previous 4 points are: “How do you then explain the failure to prepare between end of the first lockdown in May and the beginning of the next in November? Six months, or, actually around eight months because there was every possibility of preparing for an expected winter resurgence during the first lockdown.
So it made sense to admit 3000 Spanish football fans to a match in Liverpool, when Spain was riddled with the disease and was on its way to lockdown? Or to hold the Chelthenham Cup? Really?
“We have the biggest test and trace system in the world.”
You are not seriously telling us that the £22 billion spent on that, overseen by one of Boris’s Tory cronies, has done much good at all?
When you complain that others are informed by “the MSM” while you have “done your research”, that’s like someone who claims that Poland invaded the peace-loving Third Reich and anyone who says differently has been brainwashed by the MSM.
Sorry I meant to uptick you!
WHAT ERRORS? His error in Locking Down have been as devastating as any decision made by a politician in British history!
His errors in not doing it sooner, you mean.
No conflict when SAGE advised a two week lockdown in mid-September. Boris, under pressure from the Covid sceptics sitting behind him (he’s no leader), dismissed it as “ridiculous”. Six weeks later the virus was out of control, exactly as the scientists had predicted, and he had to institute a ONE MONTH lockdown.
There’s a reason why Britain has the highest death toll in Europe, and the third highest death toll per million population in the world.
Starmer does not understand Johnson. Most people do not. Johnson will not be out-flanked by the Left in terms of support for public services and support for those on low income.
Despite all of the left wing inspired twaddle propagated by the MSM about Johnsons’ incompetence, he is actually something of a strategic genius. They said he could not become Mayor of a Labour City like London. He got himself elected (twice). They said he couldn’t win the Brexit referendum. They said he would never win the leadership of the Conservative Party. They said he could not win a GE. He won it with a landslide. They said he could not reach a Brexit agreement. He got both the transition and free trade agreement passed.
Politically speaking, this Pandemic is the very definition of an ‘unwinnable’ event. Yet according the polls, this PM now seems to be winning the unwinnable.
Johnson is no manager, but he is a strategist, single minded, obsessive about winning and a patriot. I am becoming convinced these are exactly the skills we need from a leader in the current situation.
Emerging from the hysterical fog of the pandemic we seem to of ended up with world’s largest and most successful testing and vaccination regime. That outcome is no accident, it has Boris Johnson written all over it.
I think you are right. Johnson seems to me to be very good at strategy but not so good at mundane detail. The Chinese Virus is an unpresidented situation, and the reaction to it across the West has been baffling to me. Liberty and freedom have been murdered in cold blood. The decisions made have been to some degree dictatated by figures (infection rates and death statistics) which are in essence meaningless drivel. BUT, Johnson had the nouse to see very early on that the route out of the mess was vaccination and he went h*ll for leather and ordered more vaccines that you could shake a stick at. He was right. And I think what the public will remember (they have short memories) will be the huge success of the vaccine roll out, not all the f*** ups before.
Agreed on the vaccines. Same goes for testing – that system will be useful in all sorts of ways going forward. Future pandemics, no matter how serious, should focus on identifying and isolating infected individuals, not the entire country. Mass testing will be critical to achieve that.
On the general liberty issue, you may recall the PM attempted a ‘voluntary lockdown’ in the first 48 hours, his instinct was not to mandate anything. But he is a political realist (the reason for his success). It became apparent there was enormous public support for a mandatory lockdown and the Left’s strategy from day one was to accuse the PM of putting business before lives (profits before people). In terms of the politics, he had no option but to lockdown hard and spend a fortune on furlough etc As soon as the pandemic is over, I think you will see his true instincts come back into play as a ‘classical liberal’
So, an ever larger, incompetent and wasteful state, and endless money printing to pay for it. The situation is hopeless, isn’t it?
Your CV, brief as it appears here, identifies clearly your political bias. The failed state that you describe here – and decry as a failed Johnsonian state – actually sounds ideal to me, stuck as I am in increasingly socialist Canada. Would that our so-called Conservative party were anywhere near as wary of centrism.
Canada? Goodness. You have my sympathies. It must be terrible to have to pretend to take that virtue-signaling jackass of a premier seriously.
Yes, what an absolute ‘Ponce’ as we used to say.
He is adored by the French contingent.
That’s Prime Minister to you. And somehow we’re managing to survive the trauma quite well.
One of my grandsons lives with his family in Quebec. The Quebecois love him.
Canada is not “increasingly socialist” – it’s not socialist at all. It’s ideology is classic liberal, which is why conservatism and socialism have no place. The conservative party here are and have always been a party of anti’s – anti-abortion, anti-USSR (anti USA once upon a time), anti-fluoride, anti-immigrant, etc., which is why it only has only ever been elected when the liberal party makes a bigger c**k-up than usual. The NDP, a 2nd international party of social democrats, are ideologically liberal: they have no policy which Lloyd George would have ideologically rejected in 1904. Thus they too get elected only when they are an aternative to some otyher party too right-wing forn the moment. You might say that all the parties in both the Canadian and UK parliaments are in favour of managed capitalism and you wouldn’t be far wrong.
Ex BoE Governor Mark Carney famously once somewhat cryptically opined, in relatively far, far rosier times incidentally, that the UK has become too reliant on the kindness of strangers.
It was his roundabout way of saying that this country and its successive governments had become addicted to debt to sustain itself, much of it held in foreign hands.
Contrast the UK with Japan which though also hugely indebted sees most of its debt owned and held by its own populace ie they are effectively directly enfranchised and invested in their own destiny.
The one thing of real interest I thought that Starmer was advocating in that largely vacuous speech the other day was the idea of a post-covid ‘British Recovery Bond’. Details were sketchy, but this could well perform two valuable functions for the UK.
First using vital domestic investment to get our covid crippled economy going using the vast amounts of unspent wealth accumulated by certain sections of the population during the pandemic without having to rely so much on the fickle credit markets and, secondly, to start the long overdue process of weaning this country off the aforementioned ‘kindness of strangers’ that potentially leaves us so vulnerable during times of crises such as these.
Having all of our debt owned by foreigners is quite clever. No one will want us to succeed as much as those we owe money too
I take your point but it’s the, ‘if you owe the bank £50k and can’t pay it back then you’ve got a problem, if you owe them £50m and can’t then they have’ play really isn’t it.
Different times, but I’m sure that much the same attitude prevailed in Argentina way back in the early 20th century when it was then the 10th most affluent country in the world but by the 1930s it became a basket case and pretty much remains so to this day.
It pays us all to remember, particularly in a post-covid, debt laden, economically dysfunctional world increasingly dominated by China, that nothing is forever.
I was not suggesting debt is good. I was just saying if we must sell debt, it’s arguably better to sell debt to foreigners than domestically. It will make many of our potential enemies think twice about attacking us, economically or financially. It gives a kind of leverage.
Nothing to stop you, or anyone else who’s attracted to the idea of a Recovery Bond, from buying Gilts first thing on Monday morning.
In no small part thanks to covid there’s a huge amount of accrued money in the UK just sitting there doing very little and a lot is unlikely to be spent quickly or productively whilst much of the genuinely productive non-financialised economy, ergo the UK’s taxbase, suffers.
Of course there is a lot in a name, but I don’t think that UK gilts are exactly offering much of a return for many nowadays other than the offer of a relatively safe haven, and nor is it exactly a simple, straightforward or widely known about process for individuals who might want to buy UK gilts.
As I said, details were left likely deliberately extremely sketchy and it depends hugely on how it is structured in terms of the carrot and stick when it ultimately comes to selling it to the punters.
“there’s a huge amount of accrued money in the UK just sitting there doing very little and a lot is unlikely to be spent quickly “
Hence the talk of negative interest rates. That will get people spending and investing like there is no tomorrow.
Negative rates can have negative consequences and the evidence from Europe already suggest that they do not work in the way you seem to imagine they would.
Never mind that we don’t know what the post covid world is going to look like.
The Bond is a mindless proposal. Will it be offered at rates higher than the market costing the taxpayer or lower than the market costing savers or the same as the market in which case what’s the point?
Again, we’d have to wait and see.
I’m looking for a chink of light in the darkness here, but the point is whether there might be a public appetite for them as there was for the ‘pensioner bond’ which previously raised over £10bn.
So far Labour has only said these bonds would be a long term offering, the rates would be slightly higher than the near zero interest savings accounts, would offer a predictable income stream and that as well as being attracted by the security they offer people will be tempted by the prospect of investing specifically in the national recovery of the UK economy, not least through its backbone SMEs.
Who knows?
A trifle optimistic perhaps, but to date years of QE precovid have actually done more harm than good for the average person in the street in this country in terms of who it ultimately benefits and I fear that we are looking at yet more of the same if we fail to at least consider alternatives.
Even if you are right, it will just crowd out the private sector. So people’s savings that would of been distributed to the private sector based on the merit, will now go to the government to piss up the wall on politically correct ‘schemes’. Probably financing transexual wheat free bakeries in islington.
I won’t lie your comment made me laugh, but a genuinely productive, potentially employing, taxpaying business is a genuinely productive, potentially employing, taxpaying business whether it’s a transexual run wheat free bakery in Islington or not.
Talking about savings, particularly in a time of crisis where the value of said savings is likely to drop like a stone thanks to inflationary pressures amidst a bleak economic outlook and a knackered taxbase, as if they’ve all been accumulated purely on personal merit is a bit of funny one for me when one considers the BoE’s various interventionist bouts of asset and equity inflating QE over the years, let alone the taxpayer funded ‘private’ bank bailouts.
Still, I appreciate it really boils down to quite how broken the system is, but I long ago lost my faith in the self-correcting, risk/reward, merit based, ‘free’ market, I’m afraid.
If the Pensioner Bond is what I recall, it was an election bribe for the aged at the expense of other taxpayers, which was withdrawn almost immediately the 2015 election was won.
Anyone who watched Starmer’s woeful “Fork in the Road” speech the other day and thought that here was a politician who could capture the public’s attention, probably thought the same about Ed Miliband.
It wasn’t much helped by Labour’s embarrassingly amateurish press team who appear to misunderstand the concept of “Under-promise and over-deliver”. They breathlessly previewed the speech, promising it to be “on the scale of the 1945 Beveridge Report”, and then had their man deliver a sub-Miliband yawnathon, filled with increasingly dull and uninspiring platitudes, hidden within which were only 2 discernible policies – both of which had already been suggested (and better) by a Conservative think tank! – was that really a “Fork in the Road”, it seemed more to be “Following the same path, just 3 paces behind”.
What Starmer and “Starmerism” – if that really is a thing – have failed to answer is ‘What is the current Labour party for? What do they stand for? Whose interests do they seek to serve and promote?’
It is certainly not workers. Except maybe some of those in the public sector. Most of the working class, whose interests the party was founded to serve, are an embarrassment to the current Labour leadership, and have been for years. Emily Thornberry’s Van & St George’s Flag tweet, and Gordon Brown’s encounter with Gillian Duffy, were just moments that publicly laid bare a view that has been prevalent within Labour HQ for years.
John McTernan, Blair’s advisor, put it most succinctly when he dismissed working class supporters as the “lumpen mass with their half-formed thoughts and fully-formed prejudices”, and urged the party to ignore them and focus instead on ethnic minority voters, who could be attracted to Labour by stoking their sense of grievance.
The Labour front bench of recent years, whether NuLabour centrists or unreconstructed Trots, seems to have an agenda completely at odds with the hopes, fears and aspirations of their former heartlands – yet still imagined (right up until the night of the election) those red wall voters were “theirs” by right.
Nothing that Downhill Sir Keir has said or done is likely to win back supporters to the cause. Though plenty he has said and done will have persuaded former supporters that he is a dud. A North London fauxialist who seems to have wafer thin policy positions backed up by no principles whatsoever.
He faces problems on multiple fronts:
Corbyn acolytes (of which there are still many within the PLP, inexplicably) will never forgive Starmer for being a centrist and diluting the purity of their 1970s Marxist tribute act.
Blairite centrists in the party (and the electorate) don’t think Starmer has been half strong enough in repudiating Corbynism and dealing with Momentum. They hoped Starmer would reform the party with a “Clause 4 moment” that he has singularly failed to do.
Plenty of the Starmtrooper cheerleaders here at the Guardian seem to be conceding that he’s going nowhere and his only hope of gaining ground is for the Conservatives to do something to lose support.
Starmer’s 4 years of agitating to overturn Brexit, kneeling to BLM, and then imagining that just cynically draping himself in the flag because a focus group told him (much to his surprise) that most people don’t actually despise Britain, or wish to see the monarchy abolished, is not going to win back red wall voters nor appeal outside the base. He is an uninspiring, charisma-free technocrat, with no instinct for leadership.
The sole reason you can expect to see Conservatives kneeling should be in thanks for only having had to face Miliband, then Corbyn and now Starmer, and praying their good fortune holds.
Downhill Sir Keir is promising to be every bit as lacklustre as many of us suggested he would be. “Forensic” is not the stuff of leadership, however you try and hype it.
There is a fashion for over-hyping incoming leaders at the moment, for simply being better than their predecessor. Biden being better than Trump, and Starmer being better than Corbyn isn’t really setting the bar very high.
But apart from that he is quite good.
Over the last year, there have been around 20 Government U-turns following the pattern Keir Starmer and Labour call for something – Tories are in disarray – Boris does a 180 degree turn and adopts Labour policy.
The simple fact is that there are only three ways to fund an economy.
1) Print the money – highly inflationary
2) Borrow the money – but debt metrics are poor already
3) Tax the economy.
But first you need an economy to tax, and that requires a rapid return economic activity without restrictions, and on current variants and the mood music that currently doesn’t look likely.
Even then, businesses are loaded with government debt, so that would have to be paid off before there’s any real tax revenue, that could be years, even a decade.
So taxation is no immediate solution and more government support may be required for years.
So if Starmer wants massive social spending, and the way he was talking was MASSIVE – a-la Corbyn on steroids he’s going to have a phenomenal job explaining his financial prudence at the next election.
Or more accurately – Labour has nowhere to go
Interesting. At the last election Labour’s aims could be summed up as: no Brexit and more nationalisation. Both the wrong choices.
What would they be today? Well, a microcosm of the Socialist world exists in Wales where the Assembly is Labour-controlled and the next elections are due in May. Back in December, Labour was advocating a two-week holiday or break, a short lockdown coming into Christmas. In Wales, we immediately had a two-week break and it didn’t work.
Mark Drakeford said in November that the Assembly were focussing on poor families and planned to give each poor family a hand-out of £35 per week on an indefinite basis. Then we had the vaccine fiasco where Wales didn’t buy enough vaccine to get the maximum coverage in January and February. In the weekly First Minister’s Question Time, Drakeford was criticised for the slow vaccination plan. His first answer, “If we vaccinate too quickly, we won’t have any work for the vaccination staff for a while.” was laughed down. His second answer was that Wales didn’t have enough money for vaccine and he blamed Westminster. The lead Conservative said, “What about that money you’ve set aside for the £35 per week to poor families?.” Panic. “Let’s move on to the next topic shall we?”
I would expect the Labour proposal for an election manifesto to remove comments on nationalisation, to say that poor families would receive an extra £35 per week, that the voting age would be reduced to 16 (as we have done in the Welsh Assembly), that student fees would be reduced to zero, that there would be a freeze on the OAP, that tax on petrol would be hugely increased. This would be financed by income tax increases for everybody who pays over the base rate.
Removing student fees would encourage almost all 18 year olds to go to higher education which would give the appearance of alleviating unemployment problems.
I really don’t know where Welsh Labour go, they clearly have the same money as Westminster by consequentials.
Regional assembly is different to national elections because finances are constrained.
What sets the landscape is the Westminster elections as that sets the purse strings
We have spent so much money, and businesses are so much in debt that tax receipts are going to be cut for some time
The question really is WHEN do you raise taxes, by HOW much to TO whom.
That’s the debate, and that’s just to try and pay down where we are, without considering the mass largesse that Starmer is cooking up – he sounded worse than Corbyn.
The two week lockdown was in October. The restrictions in December weren’t lockdown. Sorry I’m just being pedantic. Vaccine start was slow but Wales was first UK nation to vaccinate 20% of population. Not picking an argument but those points have little relevance to the politics.
Thanks for your correction on the lockdown. But 20% of 3 million is a lot easier than 20% of 55 million, or even 5 million.
No it isn’t. If you have a smaller proportion, you have a smaller number of medical staff and church halls (etc) in proportion.
You have changed your name. Sneaky.
I wonder also why some people get a U and others get something else ?
BG TR is an obvious outlier …
The Disqus dislocation has robbed me of my Avatar with no obvious means of re-instating it ….
Because the BG was picked up from my e-mail address and it gave me no option to change it.
Makes sense – Thanks TR
Sir Kneel can’t explain why he worked for Corbyn and told us to make Corbyn our Prime Minister. The two facts in that sentence are the beginning and end of everything worth considering about this abject New Labour leftover.
To me if you support and promote a Traitor, you must be suspected of treason yourself. The people noticed this and the stain is still there. Also Starmer was the architect and main promoter of their Brexit policy, which went down like a bucket of cold sick in the North. It was Starmer and his ignoring of democracy that cost Labour swathes of seats at the election. The man’s a fool.
It’s a bit premature to write Starmer off. Tbh I have no confidence in either leader of the main parties and nothing in this article changed my mind.
“the Beveridge welfare state and the NHS — were initially opposed by the Conservatives, who only regained power after they accepted those reforms.”
Utter codswallop.
Churchill endorsed the Beveridge Report in his Chequers broadcast on 21 March 1943. Government set to work and coalition National Health Service and National Insurance white papers were published in 1944 that formed the basis of the 1946 NHS and NI Acts.
The Tory plan for health reform in the mid 1940s was a pale shadow of the Bevan’s NHS and involved a continuation of the fragmentation, inequality and insecure financing of the pre-war system. “…..the NHS — ….initially opposed by the Conservatives, who only regained power after they accepted those reforms” tells it how it is.
So the Director of the Social Market Foundation is not averse to technocratic leadership. Well who’d a thunk it. But that is your blind spot Mr Kirkup. Sir Kier does not have a long track record of being a politician, and that fact is becoming more and more obvious the longer he is in the job.
Your points about the similarities between the party leaders’ policies are well made, but the uniqueness of Starmer in Labour history also needs to be borne in mind.
So far the signs are that he simply lacks the necessary political skills (and/ or sensible advice) to manage his party from the centre as per Attlee or Wilson. Result – no peace in the valley , public perception of never-ending turmoil persists. Plus he is failing to achieve cut-through with the public because of his speaking manner. A technocratic outlook can only take you so far.
We are all aware of the Bank of England’s denial the quantitative easing is not aimed at easing government funding, but the coincidence of numbers in the fiscal deficit and QE engaged in are just too persuasive to the contrary. Any political party aspiring to power will find arguing against monetary financing of public spending very difficult until the costs of such an arrangement become clearer.
It seems to me that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT, or Magic Money Tree if you prefer) contains the seeds of it’s own destruction. It is so seductive as a policy tool because the winners form the spending are very obvious and often vocal, while the losers are invisible. Thus QE financed spending removes any pressure for fiscal rectitude from government spending decisions and now all advocates for public spending believe there is no effective fiscal constraint. But what if, suddenly the losers make themselves very visible indeed?
I can think of two sets of losers in the case of current UK economic policy settings: domestic risk averse savers holding cash and foreigners holding sterling. The first of these constituencies are by definition somewhat timid and unlikely to find voice. But the overseas sterling holders are far less predictable. Someday, somewhere a national policy making system (elected government plus unelected central bank) will push the QE button too hard and too often, and then there will be a currency crisis.
My own view, for what it is worth, is that such a crisis will be the circumstance for the next serious, probably election deciding, economic policy debate.
In theory we can unwind QE during the good times (sell back the bonds to the market). Then all’s well that ends well. I think we did start to do this pre-brexit.
The UK is not alone in QE, most of the G7 are in a similar position. There is some safety in numbers, I guess.
Well I suppose one could say they are all busy debasing the coinage and at least the Bank of England isn;t the worst offender. Not much comfort there I fear.
Labour have been out of power, Defo decade: we’re lucky to have a competent, calming influence in opposition, Keep Calm and Carry On Starmer
True ‘centrism’ in Britain is Reddish Tory. Centre-left on economics, and centre-right on culture. The current Tories get this largely right.
Labour won’t win an election for another decade at least.
You mean ‘national socialism’
Who would you buy a used car from? Keir Starmer or Boris Johnson?
Well thank god we are moving away from Jeremy.
Excellent analysis. Mid-pandemic and with the populist Tories stealing many of Labour’s clothes, Starmer has to play a long game and his supporters need to be patient.
Starmer Captain Rejoin is damaged goods, He just supported CCP style lockdowns is A Climate control freak..All political parties of Lib-lab-Cons-green-Snp-Plaid are failed high tax Globalists …Reform and SDP could do well at local Elections to trouble mSM..
How long? How patient? After the next GE before we can get rid? 4 years? Ok but don’t say I didn’t warn you!
While it may be true that Doris has temporarily abandoned Thatcherite principles on state spending, but the idea that he was always a closet Keynsian is for the birds. Doris is the man, as London Mayor, eager to curry favour with Cameron and Osborne, who agreed, uniquely across the globe, that London Transport, already with the highest fares in the world, would do without any subsidy from central government.
This has been a financial disaster and now the Tories try to claim that the difficulties have been solely created by Sadiq Khan as though Doris and the removal of subsidy & Covid had no impact on transport in London.
But I predict that the Tories will find that their lethal incompetence over covid, and their ‘chumocracy’ spending of public money in the hundreds of millions to inept leech companies like SERCO, and their catastrophic appt of idiots like Dido ‘Typhoid’ Harding, will come back to haunt them.
Forgotten is the continuing public enquiry in to Grenfell, there is no possibility that the judge will not conclude that the disaster happened because of privatisation and the famous ‘bonfire of red tape’ instigated by Gove, Cameron & Osborne; this ‘bonfire’ had a focus on fire regulations.
I predict that all these will come to public consciousness around the time of the next electiomn.