What hope for Sir Keir? Credit: Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty
It has been a torrid three months for Boris Johnson’s Government, having to fend off accusations of serious hypocrisy and impropriety — two sins always sure to rouse the ire of the electorate.
Perhaps inevitably, subsequent polling has shown Labour moving ahead of the Tories. This has been seized on by some within the ranks as evidence that the Party is heading in the right direction and actually reconnecting with millions of lost voters.
We would do well to exercise some caution before assuming that any sort of decisive shift is occurring. A statement of intent made to a pollster at a time when one’s dander is up is one thing; following through with it in the privacy of the ballot box another. History tells us that.
I immodestly lay claim to having been one of a small number inside the labour movement who — often to the derision or fury of comrades — publicly predicted in advance of the 2019 general election that the Red Wall would crumble. My political antennae tell me now that, while fortunes have improved marginally for the party since that calamity, reports of an incipient Labour resurgence are greatly exaggerated.
For one thing, any opposition party that can truly be seen as standing a decent chance of heading for power needs to have enjoyed reasonably consistent poll leads far out from, and right up to, a general election. A clutch of favourable polls when the sitting administration is navigating choppy waters does not a government-in-waiting make.
It is barely-remembered that Labour, under Michael Foot, polled consistently higher than the Tories throughout the first half of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. And we all know what happened, in 1983, when it really mattered.
Though it pains me to say it, I see no compelling evidence that the political realignment which has taken hold in British politics over recent years is about to fracture. The Labour party, as with all opposition parties, must, if it is to win power, rely on something more than the ephemeral bouts of unpopularity experienced by all governments.
And while Sir Keir Starmer has gone some way to positioning Labour on territory that will afford it wider appeal, the party remains a million miles from sealing the deal with the electorate — especially those once loyal voters who jumped ship to the Tories in 2019. Refocusing the party’s messaging on themes such as family, community, patriotism, security, prosperity and respect is unquestionably the right thing to do, as is pledging to make Brexit work, rather than continuing to allow that particular sore to run. But the fine words need to be anchored in hard policy, and that is where Labour must be more audacious.
Never was it more necessary, as we (hopefully) emerge from the pandemic, and with a general election perhaps a little over a year away, for Labour to set out a bold, though coherent, economic narrative. It must resist all calls for the literally counter-productive measures of retrenchment and constraint. Starmer must ensure the party does not strap itself back into the intellectual straitjacket that restrained it during the new Labour years, eschewing its own tradition of economic radicalism to make its peace with neoliberal orthodoxy.
Rather, he would do well to emulate one of his predecessors, Clement Attlee, who, upon assuming power in a nation ravaged by war, gave no quarter to those agitating for deeper austerity and embarked instead on an ambitious programme of economic justice and reform.
Similarly today, tinkering at the edges won’t do. Instead of limiting itself to arguing about the odd tax rise or benefit cut, Labour must champion a profound reordering of the economy. Yes, it must present itself as the party of business — in fact, it needs to do far more to show that it understands the private sector and those who work in it — but it should also be prepared to challenge vested interests and what has become the conventional economic wisdom.
Why, for example, should Labour, with its radical tradition, be shy about advocating full employment over price stability as the prime goal of economic policy? Let’s hear what the party has to say about reviving our industrial base. Where is the clear-eyed industrial strategy for a post-Brexit Britain? What about some ideas for closing the gap between rich and poor or rebalancing the economy away from the interests of finance capital and towards those who work in the productive sector? And instead of placing undue faith in the “wisdom” of bankers, how about tackling the virtual monopoly of the banks over the creation of new money — a state of affairs that has seen an explosion in mortgage lending and contributed significantly to the housing crisis? It’s about time Labour put the case for ending the overvaluation of sterling, which has caused untold damage to our manufacturing sector over recent decades, made British goods fundamentally uncompetitive in the international marketplace, retarded productivity and seen thousands of blue-collar jobs vanish overseas.
This kind of programme — call it “credible radicalism” — would befit any party of the mainstream Left serious about economic reform. It would also be well-received across the hard-pressed, post-industrial areas of the country that Labour needs desperately to win back.
But as we saw in 2017 and 2019, promises of economic justice are not enough for voters in these places. For Labour to even begin to reconnect with this cohort, it must recognise the obvious truth that the hyper-liberalism and globalism it and the wider Left embraced so enthusiastically and saw as the end point of all human progress has been rejected emphatically across much of provincial Britain. Instead, the party must readopt the politics of place and belonging — a politics that recognises that most humans are social and parochial beings who value cultural attachment and desire something that transcends money and individual rights.
That means ditching for good free movement, ending the obsession with ID politics and multiculturalism, and crafting in their place a programme that, while defending resolutely the equal worth of all humans regardless of race or background, seeks to address the profound loss of meaning and community experienced throughout so much of post-industrial, blue-collar, small-town Britain. It means fostering the common bonds, reciprocity and shared citizenship that is the essence of nation building. It means promoting unashamedly a pro-family agenda — why not a “family wage” to supersede the living wage? — and relearning the concepts of vocation and the dignity of labour.
The key question confronting all parties of the mainstream western Left is how, in an age of liberal globalisation, and with all that means in the way of societal atomisation and fragmentation, we maintain the maximum possible social solidarity. Most have no answers. Some haven’t even recognised it as a challenge, less still a priority. Little wonder that so many of these parties have seen their support plummet in recent years.
It is ultimately the question that the British Labour party must start addressing over the coming months. It’s future viability as an electoral force — and, in particular, its ability to win back the hearts and minds of voters who have abandoned it — will depend on its coming up with the right answers.
Paul Embery is a firefighter, trade union activist, pro-Brexit campaigner and ‘Blue Labour’ thinker
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SubscribeYou used to buy books. You read them, then you could keep them, or perhaps flog them to a bookseller, or give them to friends (or strangers). But you had a (fungible, ho hum) asset that you had invested in. Ditto a car; or software; or music, or films. Then they all became services, not purchases, and in the switch, suddenly what you thought you had bought (say an ITunes album) became something you had just rented….So the focus moving to housing is no real surprise, what with the obsession on scaling up and *accelerating disruptive strategies* that these unimaginative corporates usually display. And the history of ‘x as a service’ is one of dismal service, ironically enough. How banal, and how dismal this will be for the youth.
I doubt that Covid was a deliberate ruse to bring it about, but the WEF certainly leapt on the opportunity to turn their ‘Agenda 2030’ into ‘The Great Reset’. World ‘leaders’ (including Boris) have been parroting the talking points and phrases – “Build Back Better” etc.
Before Covid, the WEF site had essays to illustrate what life will be like in Schwab’s 2030 ‘utopia’. One was titled ‘I Own Nothing, I Have No Privacy, But I’m Happy’. When they say we’ll own nothing, they mean it – literally everything will be rented for the duration of use, pots & pans, clothes, your accommodation will be allocated when you need it and will be rented for the time you’re in it. When you go to work, someone else will be renting it. Not one of the essays mentioned families – when you don’t live anywhere, you can’t live with someone. Schwab apparently watched and read dystopian sci-fi and thought, “Ooh, that’s a good idea”!
None of this will of course apply to the patrons of the WEF or their families
If this happens in the UK, it will be an absolutely textbook example of Be Careful What You Wish For.
For at least ten years, any newspaper article about property attracts a tsunami of comments hating Buy-To-Let (BTL) landlords for – supposedly – buying up all the properties that first-time-buyers (FTBs) would have bought. Almost the entirety of a loony website was dedicated to hoping for a house price crash and jeering at all the money BTL landlords were sure to lose.
That FTBs can’t buy was apparently nothing to do with the arrival of 10 million immigrants in as many years, and entirely the fault of their landlords.
George Osborne fell for the lot and subjected landlords to a truly bizarre tax attack: stamp duty penalties, higher CGT, income tax charged on turnover, mortgage relief disallowed, and so on.
Landlords duly started to quit the sector, which the Tories apparently want to destroy, so of course prices and rents alike then went up, because rental property is more densely occupied than owned. A five-bed, three-reception semi will house a family of five in owner-occupation but up to sixteen tenants. Force the landlord to sell it and sixteen tenants get evicted, but only five get rehoused in it. Those net eleven tenants are now looking for another rental in an ever-shrinking market.
The rationale for deliberately wrecking the rental sector in this way was that supposedly a new type of landlord, more professional than your BTL landlord who lets out one flat and whom nobody likes, would come onto the scene. Huge pension funds would enter the residential housing market, build and let out better properties, and maintain them better.
Except they won’t. This article shows what will happen instead: they’ll bid up the price of existing blocks far higher than individual landlord ever could, they’ll build worse, and they will maintain them worse, not better. If the tenant leaves, the same huge financial player is the only game in your town. And if the tenant’s ever late with the rent, bye bye credit history.
And this is exactly what the landlord-hating classes think they wanted. I’m so glad they’re going to get it.
So your solution to a housing crisis, in which due to QE equity rich property investors are able to outbid first time buyers despite not having to put in a penny of their own money, is for 16 youngsters to squeeze into a house? No doubt if this started happening on your street you’d be the first to complain at their cars clogging up the parking, the noise they’d create etc.
Landlords create an artificial shortage by buying up large numbers of properties, leaving all the youngsters to fight over a diminished supply which is pushing up prices. If you took large numbers of landlords out of the market, those houses don’t simply disappear, you may find prices drop to a level where hard working young families can afford a family home and a start in life
It will be detrimental to capitalism, society in general and the UK in particular if people can’t afford to own their own property. Policy should be to enable as many people as possible to own their own property. It has always been hard – ask my grandparents (b. turn of the last century). Ask my parents. Ask me. But if we want a stable society, we need this.
Literally a ‘buy in’ to society as a whole vs marginalization and all the angry acting out that follows…
Let me pose this counter-intuitive idea:
In the United States we *have* long had policies to promote home ownership starting with at least the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Promoting home-ownership became a bi-partisan project, the idea being that home ownership induces people to take more interest in their communities. They assume ownership not only of their homes but also of their communities. It’s all good, right?
But, the policies put pressure on the banks to channel subsidized mortgage loans to people of modest means. And, that, my friend, set up the housing crisis of 2008/9. The Wall Street “quants” got a hold of these portfolios of “sub-prime” loans (loans to people of modest means who really shouldn’t have been getting loans), and derived a host of financial options from them (“derivatives”). The underlying, mathematical modeling was very elegant — basically the Black-Scholes model according to which we can model risk and uncertainty as nicely-behaving white noise/Brownian motions. All well and good, except when risk doesn’t conform to white noise. When that risk becomes systematic — that is, all of it moving together in one direction — the market for derivatives falls apart. So, one can have the most elegant mathematical models, but if they’re off-base, they’re just plain wrong. The models were way off-base.
That’s one result of forcing Big Finance to find ways to subsidize home ownership. And here’s another: We should not be too surprised to find that inflating the demand side of a market with subsidized credit induces an artificial rise in prices. Why? Because the supply side does not sit there passively. If folks want to pay more for houses (because they can get bigger loans than they would otherwise be able to get), then home sellers will raise prices. Supply and Demand. No big mystery there.
So, there we go: Public policy intended to promote home ownership has the perverse effect of putting home ownership out of the reach of folks who can’t get those subsidized loans. Those are the people in the middle. So, they don’t buy homes. They don’t settle down. They don’t have kids. They get kicked out of their jobs during COVID. What do we expect.
Here’s my policy prescription: Stop trying to use public policy to promote home ownership. Let housing markets work without government interference. Easy.
Now let me pose another, almost contrary argument:
It just doesn’t matter. Home ownership may have been a traditional way of building up wealth, but for nearly 50 years now, with the advent of (indexed) mutual funds, it’s been easy to build up wealth by investing in financial markets.
So, question: Would investments in a home dominate investments in mutual funds? Not necessarily.
I did some calculations. I bought a house in a transitioning neighborhood in 2003. I sold it in 2019. Would I have been better off financially to have rented that same home (and to have invested the 20% payment in mutual funds) or to have basically rented from the bank (albeit paying monthly mortgage payments that would have lower than rental payments)?
I had to make some assumptions, of course, but the result was: The state of my finances would have been NEARLY THE SAME whether I had rented or did what I did (bought a home). I was surprised. But, then, you know what? Maybe the result indicates that financial markets can work pretty well. Money sloshes into this and that as people look for yield. Not everyone has to be a yield hound, but so long as financial investments collectively respond to incentives, then it may not make much difference where one invests. If that is the right to think of things, then the prescription is: Invest, invest, invest. Squirrel money away, dribs and drabs at a time.
Now, that raises a question for the folks in the middle. Are you really being squeezed, or are you not availing yourselves of the easy opportunities to invest what modest resources you have?
Except that at the end of those 20 years you’d still be paying hundreds a week in rent, whereas if you’d bought the property you’d now be living rent free until the end of your days
You can’t blame a policy for helping youngsters into homes for a banks greed that caused a major financial meltdown. The credit crunch was caused by the banking sector, nobody else. The fact nobody has ever truly been held accountable for ruining the lives of millions is a shameful indictment of where capitalism currently finds itself
“And, that, my friend, set up the housing crisis of 2008/9.”
What about the preceding ‘de-regulation’ that allowed it to happen? What about the ‘incentive schemes’ the banks put in place, like, you don’t earn a salary, you just get paid according to how many mortgages you sell? There were many factors that led to the crisis.
“Let housing markets work without government interference.” Many markets won’t work for the public benefit without government regulation.
And who was ultimately responsible for the subprime crisis, Billy Bob Clinton, his Attorney General, Janet Reno and his Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, Roberta Achtenberg, who cajoled and then threatened lenders with legal action to force them to grant mortgages to individuals who, objectively, were never going to be able to make the repayments. This they justified with spurious race argument: sounds familiar?
Since it was a Democratic administration they were given a free pass by the chosen MSM
See https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/clinton-democrats-are-to-blame-for-the-credit-crunch
…zigackly Chauncey. Arguably, public policy can extend to (limited) measures to support “a roof over every family”, but a policy of “everyone owning their own roof” is policy over-reach in virtually every economic and social dimension imaginable.
I think, until recently, the point of owning a property was to provide a home in which to raise children. If that is no longer important, there is no longer a necessity or expectation to acquire a home.
OK, some people are not comforted by memories, but don’t most of us have some of their identity attached to memories of their families and even their own past? I have not only my parents’ dining room furniture, but also my grandparents’ (expensively re-polished and upholstered); I have the piano my music teacher left to me (the Bluthner, not the Yamaha), I have various clocks and other things from an assortment of old uncles, aunts, and their uncles and aunts. I’m not the sum of these possessions, but at least they do remind me where I’m from.
Also, I’m currently mulling over colour cards – if it’s your own home you’re free to re-paint, change curtains and carpets – it’s nice to be able to choose what to do, when you want to. Also, all the work that’s gone into the garden over the years, which can now be reaped – the figs, blueberries, lemons, strawberries etc. From what Mary writes, the young won’t have to fear dementia in old age, dementia will be their ‘lifestyle’.
They aren’t even that anti woke when you listen to BoZo after the G7 with his ‘build back better greener more gender-neutral but in a feminine way’ Woke gobbledegook at it’s finest all said while taking the knee to Creepy Joe
Totally bang on. As an ex-financial advisor and having recently put a toe back into this sector, it is alarming how much wealth has been accumulated through ices and property by the previous generation and how little there is for young people who do not have a bank of mum and dad. These very same mums and dads will soon be selling up their rental properties to these large corporate‘s and cashing in. We need a new political force in the UK which costs off the shackles of old style socialism and really stands up for aspirational youngsters and the need for a home as a basic human right. If we are going to have a rent economy then Tenants need security, rent protection, and maintenance rights.
Bring on the revolution. There’s nothing left but to burn the rotten, corrupt system down.
I’m curious as to how a real look at rentals on the European mainland might make for a more nuanced argument here. Middle class home ownership has long been an English speaking world phenomenon: yet it seems that the kind of terrible landlord behaviour mentioned is not typical in Europe. Friends in Germany, France and Switzerland have never had any intention of owning homes, as home ownership is often prohibitively expensive and heavily taxed, and yet their middle class lifestyle has in the past seemed pretty good to me. A home is obviously the most expensive item most people often own so it’s in a rather different category even compared to car ownership.
Germany has a housing surplus and a flatlining population, so its use as a comparator to the UK situation is very limited and perhaps nil.
This is so depressing – and true. Comparing my experience with that of my parents and my children, we can see a trend to young people settling down later and later – and the later they leave it, the harder it gets. It’s too easy to start renting, you enjoy life, a better property than you could afford to buy, in a nicer area, and after a few years you find that a home is like a phone or a car – just trade it in for the next model. Your life is just a rolling contract, going from one model to the next, but with nothing of substance to show for it.
I expect we are all partly to blame for creating our own society.
My parents were old enough to well remember the great depression, and their generation were really motivated to own their own homes. They saw what happened to people who were renting and lost their jobs. It could happen again.