Prepare for disappointment. (Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)
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Optimism is crucial to success in democratic politics. There is plenty of evidence to back up this platitude. Bill Clinton came from the town of Hope in Arkansas, and never let voters forget it. An advertisement for Ronald Reagan in 1984 opened with “It’s morning in America again”. New Labour marched to the soundtrack of “Things Can Only Better”.
By contrast, only a small number of Grinches with long memories and cynical dispositions point out that Churchill opened his wartime premiership with the promise of nothing but “blood, sweat and tears”. (His government of 1951, by contrast, promised to “set the people free” and ended up being, even in the eyes of his greatest admirers, an embarrassing shambles.) As for Reagan, his success owed at least as much to fear — of the Soviet Union, of national decline, of urban disorder — as it did to hope. Rambo not Rockie is the film to watch if you want to understand American politics in the early Eighties. We Grinches would point out that the most successful politician of recent times, Donald Trump, trades on the feeling that “carnage” is just around the corner.
Of course, the Left has a particular problem. It is, or has been, about selling change. Left-wing candidates have usually sought to persuade their supporters that things can get better, whereas British Conservatives argued that change was likely for the worst.
This brings us to the current state of the Labour Party. A few years ago, it looked as though Starmer would be Neil Kinnock — painfully leading his party back to electability but not quite fast enough to get elected himself. Now everything is going right for him. He is ahead in the opinion polls; his party is disciplined; his opponents — the SNP as much as the Conservatives — are falling apart. Prudent commentators talk of the dramatic swing that would be necessary for Labour to get an absolute majority in parliament, but my own money is on something close to a landslide.
This is not, though, quite the same as saying that Labour should be optimistic. In his conference speech last week, Starmer blamed the Tories for “kicking the hope out”. But this is not a hopeful time. Tony Blair came to power in almost uniquely propitious circumstances. Norman Lamont lost the Tories their reputation for economic competence with the sharp drop in the value of the pound on Black Wednesday of 1992, but Labour inherited the benefits of Ken Clarke’s competent Chancellorship that followed Lamont’s dismissal. Blair also reaped the results of patient negotiation by the Major government in Northern Ireland. This was good news for the province but also for the climate in Westminster: for the first time since the Sixties, senior ministers could walk the streets without a phalanx of nervous-looking bodyguards.
Conditions beyond the reach of the British government’s policy were also good. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that peace and democracy seemed to be on the rise. Almost everywhere except North Korea, spending on armaments dropped in the Nineties. World-weary commentators had spent years saying countries that had lived under Communist rule would take decades to adjust to liberal democracy but, as it turned out, the Czech Republic — one of the more repressive countries in the eastern bloc during the Eighties — was a liberal democracy within a few years. Even China seemed to have moved away from the repression of 1989, which was why the handover of Hong Kong did not, in the short term, produce the exodus that some had expected.
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SubscribeSo let me get this straight.
Once Sir Keir has turned his back on the Red Wall, Brexiteers, the working class and vociferous middle aged men everything will be okay. He will march triumphantly into number 10.
Yup. I can see a few holes in this plan.
What Non Doms? They are not stupid. Told by vindictive class warriors that they will be squeezed to fund the 200bn NHS singlehandedly, all have now packed up and taken all their horrible horrible money to Paris or Dubai. Rachel will come for isas, pensions dividends, savings and probably – in desperation – some property wealth tax to feed the broken greedy monstrosity that it the British State. Run if you can.
Yep, coming, for example:
https://youtu.be/ZRympCaiOJ4?si=KHTqyv7pLknxtsrP
Just not at all convinced it would be any different under the Tories.
Yes, Establishment Groupthink has already seen the Fake Tories/Tory Brownities describe income as ‘unearned’ and bow to the warped Dogma that insists taxation is only for redistribution/equalitarian purposes – not the incentivisation of enterprise. But they may wake up. The difference is that Starmerism is a giant con; they steal Thatcher speeches and wrap themselves in a pro business union jack. But its all a lie – they still seethe with class war vindictiveness (all masked bar the war on private schools/non doms). Not one MP believes in private enterprise. All are servants and worshippers of the Big Bad State.
Never interrupt your opponents when they are offering advice like this.
Oh dear, another Brexit obsessive… well, never mind.
Thatcher won in 1979 because she convinced the electorate that she had a plan. And she did. She and her allies had put in the hard work in opposition to assemble and promote a workable strategy – most notably, in taming the unions. There were no big surprises in the manifesto, unlike Theresa May’s ‘dementia tax’ that appeared out of nowhere.
She sold confidence to the voters, not hope.
Starmer and Reeves have not put in the spade work. So how can they convince the voters they have a workable plan?
I don’t agree Starmer and Reeves have not put in the spade work, I think they are very well prepared for their priorities – they ‘took the knee’ for BLM (the very same BLM, I note, which stands strong with the genocidal paragliders, but let’s move on from that, nothing to see here). And I bet they could both recite backwards the entire pronoun alphabet.
She and her team had a plan, a philosophy, a coherent set of principles, they believed profoundly in rolling back the state, and they spoke convincingly. No politician today has such, except for Corbyn and he is dangerous and wrong
It’s not going to come from anything Starmer does either. Labour will wreck the economy and kill thousands of people in the name of saving the planet and it won’t make even a sliver of difference. You know that, I know it, this writer knows it – but it will happen anyway. That’s the extent of the pseudo-religious idiocy we’ve sunk into.
There’s plenty to blame successive Tory administrations for … but is there anything that Starmer and his team would have done any better? Mostly worse I suspect, whether it’s lockdown, excessive spending, or population growth without the housing and other infrastructure to support it.
What are the big ideas now? More tax on the non-doms, which will probably lead to a lower take for the Treasury. VAT on private education, which will mean the taxpayer paying for the schooling of more children, plus a bit of rural unemployment, and loss of income from overseas. Making it easier to call strikes – we’ve been there before.
At least Blair and Brown had ideas, even if they were mostly about spending more taxpayers’ money.
Yes, social democracy is over, isn’t it? All the levers have been pulled so hard that they’re now coming off in the politicians’ hands.
Like running small businesses building, making, repairing and delivering stuff. Still, it’s got to be done, hasn’t it…
‘ In truth, there would be no more self-indulgent luxury for the Labour Party than to hold on to a diminishing group of traditional working-class voters’
A diminishing group of traditional voters….
I wonder what is replacing that group of traditional voters in Britain.
When Blair came to power in 1997 most people worked for large companies or the government. Nowadays most of us work in small businesses, our own or someone else’s. Small businesses pay the taxes and provide the employment that keep the country going. Can you name three members of the parliamentary Labour Party who have any experience of this sector – or even know someone who does? I can’t. The Tories are not much better. Both parties are far too busy pandering to the professional and media classes to even notice the opportunity that exists here.
Interestingly the only leading politician who talked about this at the conferences was Nigel Farage.
I don’t know how old Professor Viven is, but for those of us Americans who were young all throughout Reagan’s two terms in office, we were anything but fearful.
In fact, we enjoyed enormous prosperity (remember yuppies?), most of us knew the Soviet Union was a toothless wreck (we all laughed at Wendy’s Soviet fashion show commercial: “Svimvere”), HBO and MTV were awesome new forms of quality home entertainment. PCs were beginning to enjoy broad popular use. Movies like “E.T.”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, “Gandhi”, “Chariots of Fire” and “Beverly Hills Cop” would never be made today (I shudder to imagine it). Comedians were funny and filled stadiums, race relations were vastly improved to the point where interracial marriage was no biggie, homosexuality was widely accepted (even during the AIDS crisis) . . . I could go on, but the fact is, the optimism was palpable everywhere and felt by virtually everyone, all night long, to quote Lionel Richie.
If you’re going to cite a period in America, even in passing, it would be good idea to know something about it from an American perspective.
1979 is surely a vastly better point of reference for the next referendum than 1997. It took place in the ruins of the post-war consensus. Thatcher might have been lucky to survive long enough to get radical in 1983 but she did recognise that the consensus had run its course. And boy did she get radical once she had the chance. She sold off more of the state than any other Government on Earth barring, possibly, Pinochet’s Chile and far outstripping Reagan’s US. She didn’t just tame the unions, she smashed them – leaving the British Labour market one of the most capital friendly in the developed world. She de-regulated finance and allowed it do essentially as it liked.
For all of his landslide in 97, Tony Blair accepted the new common sense that Thatcher had established – what, after all was his calling card as the coming man of Labour? The abolition of Clause 4. Even for people like me, it’s quite hard to fault him for that – Britain’s economy was scarcely a basket case at the time.
Fast forward to now and Thatcher’s chickens have come home to roost.
All our major firms and employers are not only privately owned but foreign owned. Wages are lower than in almost all comparable economies, which raises the benefit bill and erodes the tax base. There’s no Council housing to accommodate the low paid (and the stuff Thatcher sold is largely in the hands of private landlords charging twice the rent).
Smashed into a thousand pieces, the telecoms sector is still struggling to build the fibre-based internet that the GPO was planning for in the 80s (along with Japan and Korea) and had to abandon in order to be readied for sale. A privatised railway system has sucked all the relevant expertise into a maze of competing consultants, so that the most expensive high speed line in the world will reach neither of its planned termini. For all its faults, that would have been unimaginable under BR.
The schools are falling down because they weren’t rebuilt within their planned service lives. Private water companies are covering the nation and its rivers in sewage and still paying themselves handsome dividends and, apparently, no-one has the first idea how to stop them doing so. We have the highest fuel costs in the OECD because we’ve created a market mechanism that prices all energy at the cost of the most expensive unit. Deregulated building control looked the other way while an unknown number of tall buildings were effectively clad in petrol. And on, and on.
The post-Thatcher consensus is a dead duck.
And Starmer’s answer to all this is… the same but with fewer parties in Number 10.
The Labour party is fond of saying that the only thing that counts is power. Without that, you can’t change anything. It is cant. Saying it absolves them of the first task of parties in opposition – which is to change people’s conception of common sense.
They haven’t, they won’t. They tie themselves in knots to place themselves in the wheeltracks of the worst Government most people can remember.
But the truth is that the scale of change we need is not 1997, it’s not even 1979. It’s 1948.
Covid and Brexit……???
Why do you guys get this so wrong all of the time? By far the biggest problem the G7 faces is absolutely the consequence of money being far, far too cheap for much too long. QE is, as it was always going to be, a terrible disaster. The debt hangover facing Starmer is completely unfixable. He can’t borrow more and taxation is maxed and yet we’re STILL spending more than £100bn more than we earn annually.
This means cuts to health, education and welfare whilst, at the same time, military spending must increase.
He’s had it. He really has. If I were him, I would be doing everything in my power to lose the next election.
The author’s spelling is, um, Rocky.
The ‘highly educated middle class’ have been ‘educated’ largely with propaganda unfortunately.. Sad 🙁
Sir Keir is simply a Eurofederal technocrat in waiting. His Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves is the key figure in the new euro project, getting the economy prepped for monetary union again.
You could feel sorry for Starmer. Put in charge of Labour to make it electable again and (perhaps) put in charge of the Government to allow the Conservatives time to recharge.
Not just an administrator – more of a professional ‘insolvency practitioner’.
“…there would be no more self-indulgent luxury for the Labour Party than to hold on to a diminishing group of traditional working-class voters out of nostalgia…”
They may be ‘diminishing’, we are all ‘diminishing’ unless you have found a genetic cure for mortality, but weren’t they ‘undiminished’ enough to give the party a big kicking in 2019? Or did you think all of those people will have broken on through to the other side because of covid?
________________________
So I’m a wrinkly, crinkly, set in my ways.
It’s true my body as seen better days.
But give me half a chance and I can still misbehave.
I don’t really agree with this article. Sir Keir has never struck me a cheerful sort. I know Rishi is a teetotaller but he would be better company down the pub than sour faced Keir.
There is quite a lot of sense in this article, especially with regards to governments being able to click their fingers and solve every problem (especially, though the author didn’t say so) by spending public money.
However there are some really jarring notes. It is extraordinary that the one policy or proposal that he specifically advocates is the completion of HS2, presumably at pretty much any cost. I suppose this is a metropolitan elite project par excellence, of utter irrelevance to most people in the country except that they are paying the (unaffordable) bills. In addition, the characterisation of anyone not fully on board with the Net Zero agenda as an angry middle class motorist is simplistic rubbish, completely detached from reality.
Who can forget Blair, Prescott and Mandelson twitching in an embarrassed fashion to D:Ream after their win ?
What will Starner, Rayner and Lammy be dancing to ?
Answers on a postcard…
Red red whine?
Bravo, sir. I was trying to come up with something on the theme of Starmer’s constant u-turns but nothing sprang to mind.
What about ‘You can’t hide your lying eyes ‘ ?
I wonder when the free-market ideology of the Thatcher government stopped being something people talked about. Must have been Blair and Brown not contesting it in 1997.
Nah, she just got lucky as a net exporter of oil, indeed.
I quite like the article, but for a senior Professor of History to misquote Churchill’s most famous words in only the second para is somewhat off-putting! And no-one else has commented on that. [for those who sadly don’t know, it was “blood, toil, tears and sweat” NOT ‘blood, sweat and tears’!!!
I guess being a professor of History must be the principal reason that he doesn’t appear to understand the macro economic reasons behind Britain’s fiscal problem. He’s also in London! No wonder he’s obsessed with Brexit……..
Cambridge 1982-9. Need I say more?
A good article except for the comment that Galtieri handed Mrs Thatcher ‘an easy military victory’.Galtieri would not have invaded if he thought Britain would win .And arguably Brown,Chamberlain,Macdonald, Theresa May,Sunak and Wilson might have done a peace deal instead of fighting.
Blimey an article in Unherd that suggests Brexit might not have been such a great idea after all. Guaranteed lots of positive feedback!