Keir Starmer cannot govern as an autocrat
He must acknowledge he won a stunning victory on a stunted vote
At the start of his premiership Keir Starmer appeared to understand that his government would face a massive trust deficit.
You can speculate about the reasons. There are whole libraries of books that do just that. To keep it local, Boris Johnson’s partying in Downing Street while the country suffered, the failure of Brexiters to control immigration and deliver any tangible benefits, and an electoral system that gave Labour an enormous majority on a mere third of the vote (give or take) did not help.
More globally, you can look at the inability to find a new economic order after the crash of 2008 and the spread of lies by new media.
"The fight for trust is the battle that defines our age,” Starmer said when he was elected. “It is why we've campaigned so hard on demonstrating we are fit for public service."
"We have to return politics to public service. Show that politics can be a force for good."
Starmer seemed to get it. He said he believed that restoring trust was the best way to combat the far right, and I have no argument with him there. But his government is not working hard to build public support, and does not understand that trust comes from creating alliances.
There’s a touch of autocrat about Starmer as he and Rachel Reeves throw out policies without preparing the ground or finding allies.
I write as a candid friend of the new administration when I say that Labour must always remember that it won an astonishing 411 seats on a mere 34 percent of the vote.
You would normally expect a party with a majority of 158 to at least be around 45 percent of the vote even in our fantastically biased electoral system.
As it was, Labour had “a lower vote share than any party forming a post–war majority government” as the researchers at the House of Commons said after the results came in.
Tactical voting on a scale never seen before and a splintering of the right delivered it a stunning victory on a stunted vote. To succeed Labour must recognise that it needs to build the widest possible coalitions to overcome the flimsiness of its mandate.
Let me take two policies to make my point.
I think the proposal to abolish the winter fuel payment for everyone except poor pensioners is terrible politics. “We want to make it harder for your granny to heat her home,” is not a slogan to win hearts and minds.
I have lost count of the number of times I have heard right-wingers say that Labour has cut the winter fuel allowance for pensioners so it can give pay rises to its union mates, or that Labour can’t afford to pay the winter fuel allowance but can afford to put asylum seekers in hotels.
They know a gift horse when they see one.
There is a case for the cut, of course. In office, the supposedly fiscally responsible Conservatives poured benefits into pensioners’ pockets because pensioners voted Conservative.
The result was that by this year’s election the average pensioner had more disposable income than the average worker. Only this week we heard that the state pension will increase above inflation yet again.
To my mind the logic of the manifestly correct view that wealthy pensioners are receiving too many benefits leads to ending retirees’ exemption from national insurance. It is fairer to charge NI as it is related too ability to pay. As extending its scope is not the same as raising the National Insurance rate, Labour would not be breaking election promises.
But, foolishly in my view, Rachel Reeves decided to go with means testing the winter fuel allowance instead, even though Labour must know that many poor pensioners would fall through the cracks.
OK, but it you are going to do it, do it properly. Labour ought to have had authoritative voices from the Resolution Foundation, which has chartered intergenerational unfairness, and the Institute for Fiscal for Studies, which has recommended concentrating help on the poor, lined up to explain how well many pensioners have done since 2010.
Not politicians. But independent voices the audience was more likely to trust. Instead, Labour has relied on assertion rather than argument and been battered for it.
I am not sure I am any keener on Labour’s plan to ban smoking in pub gardens and the like. It breaks John Stuart Mill’s harm principle that the law should not stop you harming yourself, only harming others. My younger self was addicted to booze and fags, and would have been outraged, as many are today.
But equally obviously the government will be passing many laws to tackle smoking, obesity and alcohol abuse. John Stuart Mill be damned. Labour wants to stop us harming ourselves because we are a country with a health service on the brink of collapse.
So why did Labour not line up public health experts and chief medical officers to say that the NHS cannot afford to carry on as it is, and add that emphysema, smoking-related cancer, obesity and alcoholism bring misery?
If it doesn’t produce convincing arguments, the government will leave the field to its many enemies on the right and left.
Michael Gove might think the country has had enough of experts but, after experiencing the disaster of his party’s rule, the millions who combined to throw the Tories out of power are more than willing to listen to them.
We are not anti-vaxxers or ignorant-and-proud-of-it Faragists. We will take account of medical opinion, as we did during Covid, and accept evidence of the unfairness of the tax and benefit system.
Labour ought to be marshalling centre-left opinion and preparing the ground for new policy announcements, even if in the process it discovers that some of its individual policies should never be announced in the first place.
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Tinker Tailor Tory Traitor
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11 January 2023
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Important and good one Nick. Its odd as any Barrister knows to have to build your case, esp expert vitnesses and persuade the jurry. He should be quite good at this
Way back in 1964 when I was just 14 years old I wrote an essay at school decrying means testing as being unfair and always creating a cliff age. Reversing the recent NI tax cut would give Reeves the 22 billion in one fell sweep. More it would give her that every year. Tax is the only other fair way to deal with this. Tax wealthy pensioners more but do not take from the many vulnerable pensioners who may be just a few pounds a week over the ability to get Pension Credit.