Dare Labour tell the truth?
Why it should call Conservatives “losers”
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Jeremy Hunt: He just doesn’t care
Even by the standards of the 2020s Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement is a work of epic charlatanism. The chancellor has no concern for honesty in public life or protecting public services. He banked the extra tax revenues that came from inflation raising nominal wages. But instead of using them to pay for the higher costs inflation brings to the public sector, he announced pre-election tax cuts.
It was a cruel joke, perpetrated by a politician we foolishly imagine to be a “moderate Conservative.” After the cuts in national insurance, the tax burden will still be the highest in UK history (it has taken a Tory government to reach that “socialist” goal, incidentally). But that is not the real scandal: governments are entitled to cut taxes, after all. The scandal is, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies says, that “the tax cuts are paid for by planned real cuts in public service spending”. Higher inflation pushes up tax receipts by more than it pushes up spending on debt interest or social security benefits. “But rather than use the proceeds to ease the ongoing ‘fiscal drag’ effects of threshold freezes, or to compensate public services for higher costs, the Chancellor opted to cut other taxes.”
Sam Freedman of the Institute for Government said the effort was a “fairy tale” premised on completely implausible spending cuts. “Every penny of the ‘headroom’ against his fiscal rules that Hunt spent on tax cuts came from not uprating public spending in line with inflation. There is no new growth; as expected growth projections for future years were cut. It’s all illusionary.”
Hunt and the Conservative party won’t say how the they will pay for their pre-election bribe for two reasons
1) Every part of the public sector from the National Health Service to the criminal justice system, from defence to local government, is in a state of decay. Explaining how they will suffer further would provoke public anger.
2) The cuts won’t happen until after an election the Conservative know they will lose, so why should they care?
Why doesn’t the opposition just tell the truth and call Hunt out? It thinks it can’t because nowhere is TS Eliot’s wise line that “mankind cannot bear very much reality” truer than in politics. Here’s what would happen to Labour if it told the truth.
Keir Starmer/ Rachel Reeves: The Conservatives are making tax cuts that will be impossible to fund without cuts to public services the country cannot bear.
Interviewer: So you would reverse them, then?
Starmer/Reeves: Of course. This is a cruel trick and an insult to voters’ intelligence
Headline on the next bulletin: Labour to raise taxes
To avoid it, Labour says nothing, and sidesteps the trap. Labour’s strategy is dismal on all kinds of levels. Taxation has become like Brexit: a vast area of public policy where Labour avoids saying anything at all for fear of a bad headline on the BBC news or a propaganda campaign in the Tory press.
You might well think that this is the only way for a centre-left party to win an election. However, Labour could hold the government to account by emphasising that Rishi Sunak is a “loser,” leading a government of losers, whose cynical actions are dictated by the knowledge that they will lose the next election. Calling out the Downing Street losers is different from Labour politicians taking victory at the next election for granted – always a dangerous strategy. Rather it is acknowledging the truth that the government knows it will lose, and that the only question in Conservative circles is: how badly.
For the next year we will see the Conservatives operating like a retreating army: poisoning the wells, burning the crops and salting the fields. They will follow policies they would never consider if they thought they had a hope of retaining power.
They will do as much as they can to wreck the next government, and not care about how much damage they inflict on the UK in the process.
In the mid-1990s, when John Major’s Conservative government knew it was about to lose, it engaged in the same trickery. Ken Clarke another supposed Tory moderate was then chancellor of Exchequer. He put forward absurdly tight spending plans for after the 1997 election and dared Labour to say it would not stick to them. To appear “credible” and to avoid having the “tax raiser” label hung around its neck, Labour accepted the Conservative restrictions. There is a great deal of nostalgia for the 1990s. But the early years of the Blair government were dreadful for the National Health Service and for lone parents and others on benefits, because Labour honoured insane spending restrictions that Clarke brazenly admitted he would never have abided by himself if the Conservatives had stayed in power.
It is equally true that Jeremy Hunt would never abide by his spending targets if the Conservatives win. Labour could explain that we are now governed by a party of vicious losers, who know they are beaten, and whose knowledge of the certainty of their defeat explains their determination to settle scores.
It would enjoy two advantages if it did. First Labour would tap into the deep cynicism that characterises the UK. I often think that people like me are not best placed to describe it. We never trusted Boris Johnson or believed a word the Brexit campaign said. But think of the millions who genuinely thought that voting for Brexit in 2016 and the Conservative party in 2019 would cut immigration, help the NHS and revive the economy, and then imagine their disappointment.
By emphasising how the government has lost trust, Labour would be going with the grain of public cynicism. The collapse of trust is a growing area of academic study. Will Jennings of Southampton University and his colleagues looked at one issue that is highly pertinent to the UK: the perception that the government has an institutional bias against left-behind regions, and treats them like they “don’t matter”. You find this belief across Europe. “Clear majorities see government as biased towards rich areas and capital cities, while around half of respondents perceive bias against rural areas.”
But after the false promises that the Tories would level up perceptions of bias were much higher in the UK than in comparable countries. It’s not just Downing Street partying, while the rest of us were in lockdown, or ever larger numbers of people learning that Brexit was a monumental national folly. Millions were fed a lie that the Conservatives would improve their lives. This is why polls show they have no prospect of holding to the northern seats they won in 2019.
They would be receptive to Labour saying that the Government is just conning them now because they know from experience that it has swindled them in the past.
Keir Starmer/ Rachel Reeves: The Conservatives are making cynical tax cuts because they are losers who know they won’t be around to pick up the bill.
Interviewer: Yeah, but what would Labour do?
Starmer/Reeves: We will begin the huge task of cleaning up the mess they made.
It’s not a brilliant answer. It’s a little pompous and a little vague. But it is better than going along with tax cuts that every financial authority knows will be covertly reversed with a stealth tax after the next election. It appeals to a public that has learned the hard way not to trust the Conservatives. And finally, and highly unusually in politics, it also has the advantage of being true.
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