To avoid five more wasted years, vote for a strong opposition
Without the growth needed to fund the higher spending his MPs and voters demand, Starmer will resort to appeasing them with anything he can deliver on the cheap: constitutional meddling, banning things and red tape. A mega-majority just makes this more likely, so vote Conservative tomorrow, urges Henry Hill
To read some of the commentary around this election, you’d think we were about to experience a decisive break in our national politics. Goodbye to the Tories and all the chaos and instability of the past few years. As parties of the radical right make headway on the Continent, Britain will have a social-democratic government with an historic majority. Stability awaits.
Yet a closer examination of the Labour campaign suggests that a Starmer Government seems very likely to fall into many of the exact same traps that the Conservatives have hurled themselves into time and again.
Promising to be better than Boris Johnson or Liz Truss isn’t a foundation for lasting popularity (ask Rishi Sunak). Nor is a majority built on a vague manifesto of nice promises a recipe for successful government (ask Boris).
Yet there’s a reason the opposition is playing those tunes: because on the substance of the questions that really matter, there is far less between them and the Tories than anyone would expect in what is supposed to be a transformational election.
Yes, Rachel Reeves talks a lot about growth – including, if her rhetoric around “living standards” is anything to go by, the important, per-capita sort. Yes, Starmer is talking a big game on housing, even leaning into Yimby talking points about building on the green belt.
If we were assessing the parties on talk, however, the Conservatives are going to deliver 1.6m new homes by turning central London into Barcelona. Talk is cheap; what matters is the actual policy agenda.
This is where the varnish starts to peel from Labour’s promises. Where they are specific they are often either trivial (non-doms, VAT on private schools) or inadequate (housing); more often, they are so vague as to be esoteric.
Starmer’s defenders argue that he isn’t chained to his manifesto once he enters office, which is true. But manifestos are important: not only do they give voters a clear idea of what to expect from their government, but they help to discipline MPs. Even those who don’t like a controversial proposal will usually vote for it if they fought the election on a commitment to do so.
If Labour wins vast swathes of the traditional Tory shires on Thursday, is a hazy pledge to “rewire Britain” enough to persuade those MPs to back the up to 460,000 kilometres of new overhead pylons industry estimates will be needed to get the National Grid ready for net zero? Will evasive promises to make the points-based immigration system “fair” induce left-wing politicians to row in behind any serious push to wean the British economy off the mass import of cheap labour?
As for growth, well: every politician, outside the wilder fringes of the Green movement, likes growth. But what is Reeves’ analysis of why the British economy has stagnated for almost two decades? The problem precedes Truss, Brexit, and even the advent of Tory rule. It seems unlikely the answer is ‘devolution’, which looks like an exercise in making it someone else’s problem.
Even if the likely incoming Chancellor is serious, she will have to battle ceaselessly against her own party’s worst instincts. From the planned Race Equality Bill to Bridget Phillipson’s mothballed plans to make childcare a graduate profession, the Labour instinct is always to try and brute-force social and economic outcomes through regulation.
Britain is a testament to the fact that trying to regulate a way to prosperity doesn’t work. Real growth is dynamic, organic, and uneven; it doesn’t always create the winners you want, at least on the timeline you want.
Unless Reeves can persuade her party of that, we face the prospect of getting trapped in a very Labour doom-loop: without the growth needed to fund the higher spending his MPs and voters demand, Starmer will resort to appeasing them with anything he can deliver on the cheap: constitutional meddling, banning things and red tape.
Sadly, the Labour leadership seems to have ducked this challenge. Tony Blair transformed his party by doing the hard work of forging New Labour in opposition; he didn’t wait for Tory decay to put him in Downing Street and then spring it on his MPs.
Even as a Conservative, I take little pleasure in predicting that Labour will fail. I live in the country they aspire to govern and will have to live through five more wasted years along with everyone else.
But I fear they will – and that this is only more likely if they win the mega-landslide forecast by some of the polls.
A big majority is useful only if married to the will to use it; otherwise, it just breeds complacency. Again, ask Boris Johnson. A viable opposition – when the Conservatives have rebuilt themselves into one – is in everyone’s interests.
Henry Hill is acting editor of Conservativehome