Sir Keir Starmer could perhaps have timed it better. On the day that Oasis, the band that symbolised the mood of sunny optimism that swept Tony Blair to power in 1997, announced their reunion, the prime minister’s message to the nation was that things would get worse before they got better.
Politically, it is quite a gamble. There haven’t been all that many Labour governments in the past 125 years, but they have tended to arrive in power accentuating the positive. That was true of Blair in 1997 and true of Harold Wilson in 1964.
It was certainly true of Clement Attlee in 1945, who insisted – despite the country being skint at the end of the second world war – that there would be no going back to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Britain was facing what John Maynard Keynes described as a “financial Dunkirk” but the Attlee government still managed to create the postwar welfare state and the NHS.
Starmer has chosen a different approach. His argument is not just that Britain is in a mess after 14 years of Conservative government, but that the mess is even worse than Labour imagined when it was in opposition. The prime minister says the prisons are full to bursting and a harsh budget will be needed to repair the public finances, while the recent riots are evidence of a “societal black hole”.
Pushback against the prime minister’s thesis came from two sources. Sharon Graham, the general secretary of the Unite union, was critical of Starmer’s bleak vision and called on the government to have the courage to be bolder. David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, said in a tweet: “The biggest threat to this Labour government is despair, and yet instead of countering it with a programme of hope, Labour is feeding that hopelessness.”
Meanwhile, the Conservatives said Starmer was taking voters for fools. Kemi Badenoch, one of the contenders to be leader of the opposition, said Starmer had made promises ahead of the election that he couldn’t deliver and was now being found out.
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The recent news on the economy has not exactly been helpful to the prime minister’s thesis. Unemployment fell in the three months to June, while the UK grew more rapidly than any other member of the G7 group of major western economies in the first six months of the year. At 2.2%, the annual inflation rate is a fifth of its recent 11.1% peak. Interest rates are coming down.
That’s not to say the UK is problem-free. Business investment is the weakest in the G7, productivity growth is nugatory, and a £39bn surplus in services trade in the three months to June was not sufficient to cover a £52bn deficit in goods.
Starmer is also right when he says the UK is borrowing more to cover the gap between the state’s spending and its income than was envisaged at the time of Jeremy Hunt’s March budget. After the release of last week’s figures for the public finances, the Office for Budget Responsibility said the deficit in the first four months of the 2024-5 financial year was £5bn higher than it had forecast.
All of which provides cover for a “clear the decks” budget in which Rachel Reeves will blame the last government for the tax rises she is planning. Even so, Labour needs to be careful with the doom and gloom and the fiscal stringency. Making people feel miserable can be self-defeating if it depresses business and consumer confidence. That way lies weaker growth and even weaker public finances.