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Just a month now from power, Sir Keir Starmer, that uncomplaining recipient of advice from pundits who never thought he’d get here, is urged to be bolder in his plans for Britain.
Excellent. We all agree, then. Labour should draw up the loosest regulations on artificial intelligence in the G7, to attract AI investment. It should make extra spending on public services conditional on serious reform of them. (The test of seriousness is that trade unions protest on the streets.) It should question the point of a “binding” net zero law in a nation that contributes 1 per cent of global emissions. This party of workers should cut the out-of-work benefits bill to fund lower income tax. After the disgrace of the High Speed 2 rail project — the lost cash, the lost time — Whitehall should be accorded a smaller, not larger, role in economic management.
That’s settled, then. So nice to have a consensus. What? Not that kind of boldness? You know, somehow I didn’t think so.
“Bold” is a journalistic euphemism for “leftwing”. Demanding boldness, like demanding “radicalism” and “vision”, has become a way of saying “tax and spend more”, without having to defend that position square-on.
And no wonder. That defence is hard to mount. The tax burden in the UK is the highest since the 1950s. It is still lower than in much of continental Europe, true, but Britain isn’t continental Europe. It doesn’t have the single market to offer. Even when it did, the nation’s competitive advantage tended to be ease of doing business. (As opposed to French infrastructure or German technical skills.) Now, Labour already proposes to increase the non-wage labour costs on business through regulations. So, if I follow the argument of the “bold” camp, Starmer’s vision for Britain should be European taxes and European labour laws without the compensation of the European market. Might it not be simpler to put a “Closed For Business” sign at Heathrow arrivals?
When broken down into specificities, the case for boldness becomes unsettling, hence its reliance on euphemism and code.
It is said that Britain is in such an awkward predicament that it must do drastic things. Turn that around. Britain can’t do drastic things because it is in such an awkward predicament. It hasn’t the room to borrow much more, tax much more or cut much more from the state. It can’t join the EU’s customs union or the European Free Trade Association to boost growth because there is no public appetite to reopen such a raw subject now, though that time will come at the election after this one.
Given these constraints, Starmer’s plans are, in fact, on the ambitious side. As well as clogging up the flexible labour market, he wants the state that brought us HS2 to try its fumbling hand at industrial strategy. His is going to be the fourth or fifth government in a row to believe that a “partnership” of quangos and corporate eminences will revive the regions. (Might we know the empirical record of these things? The returns on the urban development corporations? The regional development agencies?) If boldness means statism, which it almost always does, Starmer doesn’t lack it.
Boldness is questionable policy, then. But it is worse politics. Starmer has got where he is by ignoring advice of unrelenting badness from the media class. Every leader of the opposition endures this process. First, the tired, rote-learned questions. “What is Starmerism?” “Will the real Keir Starmer please stand up?” (It doesn’t help that his name scans so well with the Eminem song.) Then the nonsensical comparisons with predecessors. “Say what you will about Tony Blair, but you knew where you stood with him.” No, you didn’t. Blair in 1997 was accused of being foggy and evasive to the point of mendaciousness.
There is a misunderstanding here about politics. Governing is like writing a column: you only find out what you believe by doing it for years, responding to real events. Your -ism, if you have one, becomes clear in retrospect. Even Thatcherism ended up meaning something different, less monetarist, than it did at its inflation-obsessed start. Who would have guessed that the coy Blair of 1997 would flood the public sector with cash and retire a war leader?
It wasn’t that he withheld his true intent from voters. He just couldn’t know the circumstances in which he would govern, or even his own instincts under duress. And that was a stabler world than ours. So how on earth could Starmer? He has given about as clear a sense of what he will do as most leaders of the opposition. It is bold to a fault.