“We are absolutely shackled to an all-consuming economic policy that privileges corporate interests above the common good.”
By Neil Duncan-Jordan MP
Despite the valiant wins in the recent mayoral contests, and the close result in Runcorn and Helsby, large parts of the electoral coalition which just ten months ago delivered a historic landslide has lost faith in the Labour Party. Up until last Thursday, Runcorn was the sixteenth safest seat in Britain. And many good Labour councillors will have lost their seats across the country through no fault of their own. The time is right to now ask how did we lose so much, so quickly?
Labour’s promise of change was largely received positively. The country was looking for someone to look after them, to care, to be on their side. Change would tackle some of the longstanding problems of the last 14 years of austerity, as well as making people feel better – both materially and psychologically. There have of course been improvements in the NHS with waiting times coming down, long overdue support for renters and a host of new employment rights. But many of these changes seem some way off and have yet to land with the public. Meanwhile, a series of missteps along the way have shattered trust with our core supporters.
The decision to means test the winter fuel allowance and remove the benefit from 10 million older people remains one of the most economically illiterate and politically naive decisions that Labour has taken – just three weeks into its honeymoon period of victory. The further decisions to deny compensation to the 1950’s WASPI women and the threatened cuts to disability benefits have sent the electorate into shock. Couple these with the unusual decision to lower the NI threshold at the same time as increasing the rate for employers, and the announced cut in overseas aid, and you can begin to see how the coalition of support Labour needs has begun to unravel.
The suggestion that the answer is to copy the Right and Reform in particular, fails to understand the makeup of those voters that voted for us last July; some for the very first time. It is hard to see how Labour can out-Farage, Farage. We’ll never be able to be as right-wing or as nasty as the policies they advocate.
In fact, the way Labour will reconnect with voters is by having a strong domestic social policy.
The ambitious house building programme has got to start and focus on truly affordable council and social properties. The reform of disability benefits needs to be halted. We must get people into work by tackling the barriers they face. And we need to urgently address the scandal of child poverty by removing the two-child benefit cap.
Tackling the impact of 14 years of austerity and the cost-of-living crisis is what matters most. This of course will mean needing to look again at the government’s two fiscal rules – just like other countries have done – to be more flexible and less rigid in our approach to the economy. A healthy debate about wealth and other taxes is already underway inside our party, and this can provide some of the answers the government might need.
This change of direction is how we can begin to gain back the trust we have so quickly lost with the British people. We cannot claim to be in the service of the nation if all we seem to do is tell it to tighten its belt and hang on for bumpy ride. Mainstream political parties are notoriously bad at doing what they promise. This means those with easy answers to complicated questions can appear attractive. But we have created the vacuum into which these people now flow. There is of course at least an odds-on chance that many of the newly run Reform councils will flounder pretty quickly through a combination of incompetence, mismanagement and ridiculous cuts. But sections of the public are prepared to give them a chance. Both Labour and the Conservatives have squandered their bases and are now paying the price.
At the heart of Labour’s difficulty is an identity crisis. It isn’t exactly clear what or who is driving the agenda. Thus, you can end up with a left leaning employment policy alongside an attack on the benefits of some of the poorest in the country. It feels like it veers all over the political landscape and lacks any overarching principles to either guide it or against which policies can be judged or measured. In essence, it is hard a say that there is any such thing as Starmerism. Trying to define it is like trying to catch smoke.
Meanwhile, we are absolutely shackled to an all-consuming economic policy that privileges corporate interests above the common good. Whether it is our energy policy, housing policy, or fiscal policy, it is all geared towards greasing the wheels of corporate profiteering which so often runs counter to wider societal interests.
Still, it’s not too late to change. But claiming the answer is more of the same – and going further and faster – really fails to get why people voted Labour in the first place. Our coalition of supporters are largely drawn to our values of social justice, fairness and a society that looks after each other. The alternative is a country where we mistrust everyone, think those who have fallen on hard times are undeserving and believe the nation can be run like a business. The analogy is completely wrong. Societies have values rather than profit margins. The country voted for positive change last year, it’s time we started to show what that looks like.
- Neil Duncan-Jordan is the Labour MP for Poole. You can follow him on Twitter/X, Facebook and Instagram.
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