Doom and gloom

Here’s a pivotal passage from Keir Starmer’s speech to Labour Party Conference this afternoon, acknowledging what has been criticised as an overly gloomy and doom-laden tone but characterising it as a necessary pre-requisite to the change Britain needs:

“And if we rebuild responsibility, then we can put Britain back on her feet. I know that today there aren’t many reasons to be cheerful.

“But there are reasons to believe. Yes it will be a steep climb. But the view from the summit will be worth it.”

OK, I’ve done it again, passing off a David Cameron quote as someone else’s. That wasn’t Keir Starmer. It was, of course, Cameron in his 2009 speech to Conservative Party Conference.¹ And I’m not the only person to have noticed the rhetorical parallels between that iteration of the Conservative Party and the current Labour government.² Here’s John McDonnell:

“I don’t say this lightly but if you close your eyes and listen to the language being used it is almost like George Osborne speaking again in 2010.”

There are certainly places where the current state of politics might remind us of events from the beginning of the last decade. There might not be repeats - there never are - but there are rhymes.

For example, Ed Miliband’s first PMQs as Leader of the Opposition in October 2010 focused on a controversial and unexpected decision by the new government to means-test a previously universal benefit.³ He pointed out that it would affect not just the very wealthy, but people on middle incomes. He noted that the new Prime Minister had said during the election campaign that he had no intention of means-testing the benefit. He mocked the reluctance of some on the Government benches to defend the policy, and the fact that some ministers had been taken by surprise when it was announced.

The Prime Minister defended the policy on the grounds that the previous government had left the public finances in a mess and savings had to be made. He said that it was unfair that the poorest had to pay so that richer people could keep receiving the benefit. He pointed to people in the Labour Party who had themselves argued for this very change. And he said that the opposition had yet to come up with an alternative plan.

You can watch highlights of the exchange, about the Conservative-Lib Dem decision to means-test child benefit,⁴ via a very old page on the Guardian website, here:⁵

This old argument may all sound very familiar, point by point by point, to anyone who has been following the fallout over Labour’s decision to means-test Winter Fuel Allowance. There’s no doubt that it took some people by surprise, and caused significant opposition and disquiet, including within the Labour Party. And it provided an early opportunity for the Conservatives to attack the government, with a co-ordinated statement by all six leadership candidates (there were six of them then, there are four of them now) demanding a u-turn,⁶ and a petition, and an ad van outside Labour Conference in Liverpool which I saw and annoyingly forgot to take a photo of, and graphics targeted at the constituents of specific Labour MPs, like this one about my own MP which they targeted at me.

Some of the Tory attack here has been somewhat ill-judged, as with this tweet which weirdly implies that leading journalists, including The Sun’s political editor Harry Cole, find the winter fuel allowance cut hilarious.

David Cameron himself, who was responsible for very many benefit cuts including that cut to child benefit but not, to be fair, for cuts to Winter Fuel Allowance, made a suggestion in the House of Lords.

My Lords, as someone who made a promise to Britain’s pensioners to keep the winter fuel payment, and kept that for six years as Prime Minister, may I make a gentle suggestion to the Government? Instead of this misguided attack on the winter fuel payment, why not simply say that pensioners who are higher-rate or additional-rate taxpayers do not receive it? You may only raise 10% of the money but you would save 90% of the shame and embarrassment of the current position.

We can only speculate about how different the last 14 years might have been if the Conservatives had thought that shame and embarrassment were things worth saving.

The fact that this decision is so easy to attack, both from the left and the right, has raised an obvious question: why did they do it? And it has led to a bigger discussion, which I mentioned at the beginning of this post, about Labour’s gloomy and doom-laden tone: why don’t they just lighten up a bit?

The answer to this is, I think, that sometimes - more often than you might think - questions about comms and optics and tactics and, yes, dividing lines are the wrong questions. The most obvious answer to the question of why Labour are saying they are in a massive hole and making unpopular and politically difficult cuts is: they think they are in a massive hole. Sometimes - more often than you might think - it’s better to take politicians at face value than to stroke your chin and do punditry.

Politicians usually tell what they believe to be the truth. That is, of course, not the same as saying they’re usually right. You can take issue with the Tories’ and Lib Dems’ diagnosis of the state of the economy when they took over in 2010, and with their prescription for dealing with it - I would. And you can think that their economic project ultimately failed - I do. But what you can’t do is claim that they didn’t believe what they were saying. It’s not that politicians are liars. It’s worse than that. It’s that politicians really do think the things they say they think.

Like their Tory and Lib Dem predecessors in 2010, Labour politicians really don’t think there is any money. They really are in despair about the state of their inheritance - the other day I texted a special adviser about how they were enjoying their new job and they replied “Just so much that is broken”. They really are angry that the Conservatives have the brass neck to attack them for the early release of prisoners, a decision whose alternatives were, broadly speaking, “invent a time machine” or “legalise crime”. They might be wrong. But they do mean it. The best - the true - answer to “why is your messaging so gloomy?” is “We really are gloomy”. Sometimes, it’s not about tactics at all.

Starmer’s genuine anger about the state of the nation was behind what was, for me, the most effective part of his Conference speech: a dividing line about populism as “the politics of easy answers” and the need to be honest about trade-offs: providing more prison places means building prisons, cheaper electricity means overground pylons, having more houses means putting them in actual places, processing asylum seekers means granting asylum, and so on. I like hearing this stuff because it’s true - or at least, because I really believe it. And that dividing line, which is primarily aimed at both the Conservatives and Reform, was linked thematically with another dividing line about the “comfort zone” of “the politics of noisy performance”, which is part of his message about how Labour has changed.

The thing Starmer and Reeves really believe, which is what makes people like John McDonnell think that they sound like George Osborne, and which is what makes the whole project sound doomy and gloomy, is this:

“And perhaps most importantly of all, that just because we all want low taxes and good public services that does not mean that the iron law of properly funding policies can be ignored, because it can’t. We have seen the damage that that does and I will not let that happen again. I will not let Tory economic recklessness hold back the working people of this country.”

The second part of that quote is political attack. But the first part is what they think. You can disagree with them. You can have an economic argument about it. But they are not just saying it for fun, or for the sake of a dividing line.

It’s easy for the Conservatives to oppose the means testing of Winter Fuel Allowance, just as it was easy for Labour in 2010 to oppose the means testing of child benefit. But the reinstatement of universal child benefit never made it into a Labour manifesto: not in 2015, not in 2017 or 2019, and not in 2024. And eventually, whichever of the six leadership candidates who jointly condemned the move wins, they will have to decide whether it will be Conservative policy at the next election to reinstate it as a universal benefit, at a cost of £1.4 billion which they will need to find a way to pay for, and at a time when pensioners are better off overall than they were when the benefit was taken away, or to do something else. There are no easy answers.

This is, as I am more aware than you, the first Dividing Lines post for ages. I did, in my defence, warn that this was going to happen. That is partly a product of me going on holiday in August and partly a product of me being busy since I got back. There will continue to be not as many as there used to be, and that’s one of the reasons why it’s staying free.

1. Starmer’s metaphor of choice was not the view from the summit but the light at the end of the tunnel, despite the fact that he had a whole bit about the Lake District.

2. Sam Freedman, another man who for some reason can remember lines from old conference speeches, tweeted a close parallel between Starmer today, saying “Change isn’t a few extra lines on a graph moving in the right direction” and Cameron in 2014 saying “I didn’t come into politics to make the lines on the graphs go in the right direction”.

3. This was widely regarded as a pretty successful PMQs debut, and as someone who worked on Ed Miliband’s PMQs team (buy the book!) it’s probably important for me to point out that it was the only PMQs in Ed’s whole time as Leader of the Opposition that I didn’t work on. My first one was the following week, which was an absolute disaster.

4. You were wondering what the policy was, weren’t you?

5. Don’t they all look young?

6. One reason why a u-turn is unlikely, apart from the fact that politicians don’t like u-turns, is that if you were going to put £1.4 billion back into the welfare system somewhere, this is absolutely the last place you should put it.