Labour go on about Liz Truss but are repeating all Rishi Sunak’s mistakes
Too many in Labour congratulate themselves for rescuing the country from Liz Truss, forgetting that Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt did most of the work. No wonder backbenchers are angry about a policy platform that’s barely distinct form their Tory predecessors, says Will Cooling
There’s no shortage of things that have gone wrong with the Labour Party during its first year back in government, but if there’s one reason to fear they won’t resolve any of them it’s the attitude of Downing Street itself. There is an unthinking and undeserved arrogance to an operation that is consistently polling half what it did a year – whether its unnamed sources lashing out at their own backbenchers for being ungrateful, egotistical or financially illiterate, or ministers threatening to punish Labour MPs for stopping the planned welfare cuts by not ending the two-child cap on universal credit as previously teased.
One explanation for this attitude is that the government is overestimating how boldly it has broken from its predecessor. Too many are congratulating themselves for having rescued Britain from the chaos caused by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
The reality is that the immediate damage caused by the mini-budget was repaired by Jeremy Hunt, who first forced Liz Truss to scrap most of her key tax cuts and then, under Rishi Sunak, pushed through a larger package of spending cuts. That these much more conventional politicians had restored a semblance of normality was recognised by the public, with the Tories having regained much of the ground lost in September and October 2022 after Hunt’s first full budget.
Sensible Sunak
There were other bouts of moderate, common sense policymaking in these early days of the Sunak Government. Starmer made much of achieving a reset with the European Union, but it was Sunak who faced down the Tory Brexit diehards to call off a trade war over checks on goods entering Northern Ireland and agreed to pay for access to the EU research funding through the Horizons programme. Sunak was also successful in restoring a sense of seriousness and purpose to the country on the international stage, with Joe Biden praising both his youth and meritocratic life story.
Now, Sunak undermined much of the progress he had made in his first nine months as Prime Minister by lurching to the right after a shock Ulez-based win in the Uxbridge by-election. But his popularity also declined because once the financial markets had been stabilised, neither he nor his Chancellor had a big idea to help public services or ordinary families struggling with crumbling infrastructure and high inflation. They were reduced to playing games with the Office of Budget Responsibility every six months to maximise their ability to make some crowd-pleasing policy announcements.
Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are very much trapped in that same position now. Yes, Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood are all pursuing policies on housebuilding, workers’ rights, green energy and prisoner sentencing that are significantly different to anything Sunak would have proposed. But these areas of divergence have no unifying theme nor do they address the key priorities of the party’s MPs or voters. Angrily lecturing Labour MPs about how they just simply don’t understand all the good that the Government is doing is therefore delusional.If their own backbenchers don’t feel like anything has changed, then ordinary voters certainly won’t. Labour have to accept that the mini-budget is now a long time ago, and most voters have grown tired of the bi-annual shadow boxing with the nation’s creditors that has characterised every fiscal event since the mini-budget. When looking back at Rishi Sunak’s first year as Prime Minister I said that by focusing on doing just enough to prevent a crisis, he had swapped a quick death for a slow death. If Sir Keir Starmer wants to understand why his government stinks of death, he should recognise that it’s because he’s repeating the key mistake of the man he defeated last year.
Will Cooling writes about policy and pop culture at It Could be Said Substack