Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Only six mornings into this election, and Queen’s lyrics are rattling around my mind. Each day brings a further Tory descent into absurdity. A National Service scheme pressganging eighteen-year-olds into wiping old ladies’ bottoms for a few weekends. CCHQ e-mailing MPs its own criticisms of them. A sitting Tory MP backing Reform UK in her constituency. Carry on, carry on…
We’ve six more weeks of this. We’re caught in a landslide; there’s no escape from that reality. Rishi Sunak is no poor boy. I’ve never bought into the claim that he is jetting off to California the morning after the election, mainly because I’d hope that even I’m not that cynical. But he’s a little more easy come, easy go than most Conservative MPs. Will he carry on, as if nothing really matters?
When the Tories are already more disliked than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, with a Prime Minister busking for votes in Berkhamsted, and CCHQ so rushed in picking a candidate every 100 minutes that they they might be calling upon Lib Dems, a feeling of great foreboding is unavoidable. Sunak should have taken his campaign chief’s advice – not mine – and held off on seeing the King.
Oh well. The election can’t be cancelled or conceded. As eloquently as we may have been making the case against ourselves these last few days, Britain still needs a Tory government. The reason is the traditional one: the Labour alternative is so grim. But our campaign can make things worse. This is not 1992. Tories are not shy, but embarrassed. No focus group is needed to know that.
We can all read the opinion polls. Even if Sunak has regenerated into a campaigning genius overnight, Labour’s lead is imposing. Whilst our dabbles in fantasy seem tragic and self-defeating, those of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves should matter. One can joke about the National Service proposal with the tacit assumption it will never happen. You can’t say the same about Labour’s plans.
As such, the Shadow Chancellor’s claim that there will be no “return to austerity” under Labour, whilst ruling out of income tax and national insurance increases, is worrying. “I don’t want to make any cuts to public services”, she said, promising an “immediate injection of cash”, courtesy of Labour’s ever-amenable application of VAT to private school fees. Soak the rich! Well, middle-class.
Leaving aside the chance that that policy will cost more money than it raises, this displays a worrying lack of realism on her part. As Philip Pilkington has highlighted, she may not be looking for austerity, but austerity is looking for her. Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests Labour would inherit the worst fiscal situation since the immediate post-war period. There is no money.
Faced with anemic growth and a chasmous deficit, Reeves will have three options. “Painful” public spending cuts of up to £20 billion in unprotected departments, a slash that would make George Osborne weep. Or the tax burden could be taken to an 80-year high, without the war to justify it. Or the Treasury could let borrowing take the strain. How well did that work for Liz Truss?
Labour have little idea of how to square this circle. MPs would revolt if they even sniffed spending cuts. But they don’t want to spook the voters – at least pre-election – with talk of big tax rises. Reeves has wept crocodile tears over the UK’s debt-to-GDP ratio, and pledged fealty to fiscal sanity. They pray for growth. But so has every government since 2010. Stagnation rules, ok?
In which case, as Kate Andrews has pointed out, Reeves has one obvious option: copy Jeremy Hunt. She has already pilfered the Chancellor’s fiscal rule of having debt as a share of GDP falling within five years. This provides the opportunity to rack up debt in the present if the OBR can be fooled into thinking you will make swinging cuts in five years. The markets accept this, the schmucks.
But kicking the can continuously down the road is not sustainable. Not only because Reeves will be fending off spending demands from all sides, but because the world is becoming more volatile. I’m sorry to sound like a broken record. But we are hurtling towards a Third World War for which we are hideously unprepared. Covid-19 and the energy crisis showed the shape of things to come.
Even then, no Western social democracy can escape demographic doom. Only yesterday, the Telegraph reported that the state pension would be unaffordable by the middle of the next decade. Karl Williams has laid out our bleak future if we cannot double our current long-term growth rate. We face higher taxes and squeezed spending, whichever party is in power. Cuts are coming.
The West has yet to solve our replacement rate problem without falling back on mass migration. If his empty border policy didn’t already suggest it, this gives the lie to any hope Labour would reduce immigration. Even then, I wouldn’t mind them getting the number of houses built back to a thirty-year high. But it’s not the silver bullet they hope. YIMBY rhetoric cannot replace policy.
To even treat it as such indicates the air of unreality hanging over Labour as much as the Tories. Starmer’s pledge to conduct yet another security review has not elicited the same derision as Sunak’s teenage squaddies. But what will it tell us that we don’t already know? It is an attempt to appear serious in the absence of action. It will not make us safer. Only money can do that.
Even when Labour acknowledges that we live in a dangerous age, their analysis is utterly banal. David Lammy’s screed on “progressive realism” offered little more than a naive hope that a penniless Britain matters in a darkening world: “Global Britain” for Guardianistas. But what do you expect? Ex-Brownites, CPS functionaries, Bank of England groupies: these are yesterday’s people.
It feels odd to say that about a Shadow Cabinet hoping to be the first Labour government in 14 years. But as their newfound love-in with the Cameroons shows, the Opposition offers no departure from the consensus politics the Prime Minister rightly blames for our decline. The Tories have not turned the clock back one second on the Blairite inheritance. Under Labour, time will tick on.
Nothing really matters? Not at all. With Labour, everything will be the same, but worse. The onward march of stakeholderism will continue, as the responsibilities of democratic government are handed over to an ever-growing number of Great British quangos. A new Equalities Act will not only ensure plenty of councils go bust, but further entrench the pernicious, race-baiting DEI industry.
This is before the lights go out, courtesy of Labour’s expensive and undeliverable exercise in virtue-signaling: decarbonising the electricity grid by 2030. This was laughable even with a £28 billion funding pledge. Without it, attempting to implement the policy is a one-way ticket to national immiseration and energy rationing. Sod National Service! Starmer is bringing back blackouts.
This is all without one of the many doomsday scenarios currently kicking about the globe: a Chinese attack on Taiwan, open war between Iran and Israel, or an expanded Russian invasion of Eastern Europe. America’s geriatric empire cannot put the fires out. Starmer’s Britain will troop in its wake into the human and economic disaster. Austerity? You don’t know the meaning of the word.
These are realities that neither party can avoid. But for all the dumpster fire of a Tory campaign so far, facing this reality was at least the basis on which Sunak called the election. If his National Service plan is his best hope of responding to it, he is being utterly unserious. But it is ephemeral. Labour can giggle. But then the record stops, the money runs out, and the pain begins.
It sends a shiver down my spine. But the die is cast. As some of us have been saying for far too long, things can only get worse. Sunak has been honest about that. Starmer has not, and his party is committed to making many of the most execrable parts of our current situation even more dreadful. For God’s sake, hope and pray this Tory campaign turns around. Any way the wind blows…
