Don’t Be Fooled Again

Ben Wildsmith 

I hope you haven’t been guilty of prematurely criticising our new government. Characteristically, I made that mistake, just the once, and was upbraided by some of the most sensible people in Wales.

Pursing their lips at my jejune impertinence, they set me straight.

‘How can Sir Keir fix 14 years of Tory misrule in a couple of months, you stupid boy?’ they fulminated, as I stared at my shoes and hummed ‘Hitler Has Only Got One Ball’ under my breath.

I’m a repeat offender, having outraged decency by questioning the desirability of a huge Labour majority before the election.

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Eye rolling

Then, the eye-rolling owners of the moral high ground demanded absolute discipline under threat of what they insisted could still be a Conservative victory. Enquiring if Labour might give us some inkling as to which policies they intended to enact was evidence of middle-class frivolity when ‘real people’ desperately needed a Labour government. I was to shut up or forever be bracketed with the Tories.

Now, a couple of months in, as the frost settles on tartan shopping trolleys and the NHS is told to behave itself or be closed down, it remains inappropriate to critique the new, porcine proprietors of Animal Farm. Before the election, no questions were to be posed because of the danger that Labour might lose. Now, having been returned with an unassailable majority from 34% of the vote, any dissent is an affront to the will of the people.

The political strategists behind Labour’s victory are lauded for their success in gaming the first-past-the-post system so effectively. Some of them have been sought out by the team running the similarly policy-free Kamala Harris campaign in America. The point of difference is that Trump really might win that election, whereas the Tories could have appointed Sir David Attenborough as leader and abolished income tax for all the good it would have done them.

Puzzling decisions

Perhaps beating an utterly discredited government that was outflanked to the right by Reform wasn’t quite the stunning political achievement that the victors assume. Now that the same strategists are running the government, we are seeing some puzzling decisions.

For instance, if you were intent on proving your muscularity by duffing up the pensioners, going so far as to suggest that there would be a run on the pound if you didn’t, would you send your Foreign Secretary to Ukraine with a £600 million ‘extra’ cheque the next day? Does that seem either sensible or politically savvy to you?

Owing to the long tenure of the Tories in Number 10, hardly anybody on the Labour benches has much experience of anything but opposition. Wes Streeting has exhumed Alan Milburn to advise him on the NHS and long-forgotten characters like Jacqui Smith and Pat McDonnell are also on board. No wonder Oasis realised their time had come.

Starmer’s personal reputation, however, rests on two achievements. He routed the Corbyn-supporting left of the party and won the election. The first of these was achieved by misleading the membership as to his policy intentions, whilst the second involved obscuring them from the electorate.

'Reform'

Today, Starmer announced a freeze on NHS spending unless it submits to ‘reform’. Details of this reform are sketchy, but we can safely assume he doesn’t mean renationalising outsourced services and rolling out free prescriptions in England. He was clear on only one thing, that his programme of government was for ten years, not five. Nobody is to expect any results before the next election, only after a decade can we judge his performance.

A quarter of a century of austerity is a big chunk of life for people who had nothing to do with the banks stealing the world’s money supply in 2008. The first chance anyone will have to make that point is our Senedd elections. Don’t be fooled again.