We often forget that Labour governments are a very rare thing. Since Ramsey MacDonald became the first a hundred years ago, Labour Prime Ministers have only occupied Downing Street for just under 37 years. When you subtract the 4 or so years he spent leading the Tory-dominated National Government, that falls to only 33: only a third of that long century.
Add to that the first two Labour governments were both minorities. So was Harold Wilson’s third, and James Callaghan’s. Clement Attlee’s second ministry only had a majority of four. So did Wilson’s first. As Daniel Hannan has pointed out, for Labour, general elections since 1979 run as “Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Blair, Blair, Blair, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss”. Quite a few on the Left will fail to spot those outliers.
Labour are therefore unused to power. Few of its MPs can remember previously sitting on the Government benches. This makes Keir Starmer’s looming landslide election victory even more remarkable. In five years, he has taken Labour from its worst result since 1935 to the brink of its largest-ever majority. One recent poll had Labour winning 468 seats – 50 more than in 1997.
Fortunately, the commentariat is waking up to the prospect of a Starmer super-majority. He will soon have a mandate some Prime Ministers would have sold organs for – a parliamentary supremacy little seen in a mass democracy. Katy Balls has a handy run-down of what it might entail: 300 backbenchers, left-leaning think tanks in the ascendant, a free hand for Starmer to remodel Britain in his image as the few remaining Conservative MPs boggle on in horror.
This will be a radical departure from the Tory telenovela that has numbed Britain’s sanity for the last fourteen years. Yet even with a historic majority, Starmer faces significant challenges. His mandate will not be a product of enthusiasm for Labour, but hatred of the Conservatives will be hollow. Hailing a New Jerusalem would ring hollow. Even as they provide him with a parliamentary supremacy rivaling that of Robert Walpole, few voters have confidence in Starmer’s ability or Labour’s credibility.
We will be leaving Labour a vile inheritance. The same issues that have scuppered Rishi Sunak – NHS waiting lists, small boats, anemic growth – remain unresolved. Public confidence in public services is at an all-time low. Newly appointed ministers, eager backbenchers, and union comrades will soon pressure Starmer and Rachel Reeves to increase spending.
Blair had five years of growth at an average of 2.8 per cent across the five years before he entered office. Starmer will have had only 0.2 per cent. Public sector net debt is two-and-a-half times what it was in May 1997: 99.2 per cent of GDP rather than 37.6 per cent. Reeves has made clear, post-Liz Truss, that Labour will not be rapidly hike borrowing to pay for more spending. Sorry – there is no money.
Starmer will distract his backbenchers through constitutional tinkering. He will busy himself with a further expansion of New Labour’s empire of rights and bureaucrats that the Tories have left largely untouched, and of which he is a product. But Reeves will have to contemplate pushing our wilting tax burden already even higher. Many of her MPs might cheer her on as she squeezes until the pips squeak. But will hard-pressed taxpayers be so enthusiastic?
Without a credible Tory threat, the most significant division in politics will become that between Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. Starmer and Reeves lack the underlying resentment that bubbled between Blair and Brown post-Granita. But there will be a tension between a Prime Minister high on the power of his massive majority and a Chancellor wedded to prudence. They might also have a Deputy Prime Minister unlikely to keep quiet, even if no one can be quite sure where she’s coming from.
The pair will also be hamstrung by a timid manifesto. Just when Britain might be crying out for a radical Labour government, Starmer and Reeves are stripping back their pledges, frightened of scaring the voters. They will win a stonking landslide on a promise of doing as little as possible. The £28 billion earmarked for splurging on green Keynesianism has gone. Nationalisations postponed have been postponed. Leadership pledges have been junked.
Even those policies Labour has stuck to – such as decarbonising the electricity grid by 2030, planning reform, or whacking taxes on private schools and non-doms – are vague, inadequate, or undeliverable. They will neither cost as little nor generate as much as Labour currently hopes. Without a windfall or increased growth, Reeves will find her room for manoeuvre further constrained.
This will generate tensions between ministers and backbenchers. With a huge majority, Starmer can ignore the continuity Corbynistas of the Socialist Campaign Group. He has successfully shaped candidate selections in his own image. But he still might have three times as many MPs as payroll jobs. With their career prospects limited, his new generation will become restless and hard to whip. Rebellions will become common. A majority of 289 is not what it was.
Splits will soon emerge over age, location, radicalism – and foreign policy. As the Gaza revolt has shown, Labour MPs can be hard to silence on issues that weigh heavily on their consciences and constituency postbags. The splits it has revealed within the party’s coalition are unlikely to go away. It also points towards a lesson that Starmer should learn from Boris Johnson. However glorious your majority might look on the morning after the election, events can soon overcome it.
As Niall Ferguson has pointed out, Starmer would follow a grand Labour tradition if his government was overwhelmed by issues beyond his control. The world is not getting quieter. Just as our economy recovers from the palpitations of lockdown and Ukraine, China is expected to invade Taiwan within the next five years. A global depression would ensue. Meanwhile, the Middle East might still explode, as Russia looks covetously at Eastern Europe. Are we in the foothills of a Third World War?
Even if we aren’t, international turbulence could still undermine Starmer’s efforts at governing as readily as they did MacDonald’s, Attlee’s, or Brown’s. He is a functionary who entered politics to expand the Blob’s dead hand, fiddle with Whitehall structures, and tinker with statistics on inequalities. His putative Cabinet seems hard-working but not particularly impressive. David Lammy will be no Ernest Bevin. One can imagine them buckling under the pace of events.
If so, politics might change even more fundamentally than it will under a Starmer super-majority. The voters giveth; the voters taketh away. With living standards plummeting as the economy nosedives, British democracy would be existentially challenged. Both major parties would have proven unable to deliver the radical change voters want in the face of events, dear boy, events.
The Tories would normally hope to be well-placed for a swift return to office. But the next election will leave our party shattered, existentially exhausted, and primed to enjoy a long civil war. Who will reap the rewards of Starmer’s struggles? Nigel Farage will look on eagerly from either side of the Atlantic as Dominic Cummings sings siren songs to JK Rowling. Does anybody know the area code for Henley?
Perhaps Labour will prove more resilient in office than I expect. The international climate may pacify. Starmer may supplant Farage as Donald Trump’s man in London. Growth may return, New Towns might get built, and our economy could go green with the lights staying on. If so, Labour would be able to reward their voters after #FourteenWastedYears. For the health of our democracy, I hope that is the case.
2019 was a victory from which the Conservatives may never recover. I can’t help but fear 2024 might prove the same for Labour. Things can only get worse.
The post How quickly will a Labour government implode? appeared first on Conservative Home.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: William Atkinson
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.conservativehome.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.