The Observer view on how a Labour government can make Britain a fairer and greener place | Observer editorial
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OOn Thursday, voters will have a historic opportunity to not only decisively oust one of the worst governments this country has ever seen. They will have the chance to replace it with something completely different: a Labor an administration characterized by integrity and respect for the public service, an understanding of ordinary people’s lives and an honest desire to make Britain a fairer and greener place. Such simple ingredients, but ones that have been missing in action for the past 14 years, to the detriment of us all.
Only three Labor leaders have won a majority in the last 100 years. If the polls are correct, Keir Starmer looks set to become the fourth, a remarkable achievement just five years after his party suffered its worst election defeat since the 1930s. Voters should seize this chance to inflict a heavy electoral loss on Conservatives for their destructive period of government and positively support the alternative future that the Labor Party offers.
Austerity, Brexit, the pandemic, Rwanda
Global financial meltdown; pandemic; then an energy crisis: the last 15 years have been characterized by a series of painful external shocks. But every Conservative prime minister since 2010 has acted to make things immeasurably worse. First came the years of austerity. David Cameron and George Osborne used the cover of the financial crisis for their ideological drive for a thinner welfare state: the chronic underfunding of the NHS, reducing financial support for low-paid parents to pay for tax cuts disproportionately benefiting the better-off and erosion of services for vulnerable adults and children. The harrowing results are evident today, of the record number of people waiting for NHS diagnosis and treatment to increasing levels of child poverty and sleeping rough.
The financial crisis should have been the wake-up call that prompted politicians to recognize the structural economic problems facing Britain: low levels of business investment, slow productivity growthand some of highest regional inequalities of any rich nation. Instead, the right wing of the Conservative Party, led by opportunist Boris Johnson, promised the country that leaving the European Union would magically solve all our economic problems and transform the underfunded National Health Service. Of course, no such thing happened. Brexit proved the very definition of an own goal; it made Britain poorer, more unequal and undermined exports and investmentwhile draining political and diplomatic bandwidth and undermining our influence on the world stage.
Johnson’s premiership was also affected by a sordid breakdown of standards in public life, from the official spreading misinformation to the Partygate fines arising from it breaching its own Covid regulations, to the multitude of ministers who have breached the ministerial code. His successor Liz Truss’s term ended after just 49 days after her chancellor announced billions of pounds of unsecured tax cuts, leading to the pound is collapsing. Rishi Sunak prioritized attempts to imitate reform with immoral, an unfeasible, expensive plan deny asylum seekers the right to seek asylum by detaining and deporting them to Rwanda.
Johnson won a healthy majority in 2019 on a promise to fix the country by delivering Brexit; since then Conservative governments have only deepened the cost of living crisis and undermined public services. In recent months, the results of local and by-elections have shown just how angry many people are. Sunak deserves not just to lose, but to lose badly.
Reform, prudence and restoring confidence
The flip side of the Tories’ bad loss is Labour’s decisive win. Some point to evidence that anger at the Conservatives has not evolved into unbridled enthusiasm for Starmer; Starmer’s net approval ratings are higher than Sunak’s, still remain relatively low in the context of Labour’s overall lead in the polls. However, Labor deserves positive approval from the electorate, including in Scotland, where the SNP has a very poor record in government on education and health.
Starmer transformed Labor from the party led by Jeremy Corbyn. He confronted the anti-Semitism that flourished in the party, to the extent that the equality and human rights regulator found that the party had acted illegally in his treatment of Jewish members. Subsequently, the regulator took the job outside special measures 16 months ago: an important step on the way to government. He did changes in party regulations with a focus on winning elections rather than internal disputes. However, the party has been accused of applying disciplinary procedures differently to internal critics. Starmer must be careful not to stifle robust dissent within Labour’s broad parliamentary church. He also needs to provide clearer answers, including to women in his own party, about exactly how Labor would protect women’s rights to access single-sex spaces, services and sports, given the lack of clarity in the existing legislation.
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Labour’s manifesto is in many ways an exercise in cautious incrementalism, as Starmer suggests in his article in today’s Observer. That’s because it has pursued an election campaign focused on winning voters’ trust for workable change, rather than promising that things will be radically different as soon as Starmer steps through the threshold of Downing Street. His promises give a sense of his priorities: more NHS appointments and cancer scanners; more teachers in schools; free breakfast clubs for all primary schools; new guarantees for minimum standards in neighborhood policing; and a public green energy company to help catalyze the transition to clean energy. All positive and all achievable, but unlikely to be enough to deliver on Labour’s impressively ambitious missions, which include delivering the highest sustainable growth in the G7, moving to zero-carbon electricity by 2030, building the NHS , fit for the future, and ensuring every child can realize their potential through the education system. But they are concrete steps along the way.
Labor has been criticized for following the Tories by failing to be honest about the scale of the fiscal challenge facing the country: shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has effectively committed to the same debt target as chancellor Jeremy Hunt and to baseline spending plans of the Conservatives which include further deep cuts to public services. But it has always been extremely difficult for Labor to get across to voters about how bad this baseline is when the Conservatives are effectively pretending cuts aren’t happening.
Labor will have to face up to the fact that delivering the key growth to transform public services and rebuild a half-decent safety net is likely to require more public investment than it has let on. This will require raising more through revenue such as capital gains tax or more borrowing. This is a conversation with voters that will need to happen as part of rebuilding trust in politics and moving away from the populism-infested conservatism of recent years. But a Labor cabinet full of people from different backgrounds with real experience of the issues facing voters would be well placed to do that.
Tough challenges lie ahead
If Labor wins, their task is far from easy. There are many things that will make governing Britain in the second half of the 2020s a more difficult prospect than the last time the party finally defeated a Conservative government in 1997. There are all the long-term structural economic problems that have gone unaddressed. among other pressing challenges that have fallen by the wayside. With the honorable exception of the Liberal Democrats – whose candidates deserve support wherever they are best placed to defeat a Conservative opponent – there has been too little talk of social care in this campaign; that so many older people are left without the personal care they need to live a dignified life and that without fundamental reform of the system this will only get worse.
Young people today face far less favorable financial circumstances than their parents’ generation: some of the most expensive housing costs in Europe and a lifetime of paying off tens of thousands of pounds in tuition fee debt; this will serve to widen the gap between those who can rely on family wealth and those who cannot. The gap in educational attainment between children from poorer and more advantaged backgrounds, already widening before the pandemic, has widened even more since. On top of that is the climate crisis and the fact that without immediate international action the world will become increasingly uninhabitable.
Make no mistake, the challenge facing Britain’s next government will make winning the election child’s play. Starmer knows this, which is why Labour’s campaign has not been filled with the joy and light that some of us understandably long for after the hard times of recent years. But know this when you vote on Thursday: there are tough times ahead, but only a Labor government can begin to deliver the real change Britain so desperately needs.
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