Labour’s pound shop populists are now heading for a humiliating fall

Among conservatives, at least, a view is forming that Britain has stumbled into a diabolical new era of red-blooded socialism. Militant union power is in the ascendant, nationalisation is back in vogue, and Labour has all but declared war against bourgeois Nimby pensioners, as it steels itself to spray the green belt with concrete and raid the nest eggs of retirees.

Yet, there is something slightly off with this analysis. Perhaps in time it will be proved to be correct. But for the moment, it is too loud, too vibrant, too doused in primary colours to quite fit with the reality. Far from gearing up for a holy war on capitalism, Starmer seems to revel in a chiaroscuro use of political light and shade. Starmerism may be better understood as the politics of both Left and Right; performative frankness and quiet deceit; ruthless populism, albeit pursued through a technocratic approach to problem-solving.

If so, the real calamity facing the country is not that its new Government is hellbent on turning Britain into a socialist dystopia. It’s that it has once again been lumbered with a band of pound-shop populists who are happy to indulge in popular ideas from any ideological tradition – even if they have no damn clue as to how to credibly implement them, or whether they will rouse the UK from its increasingly desperate state.

Take the decision to give public sector workers an inflation-busting pay rise. While some are disposed to see it as an appallingly socialist display, polling reveals that the public is sympathetic with the view that such employees needed a pay increase. It is also populist politics for a country in which such a large proportion of the population now works for the state, even if it is dressed up in the phoney argument that it will somehow unlock breathing space for vital public sector reforms.

Or take Labour’s plans to bring “coherence” to the rail sector through nationalisation. The idea is intuitively irresistible to the layman. Never mind that the problem that beleaguers the railways has little to do with the system’s “incoherence”, and everything to do with an inherent lack of competition. With the market mechanism having been arrogantly dissolved, Britain will, in the end, be left with a patchier, poorer transport system, at the mercy of the penny-pinching Treasury.

Or consider Starmer’s posturing on law and order. His decision to continue the Tories’ chronically underfunded “hard” deterrence policy, based on only modest prison expansion, fits with the public mood, but it is courting disaster. Tough language on crushing the people-smuggling gangs is already unravelling as the small boats keep crossing the Channel.

Labour’s promise to reinvent the NHS is no less ominous. The notion that Wes Streeting can drive down waiting lists by settling the junior doctors’ pay dispute and bringing in Blairite bruisers to shame failing trusts into action is absurdly unrealistic. The last time that Labour pulled off such a coup, the NHS was basking in the sunlit uplands of 7 per cent annual real-term spending growth. Today, it is shell-shocked from the pandemic, embittered by 15 years of relative belt-tightening, and despairing over a populace that refuses to take responsibility for its health.

Streeting’s broader NHS reform plan does not hang together, either. His reimagining of the NHS as a “back to work service” – financially incentivising hospitals to prioritise the long-term sick – may be exactly what voters fed up with a soaring welfare bill want to hear. But it doesn’t seem to acknowledge that preventing the chronically ill from clogging up the system requires a merciless redirection of resources from the front line to prevention. His grand challenge to the NHS to tackle “waste” appears to ignore the most egregious false economy: threadbare social care.

Of course, Labour is determined to use the dire record of its Tory predecessors as an insurance policy in case things go wrong. But what may appear like an obvious tactic is a gamble. The Conservatives are finding a degree of unified confidence in charging Labour with Left-wing lunacy, and that argument may well stick in the long term. This is all the more likely given that Starmer’s plans for reform are too lightweight to fix broken Britain. 

Starmer, not a natural communicator, is making a similar mistake to Liz Truss, believing that his political choices are so plainly “right” that there is no need to distil them into a compelling governing philosophy. But that is what the most talented politicians have always done. Margaret Thatcher sought to restore Britain’s stature through the unleashing of the market. Tony Blair embraced the post-Cold War end of history with the division-dissolving Third Way.

The tragedy is that Labour could have conceived of a far more sophisticated vision for the country. Our politics is crying out for centre-Left thinkers to engage with how relatively small economies such as the UK can thrive in a post-neoliberal age. 

There are countless problems facing the UK that have been starved of political attention. From the mystery of Britain’s productivity-sapping managers, to its inability to scale startups or translate scientific inventions into commercial products, these conundrums may require more creative verve to solve, but they are less politically toxic than, say, fixing the NHS and thus may in fact be more achievable.

Instead, if populist Labour is sleepwalking into any sort of philosophy, it is rooted in an impossible promise of security. Its so-called bid to reform the NHS turns it from being a mere saviour of the dying into an institution dedicated to transforming the workless into productive labourers, like water into wine. 

The Blob is being made into the centre of the citizen’s universe, responsible for everything that goes wrong or right in their daily lives, whether a salary bump or a late train. Unable, naturally, to offer authentic protection from the world’s uncertainties, Labour may be forced to put its energies into fostering “security vibes” – as we are already seeing in the hate speech clampdown. 

Labour offers a cautionary tale for the Tories. If the Right makes the same mistake as the Left and fails to use its time out of office to engage in deep thinking about the plight of the country and the best way forward, then its comeback in due course will be as calamitous as Labour’s.