It is true that people will get very tired of hearing Labour politicians justify tough or unpopular decisions by blaming the last government for the terrible mess they left behind. There will doubtless be times when I will be among them. But Labour need to hold their nerve, and keep on with the blame game. Because a bigger and more significant truth is that the last government really has left them a terrible mess. And that truth is a fundamental part of our politics now and into the future. It will, or at least it should be, as relevant at the next election as it is now.
So just as the Tories under Margaret Thatcher and beyond never tired of reminding people of the unburied corpses and the rat-infested unemptied bins of the Winter of Discontent, and Tories under David Cameron and beyond built an entire political and economic strategy on the lie that Gordon Brown’s public services profligacy destroyed the economy, so Labour have a more truthful reality that has to be cemented into the public mind… the Tories broke Britain.
People forget, all too quickly. They should never be allowed to forget just how big a mess the country is currently in.
Economic stagnation. Debt. Inequality. Productivity (lack of.) Water and sewage. Prisons. Transport.
Crumbling schools. Shrunken defences. Housing and homelessness.
Grenfell, the Post Office and infected blood scandals. The dire state of the NHS revealed in stark terms in Ara Darzi’s report last week.
Any one of these would test an incoming government, both in terms of political capacity and cost. Labour have inherited an entire catalogue of crisis, and are entitled to complain about it for years to come as they go about trying to fix it all.
That the Tories understand the need to help us all forget is already clear. Would-be leader Robert Jenrick attacking Labour for releasing prisoners early, and asking why they aren’t getting on and building more prisons, on the same day that police chiefs revealed they had warned Rishi Sunak that jails were at breaking point and the outgoing PM just saw it as one more thing to leave to the next guy, in the hope it would help him fail.
Shadow transport secretary Helen Whateley complaining about constituents who couldn’t heat their home in winter, as a way of attacking the removal of universal winter fuel allowance – when it was her government that was in power for every one of the last 14 Christmases.
Shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins saying of the NHS review that it was irrelevant to people what the Tories did 14 years ago (such as austerity and the catastrophic Lansley reforms) – what matters is what Labour does now. The second part of her statement is true. The first is not.
We used to think “broken Britain” was merely one of David Cameron’s slogans to help oust New Labour from power. It has turned out to be a very good description of what his austerity programme helped to set in train, the cocktail of decline then mixed in with Brexit, Covid corruption and incompetence, and a succession of prime ministers who in a country with serious politics would not have reached the bottom of the political pile, let alone the top.
“Don’t give the keys back to the people who crashed the car” was the rather effective attack line Cameron and George Osborne used against Labour under Ed Miliband in 2015, five years after they beat Gordon Brown. It helped them secure a majority and put paid to the coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
Labour will need their equivalent four years from now. When Keir Starmer talks of a 10-year plan to turn around the NHS, it is in part an admission that Labour will not be able to do so in a single term. They will have to be able to show clear progress at the next election, but however much they do, whoever is leading the Tories by then will say it is not good enough, and Labour have failed.
When they do so, the public need to be primed with the only reaction such an attack will merit: “Oh do me a favour, Jenrick/Badenoch/Cleverly (delete as applicable) do you really think we have all forgotten the damage you did?”
If the Tories get their way, forget we shall. It is part of Labour’s challenge to make sure we never do.
So last week I was talking about how legacy takes many forms, hailing John Major’s National Lottery for its role in the success story of Paralympics GB. This week, let’s hear it for the Millennium Dome. This also started life under Major, but his deputy prime minister, Michael Heseltine, had to secure the support of then opposition leader Tony Blair to make it a reality.
By the time of the millennium, Blair was indeed prime minister, and the Dome was turning out to be one of the less celebrated elements of the first New Labour term. But, as I might well have said to TB on the night as he recovered from holding hands with the Queen for an unenthusiastic rendition of Auld Lang Syne, and we fielded complaints from media opinion formers who had been stuck at Stratford station: “Yeah, not the best night Tony, and it looks like Sydney and Paris put on better shows. But I reckon one day this will become one of the best concert venues in the world, and I also have a hunch that a quarter of a century from now, there will be a new medium called podcasts, and I will be doing one with a Tory, and it will become so popular that we will do a live performance here, in front of thousands of people…”
OK, maybe they weren’t my exact words. Closer to what I actually said was “well, that was a fucking disaster, wasn’t it?”
But as Rory Stewart and I climbed up to the roof last week to do a bunch of interviews to promote our O2 Arena show on October 15, and admired the views of a transformed east London, I had that exact same thought as at the Paralympics… funny old game, legacy.
No UK prime minister’s visit to the US can be complete without endless media burble about “the special relationship”. But though Joe Biden certainly rolled out the red carpet for Keir Starmer, a new poll for the Association of Marshall Scholars, which seeks to strengthen US-UK relations, suggests the relationship should not be taken for granted. There is a generational divide in attitudes.
More than a third of Americans under 30 name China as America’s most valuable strategic partner. Compare that with the 4% of over-70-year-olds who think so. Some 57% of oldies see the UK as America’s most valuable ally, compared with 27% of those under 30. There’s a lot of soft power work to be done.
New subscribers among you may have joined the New European family having been tempted here by the offer of a free copy of Tony Blair’s book, On Leadership. It is, as you might expect from someone who knows a thing or two about leadership and has a very good brain, an interesting and insightful read. And no, I did not help him to write it.
Indeed, it is clear to me that it is very much his own work. Partly because of the content. But there is another giveaway.
Tony does love an exclamation mark! Always did!! I was forever deleting them from his speeches. But the publisher has been more sympathetic to his exclamatory foible!
