Labour's arguments are well rehearsed by now. Because government finances are exactly the same as a household budget, the nation has to tighten its belt and balance the books. Our income must match our outgoings. Especially with the shock horror discovery of a totally unforeseen £22bn overspend by the Conservatives. And so WFA is deemed a nice-to-have and has to go lest we have another run on the pound and a Liz Truss-style meltdown - so said Leader of the House Lucy Powell at the weekend. Because of the Tory legacy, this is merely the first of other "painful decisions" to come.
Going after help for heating as another round of energy price rises are due is classic bad timing, but even without that this presents more political problems for Labour than it solves. The Tories went out of their way to partially shield pensioners from their cuts programme (partially, because the public services they depend on - above all adult social care and the NHS - got hammered), and while election data suggests the Tories won among the over-65s again it was on a lower proportion than the other outings of recent years. Having gone to the right and, indeed, actively avoided taking on the politics the Tories and Reform use to mobilise their elderly support, there's nothing like scrapping winter fuel payments that could bin the support of older people who have always voted Labour or lately turned to them out of exasperation faster.
We know the hard decisions rubbish is the cover, but why is the Labour leadership happy to make millions of pensioners fear the winter? There are three that jump out. The first is the recent orthodoxy of the Labour right. Because progressive taxation is progressive in the sense those earning the most pay more tax, scrapping universal benefits is also "progressive" because only those who need them get them. The waste of monies going to the well off is avoided. We saw similar Blairite defences of tuition fees during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. This is really a gloss on the Thatcherite project of residualising social security, one that is inseparable from divide and rule efforts and the stigmatisation of benefits dependency. A far cry from the Labour right of the post-war period who, in the main, extended universalisation to win support for the welfare state among those layers who didn't need it precisely so the floor for those who did could be politically maintained. As solidarity is only a word in the dictionary as far as Reeves et al are concerned, universal benefits are public subsidies for the better off. Funny how that attitude never extends to tax breaks for the wealthy, nor other schemes of state largesse.
Then we have the reversal of the Tories' beggar-thy-neighbour strategy that set the old against the young. Labour knows that "working people" paid the price of successive Tory governments, which is why they made so much of ruling out raising income tax, National Insurance, and VAT during the election - while keeping other taxes on the table. Their view is one of returning the disfavour. Shielding workers from paying for the confected crisis of state and getting pensioners to cough up legitimises the fiscal straitjacket, because they're seeing the layer who "did well" out of the Tories being forced to assist the Starmerite clean up.
Lastly, pensioners tend not to vote Labour anyway. That alone should mitigate electoral fall out. But on top of that, getting this cut out the way in the early days of the new government means no one will remember it five years from now when the corner is turned, the economy is moving, and the state and public services are working properly. Plus, to put things bluntly, a significant number of 2024 Tory voters will have passed on without requisite replacements filling the box in next to Conservative (or Reform) candidates. Why worry?
In sum, plenty on the Labour right think it's the progressive thing to do, it curries favour with what they imagine to be their political base, and the party is shielded from the electoral fall out by a confluence of existing pensioner political preferences and the actions of Old Father Time. Through the frame with which Number 10 sees politics, despite their spinning and rhetoric this "tough choice" is nothing of the sort.
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Indeed, not sure I will last to next GE and therefore don't matter. However, those young workers have elderly parents or grandparents whom they will not want to suffer, therefore I am not sure the tactic will work. The whole £22 billion is less than 1% of the wealth of the top 1% of wealth holders. Asking for that contribution from them would be like collecting small change but would please nearly everyone on the country.
ReplyDeleteNice piece, and I've felt this has been a disastrous policy since day one, up there with Gordon Brown's 10p tax fiasco. But, I think it's vital to look through the headline figures (which is surely driving the policy from Reeves' ivory tower) to think about the more finely grained electoral mapping. It's true that the current crop of (older) pensioners don't vote Labour en masse and plenty have shifted Brexitwards to Reform, but they're dying off in ever-greater numbers. So, it's important to note that (a) those moving towards pensionhood do vote Labour and (b) a not-insignificant number of those disgusted by the Tories did so this year too.
ReplyDeleteI come from a bit of England that is half left-behind with a small town centre in ruin surrounded by deteriorating estates, and half upwardly mobile, with new housing developments and shopping centres on the outskirts by the dual carriageways that ferry the middle classes to better places. It voted Labour in 1997 and 2001, Conservative either side, and I was astonished it didn't go Reform this time. The new Labour MP is sitting on a majority of 5000 and would likely have lost to the Tories had Reform not stood.
Who accounts for those 5000 votes? Sure, some of the new influx of young professionals moving into the new housing developments. But others are people like my mum: early 70s, recently retired from a part-time job due to ill-health, owns outright one of the many small terraced houses that populate the old town (value: c.£180K), only has a state pension to live, few savings, and falls £8/month over the line for pension credit. She's absolutely furious that, after supporting Labour all her life, they've decided to go after pensioners, seemingly (from her perspective) indiscriminately.
So, if she's furious, what of the people in a similar position - far from destitute, but living month-to-month, who don't have children with good professional jobs who can help them out - who also fall just over the line? Particularly those who wavered over voting Labour this time round, and would normally vote Tory or Reform or whatever? In constituencies like my mum's, and those where Labour majorities are far thinner, these are the precise people who tipped them over the line into such a big majority. So, while their electoral salience might not be that great at the macro level, at the micro level their votes are absolutely crucial. Which is why, in my view, this is just stupid stupid stupid politics from centrists who are supposed to be brilliant at it.
They're anything but brilliant at it, though. Look at how regularly cack-handed they are.
DeleteThey don't need to be brilliant at it. The reason they get into government isn't their ham-fisted skill at managing the electorate. It's their skill at firstly taking control of a party structure, and secondly buttering up the kingmaker factions among the rich and influential.
Oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. This lot are in power because they positioned themselves to be in control of the opposition when the other side finally lost their grip (and you can be sure that if Corbyn had clung onto the Labour leadership for longer, then heaven and earth would have been moved by the capitalist classes to ensure that the Tories remained permanently riveted to the government benches). Nothing at all really to do with the voters, who will always be given as few real options as possible.
Thank you for an excellent concise description of our current political situation.
DeleteThe simplest explanation is that both Reeves and Starmer actually believe the BS they talk. They are both convinced Neoliberals who subscribe to the government spending is like a household budget myth. They genuinely think that if the books are not balanced then the "markets", like some mythical beast, will erupt in fury and rip their world apart. Faced with that terror, what are a few hundred thousand pensioners, or children, or disabled people?
ReplyDeleteThey have drunk the coolaid, taken the blue pill, bought the b*ll*cks. Rather than the idea that the economy should exist to serve society, they are convinced that society exists to serve the economy. All the organisational, methodological, theoretical, practical, institutional, professional and intellectual infrastructure that administers it, rather than being directed to performing the role of serving all the people, is instead focused on ensuring that society serves it. So, markets, which are made up of people representing purely financial interests, decide everything based on profit to them. The greater good? The common weal? These are not just alien concepts, they do not even register.
The purpose of politicians is supposed to be to make sure that the common weal is the key consideration, but they too have been incorporated into the glistening threads of cells that make up the multi-tentacled jellyfish that feeds upon us all. Reeves and Starmer, that most unfunny duo, are temporarily acting as voice to this horror. In time they will be shed or moved on, and new cells will take their place. Their role is to give the illusion of democratic control and humanity to the pulsating grotesqueness they front. But, being part of it, they struggle to portray concern, or compassion, or any sense of fairness at all.
Much of this picture is actually very close to the mark, I believe - and a lot closer to being literally true than I think that Aimit realises.
DeletePlease stop being pathetic
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone know to whom or against what that "Martin"'s enigmatic cry of objection is aimed?
ReplyDeleteAnyone who posts up a 'comment' like "please stop being pathetic" , simply demonstrates that they have no coherent counter arguments to put to whatever previous comment Martin objects to. I thought all the comments had very valid points to make.
ReplyDeleteMy comment isn’t to any particular target. Maybe just a ‘tired suggestion’ that peoples attempts to explain the problems in Britain, with words seem meaningless these days, but I could be wrong. Apologies if I confused or offended. I certainly don’t disagree with the general concerns of anyone here.
ReplyDelete