Labour’s conformism is crushing Britain

(with Karel Williams)

This is a government of conformists. The core doctrine remaining to Keir Starmer and his “Project” is cleaving senselessly to elite consensus and the vested interests of lobbyists. Instead of a politics of real change, we have a politics of issue management, of botch-jobs and technological panaceas, of the repression of alternatives. Last week’s Budget was a case in point.

Having prioritised fantasies about high growth, the government is now constrained by minimal levels of growth. It has produced a budget to maintain the status quo through a combination of small tweaks, and three significant changes: increasing the income tax take (without breaking the letter of the damaging manifesto commitment of 2024), taxing EVs as should have been done years ago, and ending the untenable two child benefit cap, which the government could have actually claimed credit for had it been done in the first days of the government.

Otherwise there were minor improvements to what were in effect tax breaks for investors, the pensions of the rich, and the owners of expensive houses.But the time when this government was an actor upon events, rather than their merely their slave, seems already behind us. Economic stagnation continues, the climate crisis swells, and Britain accepts the foreign policy of Donald Trump’s United States. How did the British political class become so timid and so conceited?

Risk avoidance and conservatism are no doubt the default position of most governments and their administrative machines. But things can be and were different. In the past British governments and the British elite have been more than capable of thinking originally and changing things radically. Without dissolving into nostalgia, there have been periods when the United Kingdom was genuinely fortunate in its leadership. In the postwar decades, British leaders changed their country in fundamental ways. Riding a long boom in economic growth, they delivered social advance for the majority, and a transformed infrastructure. They built and changed the welfare state and the NHS; they abandoned Empire and went into the Common Market. They reduced inequality.

Belying stereotypes of “gentlemen amateurs”, the intellectual and political class who imagined and delivered this – within and beyond the Labour party – were a mixture of Establishment thinkers and upstart administrators. Some were from big business; some had experience organising with trade unions and opposing the status quo. Beveridge, Bevin, Bevan and all their successors were committed to a project of national transformation and were open to the new thinking required. And below them was a cadre of reformers: capable administrators, political advisers, chairs of Royal Commissions. Among the social scientists, Richard Titmuss and Alec Cairncross; among the humanists, Lords Annan and Fulton; and among the scientists, Lords Zuckerman and Flowers. They took public service seriously partly because they shared Keynes’ assumption that policy decisions could be made in the public interest and affairs would be managed by discussion among a small group of wise and enlightened insiders. It was a world in which different insider groups competed, structured not just by party but by the ambition to do things differently from the past. This was a period when the state had decided to build, with public money dispensed on social housing, power stations, motorways, reservoirs and much more on a huge scale.

Continued in the New Statesman