In our punitive politics, the Labour party is almost always on probation. You can see it in Keir Starmer’s sometimes jumpy public manner, in the party’s dumping or scaling down of policies as a general election nears, and in its often cautious approach in power, even when it has a commanding majority.
Labour’s lingering insecurity and its related lack of credibility as a governing party in the eyes of others are clearest in how it handles, or is believed to handle, the public finances. State spending, investment, borrowing and deficits can seem dry topics. But they are also treacherous ones for the party which, since its founding, has been torn between seeking financial respectability – the terms of which are usually defined by establishment interests and Labour’s political enemies – and using government to create a more equal society.
The party’s painfully protracted shrinking of its plan to invest £28bn a year – less than 2.5% of total state spending – to create greener jobs, homes and energy reveals much about current politics. Starmer’s supposedly disciplined and focused party still has internal divisions. And, as in its narrow defeat in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection last year, which also involved a necessary but contentious green policy, Labour still does not always manoeuvre or communicate well under pressure. Meanwhile, the Conservatives, who caricatured the £28bn plan as an unnecessary, tax-raising “spending spree”, are happy to pretend the climate crisis isn’t happening in order to stay in power.
The whole deeply depressing episode is also a recurrence of an old and fundamental problem for Labour – and, less obviously, for anyone in this country who wants more, desperately needed........