Rejecting Santa and embracing Scrooge
It’s bad news for the Labour party that despite the popularity of its general election manifesto proposals, credibility matters more to Britain’s voters
y rights, Britain’s Labour party should be on course for a landslide win on June 8. The manifestos of the two main parties are now out, and Labour promises lots of things that people really like, while the Conservatives are offering bitter medicine that will especially hurt those who turn out in big numbers: The old. Surely voters will pick the party of sweet over the party of sour.
Just look at the two documents side by side. Labour pledges free school meals for all, free university tuition fees and free WiFi on trains. (The word “free” appears 39 times in the manifesto.) There’ll be more police officers and more houses, as well as rail, water, mail and electricity out of the grasping hands of profiteers and owned by the public. Pensioners will keep their triple lock and their winter fuel allowance. Public sector workers will get a deserved pay rise, and there’ll be an end to the employment tribunal fees that too often render workers’ protections meaningless.
Labour will spend £250 billion (Dh1.19 trillion) on a national infrastructure that sorely needs it. Who could say no? Especially when you look at the miserly Tory plan. Tuition fees will remain in place, as will the rapacious privatised utilities. The elderly will lose that automatic help with energy bills and see the security of their pension downgraded. What’s more, if the old need care, they’ll have to burn up the value of their home to pay the bills, right down to their last pound.
Labour demands no such sacrifice, promising instead a generous extra £8 billion for social care. Given all that, surely it would take a special kind of national masochism for Britain to choose the Conservatives over Labour. Voters tell pollsters all the time that they want, say, to renationalise the railways or end zero-hours contracts: One party says it’ll give them what they want; the other refuses. How can there not be a resounding Labour victory?
And yet, those same polls that show support for individual Labour policies also show an electorate readying to deliver precisely the opposite verdict at the ballot box. How do we explain a country that is poised to spurn Santa and his big bag of goodies and instead willingly embrace Scrooge?
British Prime Minister Theresa May’s motive in channelling her inner Ebenezer is uncomplicated. She knows she’s going to win, so she wants a mandate — permission to make the moves she believes will be necessary over the next five or even 10 years in government. For that, she needs to shake off the commitments made by former prime minister David Cameron in 2015 that were designed simply to win an election (and which he doubtless expected to bargain away in a coalition agreement).
The coming rejection of an apparently popular platform will be a brutal reminder of a central truth about politics, that what matters is not just the product you’re offering, but your perceived ability to deliver it. It comes down to credibility. Voters don’t believe Labour has a hope of fulfilling its promises. This is not a new problem. Labour lost in 2015 for similar reasons. Though this is billed as a Brexit election, and though austerity and the deficit are now mentioned rarely, this election still stands in the shadow of the 2008-2009 crash.
Spending too much
Now many of us may well insist, to our last breath, that the crash was made on Wall Street not Downing Street, and that if anything, former prime minister Gordon Brown handled a global crisis with great skill. But, thanks in part to the relentless message discipline of Cameron and former chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, the settled view is that Labour messed up by spending too much. As Populus managing director and former Conservative strategist Rick Nye puts it: “The morality play of the noughties is that we borrowed more than we could afford, there was a reckoning and we don’t want to go back.” To repeat the old but effective Tory metaphor, Labour crashed the car and don’t deserve to be given back the keys.
You’ll note that I have not even mentioned the name of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. That’s because this is a Labour problem, not just a Corbyn one. It would have bedevilled Yvette Cooper or Andy Burnham too. It predates even Brown, with roots in the 1970s, the International Monetary Fund crisis and the “winter of discontent”. The party always begins with a huge, historic credibility problem that it has to work triply hard to overcome. Corbyn didn’t create it — but there’s no hiding the fact that he, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott have made it much, much worse.
Future Labour shadow chancellors will have to be even more tight-fisted than Brown was in the mid-1990s, just to prove their worthiness for office. It’s not that any one item in the 2017 Labour manifesto is unworthy. It’s just that, especially when taken together, they represent the kind of offer you can make only once you’ve earned the public’s trust. It’s not that surprising, when you think about it.
Consider the advice that a glass of red wine a day is good for you. If a doctor says it, you’ll accept it. But if the same advice comes from an alcoholic, you’ll hesitate. Labour aspires to be entrusted with Britain’s health and wealth, but the country first needs to be sure that its hands are not trembling. Jonathan Freedland is a weekly columnist and writer for the Guardian.