Labour heading for certain victory? This feels more like 1992 than 1997

Tony Blair wanted radical reforms to fix the welfare state and the NHS. Today’s politicians offer nothing

You might have thought, given the travails of the Conservative Party, that Labour would be cruising towards government. The Tories are about to change their leader for the third time in six years, the candidates for the job are trashing the party’s record in office since 2010 and, with every hustings event they attend, are undermining the appeal of whoever ends up in No10.

Assuming it is Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, she would take up the reins of government with her rival’s taunt that she is the purveyor of “fairy tale economics” ringing in her ears. Were Rishi Sunak to win, he has been denounced by those in his opponent’s camp as “unfit for office”. There is a mother lode of insults for Sir Keir Starmer to mine once the winner is declared on September 5 and faces the House of Commons for Prime Minister’s Questions two days’ later.

Yet even his best friends doubt that the Labour leader will put the ball in the net, even when confronted with such an open goal. The great irony is that a Tory leadership contest brought about by the forced dismissal of Boris Johnson by his mutinous ministers is sucking up all the oxygen of political debate, leaving Labour gasping for a hearing like a freshly caught mackerel on the deck of a fishing boat.

True, August is not a month when the public particularly wants to hear about politics and nor are many focusing on the subject while they enjoy their holidays. But those who are taking notice are witnessing a battle of ideas within the governing party. Different political visions are being represented not by a Tory-labour clash but by a Tory-tory one.

The old maxim that voters do not like divided parties is undoubtedly true; but to capitalise on the Tories’ internal rifts, their opponents also need to appear united, competent and fizzing with ideas of their own. Labour fails on all three counts. The Left and the unions are angry with Starmer over his stand on strikes; the party leader has tried, but failed, to discipline MPS for joining picket lines; and his big speech in Liverpool last week recasting the party’s economic policy disappeared beneath the Mersey with barely a ripple, accompanied by shouts of derision from the Left.

Starmer is in the same position as Neil Kinnock in the early 1990s in having to ditch Left-wing baggage while at the same time trying to chart a centrist course for Labour. It took another election defeat in 1992 and the arrival of New Labour under Tony Blair before fresh ideas emerged.

We forget how radical some of them were. In the run-up to the 1997 election, welfare reform was at the heart of Blair’s pitch for the votes of Middle England. He had understood what previous Labour leaders had not, or were unable to state: that far too much taxpayers’ money was spent keeping people in dependency, with all the baleful consequences that brought.

“We have reached the limits of the public’s willingness simply to fund an unreformed welfare system through ever higher taxes and spending,” he said. More than that, his reforms would “cut the bills of social failure” and use the money saved for schools and hospitals.

Here was the Tory party’s worst nightmare – a Left-of-centre politician articulating the very concerns that the political Right had banged on about for years. Benefits would be linked to work, and work would be rewarded, not discouraged by tax and poverty traps. (Today more than five million Brits are on out-of-work benefits.)

Labour strategists looked overseas for inspiration, including to the welfare revolution in American states such as Wisconsin, where benefits were simply withdrawn if a job was offered but not taken. The welfare system, Mr Blair said, neither helped the poorest in society nor encouraged the unemployed back to work. He went to Singapore and delivered a big speech about the “stakeholder society”, even briefly flirting with the island state’s idea of personal provision, where people join bespoke insurance schemes that pay out when they are ill, retire or need care.

“If people feel they have no stake in a society, they feel little responsibility towards it and little inclination to work for its success,” he said. Mr Blair asked the independent-minded Labour MP Frank Field to “think the unthinkable” and also understood the threat from so much taxpayers’ money being siphoned off by a voracious NHS.

Early reforms included the use of private money within the health service, setting up independent foundation trusts, and proposals for large-scale primary care polyclinics, with care tailored around the needs of the patient – a good idea stymied by the BMA.

Labour had been scarred by the 1992 election spat over the NHS, the so-called War of Jennifer’s Ear, and were mindful of the need to come up with ideas beyond pouring ever greater sums of money into an unreformed system.

That was 30 years ago, and we have advanced not an inch. In office, all these good intentions fell by the wayside. Recently, Labour’s four years of Corbynism revived all the party’s unelectable socialist instincts and have left Starmer floundering.

Since the Tories are also failing to come up with any serious ideas for long-term reform of the welfare state and the NHS, there is a gaping hole to be filled; and yet the Labour leader is being advised to avoid anything radical and expect power to fall into his lap.

Polly Toynbee, the party’s Panglossian cheerleader, yesterday wrote that the opposition “is within touching distance of victory”. Really? The latest poll of polls has them seven points ahead. At the equivalent juncture in the mid-1990s – two years or so before the 1997 election – Blair was consistently 30 points or more ahead.

Labour needs to win another 120 or so seats to form a government outright and, with hardly any in Scotland, will need to win them mostly in England, which is highly improbable. Moreover, it is a startling fact that, since 1945, only Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Mr Blair have won a general election for Labour. Starmer certainly won’t join them, not unless he offers English voters the sort of reforms that Mr Blair promised but never delivered.

Of course, he might always head a coalition if the Tories lose their majority – but the received wisdom that the Conservative Party faces a meltdown of 1997 proportions seems fanciful. This feels more like the run-up to 1992.

To capitalise on the Tories’ internal rifts, Labour needs to seem united, competent and fizzing with ideas. It fails on all three counts