Has Labour’s doom and gloom messaging gone too far?
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By simply telling people things are “tough”, is Labour failing to “sketch a vision for the future”?
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In brief…
- Keir Starmer and the Labour Party have repeatedly told the public there will be tough decisions to come in the short term due to the economic mess left behind by the Tories.
- But critics say they are not offering any concrete vision as to what will come afterwards.
- The News Agents ask whether Labour has shot itself in the foot with this strategy.
What’s the story?
He may have tried to move the dial slightly by saying there is “light at the end of the tunnel”, but Keir Starmer has largely been hammering home the message that times are tough.
But if things aren’t going to get better for a while, what should the Prime Minister be telling the public to brighten things up?
That is, without it sounding like more empty platitudes from politicians who promise the world while delivering little.
The News Agents mull this over on today’s podcast.
What has Labour said?
“I have to be honest with you: things are worse than we ever imagined.”
That was the beginning of the doom and gloom messaging Starmer has been issuing as of late, which came in a bleak speech from the Number 10 Downing Street rose garden.
It came not long after Chancellor Rachel Reeves accused the Tories of leaving behind a £22 billion fiscal black hole, which leaves the party with “tough decisions” on tax and spending to make.
This means, Labour has said, that things will have to “get worse before they get better.”
They haven’t tried to hide that the public may not like this.
Starmer has said: “Tough decisions are tough decisions. Popular decisions aren’t tough, they’re easy.”
One such move is means-testing the winter fuel payment for pensioners.
Does this mean a return to austerity?
Starmer’s latest line of messaging has drawn comparisons with the austerity years of the David Cameron government, who had George Osborne as his chancellor.
This was essentially a programme of deep spending cuts and tax increases, which the government at the time said it had to do to fix the economy.
Lewis says that Labour appears to be issuing similar messaging.
“They've thought that they could easily replicate the sort of George Osborne strategy from 2010 and sort of update it for the 2020s.”
But the difference was that Osborne and the Tories reiterated the message over a number of years. It has only been a few months in government for Labour.
Lewis says: “There was actually a fragile economic recovery taking hold by the time of the general election [in 2010].
“Not only did the government at that time actually dismantle it in terms of sentiment, but they withdrew government spending from the economy, which nearly pushed us back into recession.”
But Osborne and Cameron, Lewis says, did give a sense of where they were going at the end of it.
“You can look backwards, as long as you're looking forwards, and I think that the general impression from a lot of Labour MPs is there hasn't been as much looking forwards as there ought to be.”
Starmer, however, has said there will be no return to austerity under Labour.
What’s The News Agents take?
Emily says: “I think Keir is somebody who hates the sound of the populist promise that says it's all going to be fine…. It's the pied piper politics that he loathes.”
Instead, the Prime Minister is playing it safe.
For Jon, he welcomes the fact that Stamer is not getting into the “boosterism” of Boris Johnson, which he says “promised so much and delivered so little”.
But, Jon notes: “but you do have to sketch a vision for the future”.
“Labour have slightly failed to hold their nerve on this”, Jon says.
Lewis has a theory as to why.
He says: “I think the reason they didn't hold their nerve is because there has been a fundamental illogic at the heart of that strategy.”
Starmer and Reeves have been saying that the Tories spent too much money, Lewis points out. This, he says, would lead you again to the same conclusion - we need to spend less money.
But Lewis says: “They don't want to say that we're going to spend less money. They're saying no more austerity.
“They're actually looking at the different suite of government public services and saying they need more money. So that illogic, which is at the heart of it, is one of the reasons they haven't held their nerve.”
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