Sherelle Jacobs
What fresh hell is this? Thirteen years of Tory government are likely to end in dismal failure. And this week’s Labour Party conference in Liverpool has offered a frightening glimpse of the future under Sir Keir Starmer. Conservatives need to brace themselves: Britain is set to elect a dangerous new government just as the West tips into a dark age of geopolitical entropy and economic stagnation.
But it is not so much Labour’s zeal as its insipidness that the country should fear. The good news is that militant Corbynism has faded into carnivalesque background music: as the queues snake to attend Dawn Butler’s Jamaica Party, the CND, as it bangs the drum for Wages not Weapons, has been shunted to cupboard room 11C. With the exception of Apsana Begum MP, there has been little pro-Hamas agitation in the conference fringe tents. The bad news is that a desolate new chapter of rudderless centrism beckons.
Labour reborn is dead behind the eyes. Yes, all the signs of biological life are there. Its Liverpool annual meeting has attracted more CEOs than Davos. The main conference hall has been consistently packed. But at the heart of all the hubbub is a disquieting emptiness. And if the air at Labour’s conference is electric, it is not with jubilation but with panic. The official Labour line, implicit in shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s speech yesterday, is that it has limited scope to be bold given the mess left by the Tories. While this might be partly valid, the elephant in the room is that Starmer is on the verge of coming to power just as the social democratic model across the West is imploding.
Germany, once the model for state-directed prosperity, is now the sick man of Europe, trailing in the advanced manufacturing race against China and clueless about how to shift from traditional industry to innovation. Amid a backlash against mass migration and crime, the Scandinavian Third Way has collapsed. The White House is going into meltdown, as funds dry up for Biden’s Green New Deal, which has failed miserably to translate into votes. Underlying these simultaneous combustions is the centre-Left’s failure to answer the question that threatens its future. How can social democratic parties deliver on promises of mass prosperity in an increasingly volatile world – one where governments can’t just dig their heels in on their “liberal principles” while hosing around loadsamoney?
The question clearly has Labour stumped. One of the grand plans it has flirted with – the “entrepreneurial state”, inspired by London-based Italian celebrity-economist Mariana Mazzucato – is a calamity in the making. Such states have a bad habit of prioritising sectors that offer the best hard-hat photo ops rather than actually drive growth. True to form, and despite reining in its spending ambitions, Labour still wants to bet the farm on a green industrial plan in a country where 80 per cent of output comes from services, and when Brexit presents Britain with a golden chance to become a regional haven in new sectors such as AI. Net zero projects are unlikely to deliver anywhere near the kind of growth and productivity gains that are needed to save the country from its torpor.
Labour is at a similar loss when it comes to Britain’s other crises, including healthcare. Labour’s token heretic Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, has been out in force in Liverpool, trolling the grassroots with his favourite line: “If people want a shrine, sign up to a religion.” But despite rhetorically breaking from the NHS cult, Labour still doesn’t have a comprehensive plan for reform. Starmer’s business-as-usual announcement that Labour will invest £1.1?billion in staff overtime and pool hospital resources to get waiting lists down is revealing. Can we deduce that he has lost his nerve for more controversial solutions? Certainly, a step-by-step war plan for reforming the NHS is still nowhere to be found.
How will Labour shift money from day-to-day operations and administration to preventative healthcare and early diagnosis, which is ultimately what needs to happen to prevent the country being bankrupted by its ageing society? Where is its plan to fix Britain’s broken social care system? These questions hang in the air as Starmer drones vacuously about an NHS “fit for the future”. But perhaps it is on the totemic issue of immigration where Labour is most clearly out of its depth. Its plan to clear the asylum backlog by expediting cases is staggeringly naive. As she enjoys the moral high ground, Yvette Cooper doesn’t seem to have grasped the wickedness of the mess she is poised to inherit: some suspect that Home Office mandarins have been quietly encouraging Suella Braverman’s dog-whistle politics to distract from the scale of the department’s systems failure. By the time Labour comes to power, the country will likely be facing another migrant surge, as a rash of coups in Africa possibly coincides with another war in the Middle East.
Despite the coming storm, Labour does not have anything that remotely resembles a policy to deter new arrivals. The EU has slapped down Starmer’s hopes for a bespoke immigrant return deal as “delusional”. His vow to “smash” the exasperatingly nimble criminal gangs seems equally fanciful. Most baffling of all is that front-benchers such as David Lammy still seem to think that the basic choice is between an open “Great Britain” and insular “Little England”. Any serious Labour politician should surely by now comprehend that the real choice is between a scenario in which established parties fix the broken international asylum system, balancing a spirit of generosity towards genuine refugees with a reduction in legal migration – and the alternative in which populists shove liberal politicians aside and enforce border controls for them.
That even now, as a second populist wave threatens to sweep Europe and America, the centre-Left continues to talk so much sanctimonious claptrap about shifting from a “hostile” to “compassionate” refugee system and to indulge in moronic pipe dreams that everything can be fixed by allowing refugees to work and vote is jaw-dropping – I say this as someone who is instinctively liberal on migration. One can’t help but wonder whether, in a way, the next Labour government has already failed. It has had more than a decade to think through the flaws in the social democratic project. It hasn’t done this. As a majority government beckons, one can hardly bear to look.
The Telegraph
