What exactly is Labour’s mission?
The Labour Party’s blueprint for government – “Five Missions for Britain” — is just under 2,000 words long. The word “poverty” appears once — but only in an oblique reference to New Labour’s failed pledge, in 1997, to end child poverty within a generation.
The words “disabled”, “mental health”, “inequality” or “housing” don’t appear at all. Neither does “racism”. There’s some good stuff in Five Missions: devolving power, making government accountable, clean energy, policies for the long-term.
But it’s a document largely about how to manage change. How to get things done. It’s McKinsey disguised as policy. It’s a cart before the horse. It’s also a document utterly devoid of soul.
Three years on from his election as leader, after the unelectable Jeremy Corbyn led Labour to its 2019 pasting, Sir Keir Starmer has yet to pin his colours to the mast. What kind of country does he want to build? Does this conscientious, plodding, conformist lawyer conceal an insurrectionist with a scorching progressive programme for government in his back pocket? Or is this it? Does Starmer have an inner Superman — or will he forever be Clark Kent?
Voters who consider themselves politically homeless – and I’m one of them – would dearly like to know the answer. If Labour is elected – as seems likely – what flavours are we going to get? Social democracy with a proper regard for those who need a leg up? Or Tory-lite and more of the same, with a bit of empathy on the side?
The answer to this question will determine whether the man gets not just a proper majority to do what needs to be done, but also a second term, without which lasting change is unattainable. No clear answer to the above will encourage tactical voting, weak government, short-termism, boom-and-bust economics and instability. We’ve had enough of that to last two lifetimes.
So far Starmer has assiduously followed the politician’s version of the original Hippocratic oath: to “do no harm”. This diffident approach has had some success. Corbynism is banished. The party is rehabilitated. Labour is on 45% in the polls the Tories on 27%. A majority beckons, possibly a thumping one.
Five Missions says its top priority is securing the highest sustained growth in the G7. Fair enough. Without growth we can’t fix the deep-seated problems that bedevil our economy, scar our cities and hobble our public services.
But what would be the point of a Labour government, if it doesn’t seek, as one of its core missions, to break the cycle of struggle and poverty that blights the country? Where is the clear, blue water that sets apart a party whose driving impulse is profit – and, in its present incarnation, narrow nationalism – and one whose mission is to make life better for the majority?
Britain is not the only rich country that is also in part shockingly poor. However, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s 2023 look at poverty in the UK suggests real poverty is deepening alarmingly.
Around 13m people, including 3.9m children and nearly 2m pensioners, are poor. As the foundation points out, poverty is a complex issue with a wide range of causes. But broadly we’re talking about in-work or non-retired individuals and families whose income is less than 60% of the median income — around £20,000 a year, or less than £400 a week.
The most shocking and rising numbers are those around what is known as deep poverty or destitution. People who can’t cope. People who are one step away from disaster. This is defined as people with an income of less than 40% of the median, so around £13,500 a year or £36 a day. Their number has increased from 4.7 million in 2002 to 6.5 million in 2020.
In families with at least one member with a disability, the numbers who struggle jump to 15% or 2.3 million people. By and large people with a disability earn less. And being disabled is more expensive: wheelchairs, housing, special diets, healthcare all cost more.
Which, the consumer magazine, recently calculated that supermarket inflation in staple foods had risen by between 17% and 80%. When the price of budget cheddar cheese at Asda rises by 80% in three months, porridge by 35% and sliced white bread by up to 67% and you’re a single mother with two kids, how do you manage? Inflation is eating away at everything: wages, benefits, savings.
Rents are at their highest on record. Rightmove, the online estate agent, says that rents in London jumped by 15% over the past year. The average asking rent in the rest of the country was up by 9.7%.
The ultra-Tory narrative (Lee Anderson but he’s not alone) is that the poor are either deserving or undeserving. In my limited experience this is rubbish.
My local food bank is attended not by scroungers but mostly by working people down on their luck: single parents who can’t heat their home, pay their rent and buy the essentials for their kids. They certainly can’t do all three at once. A sudden twist of fate — redundancy, illness, long Covid – leaves them facing insecurity, uncertainty and marginalisation because they’ve gone from just getting by to not managing.
Poverty is not the only challenge Britain faces. The others include fixing the NHS, getting the trains to run on time, patching up the Union, balancing the books, making sure we’re strong enough to deal with external threats, sorting out our depressingly corrupt police forces, tackling cronyism, healing the deep wounds of Brexit. These are all first order priorities.
Thirteen years of messy, divisive, occasionally unhinged Tory rule has left Britain poorer, more fractious, less secure and more alienated from its natural allies than ever.
Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves says her party will “put working people first”. Fine. People who work are the engine of growth. But this line is borrowed from the Tories in their (unsuccessful) attempt to portray striking workers as layabouts. Or people on benefits as over-indulged scroungers.
It’s a mistake, just as the most recent attack advertisements suggest that the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is soft on paedophiles is a — more serious — mistake. It is unworthy of a great, reforming party.
Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour Party and its first MP, grew up in abject poverty and died in destitution. The illegitimate son of a farm girl and a miner, he worked in the Lanarkshire pits from the age of 10. That mournful-looking pioneer started a movement that over the next century delivered huge, meaningful change to every corner of Britain: the Wheatley Act that kickstarted social housing; the NHS and the Welfare State; the Minimum Wage; abolishing capital punishment; decriminalising male homosexuality; relaxing divorce laws; limiting immigration; liberalising birth control and abortion laws.
If and when Starmer becomes Prime Minister, he will have his hands full just to keep things ticking over: stagnant productivity, run-down public services, hostile global economic weather, Ukraine, the looming challenge posed by China. Money will be tight. But that shouldn’t stop him from having a vision.
Keir Hardie once said: “I am of the unfortunate class who never knew a childhood.” What will his namesake, Keir Starmer, do for them?
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