Labour seems to be flailing, but keep faith: Starmer’s long-term plans are both radical and sound
By Polly Toynbee, The Guardian.
Goals for low-carbon energy, prison reforms, housebuilding and more are ambitious and nation-changing. They won’t happen overnight.
This is slow government. This solemn and serious cabinet is not one for quick, bright eye-catchers, timed to hit 6 o’clock bulletins. The best it does may only emerge in years ahead – it fervently hopes for enough ripening fruit by the next election. This long-termism requires an impatient and febrile electorate to take it on trust that the plans will work. That means Labour is ploughing on, undeterred by a mendacious opposition and its monster media. If Keir Starmer’s cabinet succeeds in most of its ambitions, it would set a nation-changing path.
If Ed Miliband achieves 95% low-carbon energy by 2030, that gives us and future generations renewable electricity security for ever, regardless of global markets. If Angela Rayner builds 1.5m homes, she will have found the means, the planning laws and the people with the construction skills to carry on building exponentially through following parliaments. If Bridget Phillipson can get the great majority of infants into good wrap-around nurseries ready for school, their education and wellbeing prospects look bright: it is only now that the previous Labour government’s Sure Start children are emerging from their GCSEs with higher scores than the rest.
If waiting lists are falling fast, faith will be restored not just in the NHS, but in other public services’ ability to improve. If Shabana Mahmood at the justice department dares to seize on David Gauke’s upcoming sentencing proposals and James Timpson’s prison reforms, she may wean this country off the highest, most exorbitantly expensive and criminogenic imprisonment rates among equivalent countries. If new working rights stop gig-economy penury and let unions into workplaces to stop bondage conditions in fast food, care, warehouses and delivery, lives will improve. If relations with the EU can restore easier trade, work and travel, that too would yield growth, along with all of the above.
Failure to achieve this risks far more than one party’s ejection from the cycle of power; it risks a dangerous loss of trust that any government can do anything, opening the floodgates of nihilism to any passing demagogue. That is the hazard in the fanatical Tory party’s unprecedentedly hysterical opposition to everything a sensible government does. Essential tax rises to repair what was left in ruins are shrilly opposed, with no suggestion of what Tories would cut or tax instead: twice as many voters regard those tax increases as “necessary” than as “unnecessary.”
There will be much more to come, still only a few months in. Just announced is another high ambition that could not only recover gigantic sums of cash, but also repair Britain’s squalid reputation as one of the world’s worst laundromats of ill-gotten gains. David Lammy at the Foreign Office in the lead, with Yvette Cooper at the Home Office and Rachel Reeves at the Treasury have appointed Margaret Hodge as their anti-corruption champion. Together they announced it on a visit to the National Crime Agency, bolstered with £36m funding to hunt down dirty money, the illicit gold trade, dictators’ booty and evaded tax. Plucked from her role as chair of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on anti-corruption and responsible tax, like a guided missile, Hodge will have the staff to set about an enormous task across these wild frontiers.
Read her APPG’s latest report to understand the staggering scale of fraud she is going to pursue. How much? An astonishing £350bn is lost every year through fraud and money laundering, almost twice the entire health budget, due to be reeled in. Her words in the report make clear her first priority will be to force the crown dependencies and overseas territories to open up their books so the true beneficial owners of every property, every trust and shell company are absolutely transparent – no hiding places. Writing in the Guardian last month with the Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell, Hodge accused these offshore havens of reneging on opening up their registers. The British Virgin Islands alone is responsible for 92% of grand (government-level) corruption cases that Transparency International has identified in the past 30 years, totalling £250bn. These tax havens hold illicit capital spirited out of Africa worth nearly twice what the continent receives in aid.
Sunlight will fall on the 45% of properties that are held by overseas trusts in the UK Land Registry whose true owners are disguised, oligarchs evading sanctions or fraudsters hiding property empires. Money-laundering prosecutions have fallen 56% since 2010: that’s what Hodge has called Britain “in the grip of a dirty money crisis”. Her remit also covers bad money entering British politics, to ensure all political donations come from UK-derived funds, with anti-laundering rules expanded to cover universities, private schools, PR agencies and everywhere else loot gets sequestered. She writes in the APPG report: “We can send the world’s crooks and kleptocrats a message: Britain is once again open for clean business.” Choosing to employ her flame-throwing skills against tax cheats, criminals and fraudsters is hardly a Labour act of timidity towards the world of finance. From the Isle of Man to the Cayman Islands, those wealth-managing accountants and bankers know what is coming their way.
All these are high ambitions. After a bank crash, austerity, pandemic, war and inflation, other horses of the apocalypse are always available to knock out a government’s best laid plans. Some of their plans were not best laid, pitches not rolled. Some explosions were unexpected: the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Resolution Foundation and most tax reformers for years called to end the farm tax privileges that cause vast wealth to be ploughed into farmland to avoid inheritance tax.
From the noise caused by restoring inheritance tax to pension pots, you’d think it breached a Magna Carta right, but that unearned bonus for the wealthy was only added by George Osborne. A universal winter fuel allowance made less sense with the pension triple lock continuously escalating incomes of the old, making them less likely to be poor – though the pension credit threshold should have risen. With a surfeit of enemies, there was no need to abuse “complacent” civil servants: know your friends. There has been infelicity, clumsiness and outright blunders, but Labour gets unjustly scant credit for its long-term boldness. Ignore the bad early polls: Thatcher’s Tories were at 23% in the early 1980s, and the next election is an eternity away in politics.
The BBC’s kneejerk pugnacity is too easily influenced by a pall of hostile cynicism, infected by the Telegraph, Sun, Express, Times, Mail and GB News. All that press baron-purchased ferocity gets too little pushback from those who well know what Labour is up against. True, both leader and cabinet lack the language of political lyricism to raise these winter spirits, but to use a Churchillism, they will “keep buggering on” through their dire legacy, towards those exceptionally difficult aspirations.
