The reset word was banned by the labour officials but it is clear that this all about trying to give the government a boost after a disappointing first five months. It is certainly needed, this week one poll has put Reform ahead of Labour. Farage has announced 100,000 members which is more than the Tory members who bothered to vote in the last leadership contest.
Net approval rating for the Labour government as of November 25th was -39 (cf. -2 in July). Starmer himself is still languishing at -38 in his personal ratings. A poll by FindOutNow on December 4th puts the Tories on 26%, Reform 24% and Labour on 23% in general election voting intentions. Given these numbers you can understand why Morgan McSweeney, having deposed Sue Gray, wants to get a handle on things with this relaunch.
A botched relaunch
From all the media accounts it was a bit of a damp squib. On TV it looked very dark and the 5 (or is it 6, they don’t seem to make their mind up) slogans paraded behind the stage all looked retro and a bit Stalinist for today’s type of political performance. Having it all at Pinewood studios did not add anything except for a limp Bond joke form Angela Rayner. I always thought the first rule of PR and Comms was to keep it simple. Do not go much beyond three and do not keep messing about with your main message.
We have had missions, first steps, targets, priorities, manifesto pledges and now milestones. It is like those awful training days you had to go on when people wasted time discussing the obvious in a lot of technocratic or managerial jargon. One journalist even asked if a flow chart could be provided to navigate it all! I suppose Starmer’s teams see politics as managerial and technocratic. Focus groups, retail offers and re-brands are what gets them out of bed in the morning. At least Corbyn had a bit of heart and passion.
Blair’s team were just as moderate and licked the bosses’ backsides just as much as this lot but at least they looked more competent and you could remember their messages even today – Building Schools for the future, Surestart, Tough on crime etc. But the real issue is the political direction of this government and the way its partnership with the bosses for capitalist growth will not fundamentally change much for the working class, communities or the planet.
At the same time it could not even give the bosses enough of what they want. It could open the door for the arrival of the most right wing Tory government we have seen, with or without the participation of Reform.
A particularly distasteful aspect of yesterday’s show was the way Starmer at one stage almost aped Trump’s approach to the ‘swamp’ when he suggested the routinism and conservatism of the civil service was holding back Labour’s incredibly progressive programme. As if this was really the case…
The rebranded ‘milestones’
Let’s take a look at the six new milestones:
- Higher real household disposable income and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita by the end of this parliament, as part of a long-term aim to make the UK the fastest-growing G7 economy.
- Building 1.5m homes in England and fast-tracking planning decisions on at least 150 major economic infrastructure projects.
- Putting the UK “on track” to achieve at least 95% clean power by 2030.
- Meeting the NHS standard of 92% of patients in England waiting no longer than 18 weeks for elective care.
- Getting a record 75% of five-year-olds ready to learn when they start school.
- A named police officer for every beat, and 13,000 extra neighbourhood police officers for England and Wales.
As anybody who has had to draw up personal targets for their work knows, there is an art about this process. You make sure the target looks like a target but is well within your reach. Some of the six definitely fall into that category. Short of a massive new recession or pandemic in the next 5 years – which cannot be totally excluded – most disposable income and GDP goes up over that sort of period.
That is how capitalism works. It tells you nothing about improvements in people’s living standards, well-being or community cohesion. The target contains no figures so even a one percent increase would count as a great success. Like all these targets there is no class analysis at all. We all know that the growth in the last decades have benefitted better off people much more than the working class.
Targets…it’s how you tell them that counts
Getting 75% of five year olds ready to learn sounds good but what does it mean? It depends what you mean by ‘ready to learn’. In education once you set a target, assessment and teaching tends to just deliver that. So we have had a headline increase in GCSE achievement but there is not a lot of evidence that the overall quality of education and learning has particularly improved.
A lot of this target depends on getting the new nursery proposals implemented. Since 66% of children are in private nurseries which are not accountable to a local education authority it is difficult to coordinate or organise such an effort. These providers have to make a profit so part of the resources going to the sector is wasted as it goes straight to the owners or shareholders. A big problem is staffing, which again is split among these thousands of companies and they have publicly stated that this is a big obstacle.
The energy target, which socialists support, has been watered down. Terms have changed to ‘being on track’ and it is no longer a 100% target but trimmed to 95%. Nuclear power is included as non-carbon in this calculation too. While this target is mostly maintained the government is doubling down on carbon capture, giving huge subsidies to the private companies it is partnering for a technology which is not an ecological solution. Watch out for concessions on the electric vehicle targets too.
Milestones full of holes
Selecting one target for the NHS excludes a lot of the other problems. 18 weeks is still more than 4 months so while this would be an improvement it still means people are waiting too long. As for the police officers on the beat objective, does having a named local officer really reassure Black or Asian heritage people about their treatment?
Where is the evidence that more police equals less crime? Evidence is much clearer about the link between economic inequality and crime figures. A lot of the shoplifting epidemic would end if you had a progressive drugs policy and increased welfare benefits to a humane level. But that would mean a quite different scale of taxing the rich and redistributing resources.
When you look at the housing targets, the gap between the commitment of resources and reality is even clearer. Even many Labour councils are saying their local targets are unrealistic, as a Lancashire council leader confirmed on BBC radio this morning. The two fallacies at the heart of the housing programme are that partnering with developers and just freeing up planning regulations will produce enough new housing to solve the crisis. Rayner has still not come clean about how much social housing, which is affordable to workers on average and below average earners, will be built.
It is not rocket science to work out that private developers have no real interest is building millions of council houses. These people want shortages, they want house prices to keep rising. A lot could be done too to use the existing housing stock. Estimates have been made that suggest the housing crisis could be more or less sorted if we were able to use all the empty flats and rooms that are currently available.
You can’t change much without redistribution
Yesterday Labour made clear that the increase in taxes in the last budget was the end of tax raising budgets for this parliament – unless there is an unforeseen circumstance. This announcement was by far the most important news . It shows the poverty of the Starmer government’s policies for improving the lives of workers and saving the planet.
The last budget barely touched the rich – it increased their school fees a bit, fiddled with inheritance tax and the non-Dom exceptions and not much more. Business has to pay more National Insurance contributions but tax on profits was unchanged and it is benefiting from grants and loans from the government infrastructure and energy projects.
Here are five or six milestones most people would like to see:
- Close all foodbanks in six months
- Increase all benefits so people have a decent basic income
- An emergency housing plan, control rents, use the empty houses, build social houses
- End all private practice inside the NHS and all outsourcing, fund what is needed in the NHS
- Boost education spending, cut class sizes
- Reinstate the £28 billion a year energy project
- Move to free public transport
- Wealth tax and progressive taxation to pay for above
I am sure our readers could come up with similar or better milestones for a government that worked in the interests of workers and of Mother Nature.
The media focussed on the fact that the 6 milestones did not include Starmer’s anti-migrant crusade to stop the boats or an absolute number on net migration. He was quick to reassure everybody that stopping migrants was still ‘foundational’. He boasted how many workers have already been deported.
But his problem is that however tough he wants to be on turning people away – it will never be enough for the Tories, Reform, the hard right and their media. Sharing the racists’ narrative just ends up making their arguments for them and does not even guarantee Labour any electoral advantage.
Our response to this tawdry, underwhelming ‘reset’ is to argue in our unions, our workplaces and communities for a radical reset based on a people’s audit of what is needed and the organisation of struggles to back it up and force change.
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