There will be no second chance for Labour

Telegraph

2 days ago

The ANC were the first to coin the slogan 'make the country ungovernable' as they sought to depose the apartheid government in South Africa. An unruly people would weaken the centre, extract concessions and push tensions until they became contradictions. From there, you get the real prospect of regime change.
Britain remains a relatively prosperous and secure nation. But it is becoming palpably less governable by the day. This is not confined to one party or leader. The lifespan of prime ministers and their cabinets are getting shorter. Parliament is sovereign once again, but it does not feel that way. Successive governments have failed to grip the centre and act decisively to overcome Britain's malaise. This is the task that falls to Labour.
These are not easy times in which to govern. The Government has little room for manoeuvre. The bond markets are tetchy, gilt yields are higher than they have been for decades, pushing up the cost of borrowing. The failure of the leadership to shave £5 billion off welfare spending only increases the nervousness. Scleroticism has taken hold in seemingly every institution. How have we got here? And how can Labour get us out of it?
From the 1990s through to 2016, the political class on both Left and Right was characterised above all by complacency. These were the fat years. Growth was good, largely because of a booming services economy centred on London and the south east in general and the City of London in particular. This growth enabled New Labour's economics of redistribution that supported the country's heartlands. After years of hardship, Blair's model seemed to finally bring the warring factions of the country back together again.
The 2008 crash should have shaken the political class out of its complacency, exposing the precarity of our heavily financialised economy and the malaise that lurked beneath the surface of our now fragile economic model. While services had grown, our productive capacity had been denuded. Strategic industries had been closed down, outsourced or sold off to foreign investors. Regions once massaged by public sector employment opportunities and welfare found these tools were no longer powerful enough to smooth the cracks left by deindustrialisation.
The recession marked the juncture at which Britain began to decline relative to the US and most other European nations, yet it prompted little critical reflection. Austerity was the coalition government's answer – and it was an expensive one. Huge structural weaknesses in our economy were reduced to a matter of simple accounting. Investment dried up and infrastructure could not keep pace with maddeningly high levels of immigration. Growth, productivity and real wages flatlined. Complacency was still the order of the day for a political class who had grown decadent and far-removed from the real conditions of the country.
Whatever else it may have done, the vote to leave the European Union punctured this complacency. Blue Labour had been warning since 2009 that all was not well in the body politic, that lurking beneath the glitzy New Labour veneer social disaffection was growing. Blue represented melancholia as much as conservatism. Now all was out in the open: the disconnect between the political class and the country it sought to govern; the towns that had been left behind, their economic purpose in a global economy obscure; and the dysfunction of government, parliament and our public institutions.
The Conservatives proved incapable of exiting this quagmire. The 2019 government began with an 80-seat majority and ended in ignominy and an announcement of a new fund for chess players. Lacking the will or confidence to take on Treasury orthodoxy, immigration trebled and levelling up was abandoned. The civil service was left unreformed. Growth continued to stagnate as judicial overreach and regulatory constraints made building impossible. A few brief spasms aside, inertia replaced complacency as the defining feature of our political class.
As little as a year ago, you could still find echoes of complacency in the political and media class when they spoke of Labour's election win as a victory for the 'grown-ups'. But fixing a broken political system, a dysfunctional state and a stagnant economy requires more than a clean suit and tie. It has taken Labour one year to discover what took the Conservatives 14 years: that Britain, its economy and its institutions, are barely functioning.
Too many in Labour defined themselves solely in opposition to the Conservatives and thought a new Government need only focus on 'delivery', with a few technical fixes here and there. Others wanted to reduce the task of governance to a form of altruism for those in need. Their vibes-based politics has no resonance in the country, no acknowledgment of the hard reality of trade-offs in a low growth economy, and no solutions for Britain's malaise. If there is a divide in Labour it is not between Left and Right, New Labour or Blue Labour, but between those who understand the severity of the country's situation and those who do not.
The future success of this Government depends on this understanding. It must be an insurgent on behalf of the people, willing to grip the centre and take on its own party and the scleroticism of our institutions as it rebuilds a shattered country, shifting resources to the productive economy, to build, make and grow, driving social and economic development, radically reducing immigration and speaking for the whole country as one people united in a shared national identity and purpose.
This is the choice facing Labour, the fork in the road in this inauspicious moment – a retreat into the comfort zone of liberal progressivism confined to the prosperous areas of the country, doing things for a client electorate, promising the impossible, or a striving for a radical rebuilding of the national economy, renewing our sovereign democracy and building our national revival on a broad, cross-class coalition. This way lies a second term and a new political settlement. The first year has not gone well, but there will be no second chance for Labour.