In opposition, the simple answer often works: you are battling for a few seconds of airtime anywhere you can get it, and so the short, sharp, popular answer is the good one. The difference in government is that you can actually make it happen. You also have to deal with the consequences.
Promising to end the practice of placing asylum seekers in hotels, exactly the kind of socially conservative policy the government is embracing, is a great example of those unintended consequences.
The problem is Labour didn’t seem to think before making this promise, or consider why the last government started using hotels so widely in the first place. A large part of the answer is that many areas of the UK have acute housing shortages.
There is no supply of publicly owned accommodation sitting empty, ready and waiting for asylum seekers. And so, the government now rents homes on the private market. In some areas, people trying to rent privately were already competing with their council for homes, which are facing a shortfall.
Now, those private renters are having to compete with both their local councils and with the Home Office. Under one scheme introduced under the last Conservative government but extended under Labour, private landlords are offered up to five years’ guaranteed rent, with all property management and repairs handled by Serco, with no fees.
All of this is compounding the problems of the housing shortage both for councils trying to find homes, and for people trying to rent.
This is where the logic of simple answers – especially simple answers to take on Reform on their own turf – leads: at some point soon the Daily Mail will notice this scandal, and it will be front page stuff. The bid for Labour to look like they were taking tough action on the asylum system will be a gift to Reform.
In the wake of Labour’s performance in the local elections – which was worse than most of the pollsters’ worst-case scenarios – many on Labour’s right are tempted not just by the simple answer, but by the simple answers that also conveniently vindicate the policies they’ve wanted to enact all along.
Most of the skill of politics is learning how to resist these temptations, but the campaign group Blue Labour has never bothered itself with political skill. Its founder, Lord Glasman – a man who Ed Miliband must surely regret giving a peerage – has a bizarre set of policy prescriptions, including embracing Donald Trump’s “Bennite” tariffs plans.
Blue Labour’s influence on the government is disputed and Glasman is sufficiently out-there that even the “post-liberals” and Blue Labour sympathisers tend to push him to the sidelines. But his spiritual successor Jonathan Rutherford is still an enthusiastic promoter of his ideas.
Again, though, scrutinising these proposals leads to more questions than answers. Rutherford says Labour should simply tackle the issue of grooming gangs, for example. But this is a scandal largely based on historical activity, when the issue was genuinely barely discussed and the practice widespread.
That omertà is gone: Channel 4, hardly a bastion of British Conservatism, did a huge documentary on it recently. The scandal dominates the newspapers (and was largely unearthed by those mainstream papers).
The actual issue is whether historical activity is best handled by a further national public inquiry or by local ones. What solution does Rutherford think makes the issue go away? What would stop Reform or others continuing to cynically exploit it? On these questions, he is strangely silent.
Rutherford is no better when he’s trying to set out a positive policy agenda. He believes universities have expanded too much and wants many of them to close, or else to be “re-founded”. He is, of course, welcome to that belief, but in many towns across the country the university is one of the major employers – and is heavily tied in to other local businesses. The loss of universities would lead to dramatic collapses in local economies for which Labour would be blamed. How this is supposed to lead to a revival of either growth or Labour’s political fortunes is anyone’s guess.
Britain spent 14 years with a government that failed to deliver economic growth, and failed, if anything even more calamitously, at running public services. Nothing works and everything is expensive, and that is why most of us are sick of politics and sick of politicians. As the last government failed to deliver, it got ever-more focused on owning the libs – if it couldn’t make anything better, it did at least try to make sure those on the left were unhappiest of all.
Labour swept to a landslide majority last year because the public were comprehensively sick of that bullshit. The vote was a resounding “no” to the Conservative Party more than it was a “yes” to Labour – but it was a vote for growth, for fixing public services, and for making politics normal again.
Instead, Labour has been captured by a faction that seems determined to deliver the Conservative agenda, framed as a tactical approach to stop Reform. None of the strategists behind this approach seem to notice that it’s what the Conservatives were doing in power, nor that it’s what Labour has done for much of its first year.
Instead, they rail against an imaginary Labour agenda that doesn’t exist. Ed Miliband is mostly pushing for the government to boost investment in energy and jobs – yes, they happen to be green, but so is most new technology. This should be the easiest thing for them to embrace, but because they’re so ingrained in the culture wars they’ve decided it is their enemy.
Labour’s attempt to find a simple answer to asylum hotels is almost inevitably going to blow up in its face, to Reform’s benefit. Its efforts to take on Reform dead-on will do the same, alienating the party from its real 21st-century voting base all the while – and wedding it to a tired Blue Labour faction that is more a rag-tag collection of grievances than a coherent ideology.
Voters did not reject the Conservative Party to replace it with a tribute act. They will similarly not abandon Reform for Reform-lite. Labour needs to find its own tune and start dancing to that, and fast.
