Labour’s right wing takeover

Trying to end the practice of placing asylum seekers in hotels, exactly the kind of socially conservative Blue Labour-esque policy the government is embracing, is a great example of those unintended consequences. The reality of living in a Travelodge room for months on end is anything but glamorous or pleasurable. It is cramped. There are no cooking facilities. You are restricted in any number of ways – but to most of us, hotels feel glamorous. They feel like a treat, and they sound expensive.

The impression becomes even worse when people see hotels that used to be local landmarks filled with tourists, who spent money and created jobs, now filled with refugees. Asylum hotels attract political attention for reasons other than racism or xenophobia. So, the answer seemed simple: stop using them.

The problem is Labour didn’t seem to think before making this promise. Crucially, they didn’t consider why the last government started using hotels so widely in the first place – and a large part of that is because many areas of the UK are already facing acute housing shortages.

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There simply aren’t a whole bunch of places that are empty and ready to use as accommodation for asylum seekers. If there was an empty prison building, it would be getting used as a prison, given there is a desperate shortage of spaces in that system. There are no empty army bases with decent accommodation – instead, serving soldiers and their families are in horrendous, substandard housing. The last government was so desperate for alternatives to hotels that they considered clearly hopeless (and cruel) solutions like the Bibby Stockholm barge.

What does that leave? It leaves housing – and as there are no secret stocks of publicly-owned homes sitting in reserve, it leaves homes that are otherwise up for rent on the private market. In some areas, people trying to rent privately were already competing with their council for homes, as local authorities are also trying to rent private properties to house families in need.

Now, those private renters are having to compete with their local councils and with the Home Office or its subcontractors (often Serco). Under one scheme introduced under the last Conservative government but extended and expanded under Labour, private landlords are offered up to five years’ guaranteed rent, with all property management and repairs handled by Serco, with no fees – a spectacularly good deal. 

Even then, in some parts of the country, councils are in bidding wars with the Home Office, in what is proving an absolute bonanza for private landlords. But it is compounding the problems of the housing shortage both for councils trying to find homes, and for ordinary working families.

Housing and homeless charities are largely staffed by people like the readers of this newspaper (and the author of this article) – who would consider themselves nice, left-leaning liberals. 

Few feel comfortable saying that the housing crisis is about to get worse because Home Office policy means Brits are competing with asylum seekers for homes. But 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 an absolute 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 of 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 Blue Labour has never bothered itself with political skill. Its founder, Lord Glasman – a man who Ed Miliband must surely regret giving a peerage on a daily basis – has a bizarre set of policy prescriptions, including embracing Donald Trump’s “Bennite” tariffs plans, and a scheme for the UK to form a military alliance with Ukraine to sideline France and Germany in Europe.

Glasman is sufficiently bonkers that even the “post-liberals” and Blue Labour sympathisers tend to push him to the sidelines. But his spiritual successor Jonathan Rutherford is close to Number 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney.

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 omerta is gone: Channel 4, hardly a bastion of British Conservatism, did a huge documentary on it in recent weeks. It 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 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 an agenda 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 21^st 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.