Sir Keir Starmer’s victory on Tuesday in a Commons vote to cut winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners was a pyrrhic one. The British prime minister defeated his internal critics – at a price. It turns out that many Labour MPs have an issue with depriving pensioners who struggle to pay their energy bills of help worth up to £300. More than 50 current and suspended Labour MPs did not vote with the government. One veteran leftwinger, Jon Trickett, a former aide to Gordon Brown, voted against it. Some ministers were permitted to stay away. But scores of Labour parliamentarians – from all wings of the party – conspicuously refused to back their government.
Sir Keir should take the win and let the matter rest there. Enough voices have been suppressed in the party that they have long supported. Ministers have much bigger problems to deal with than principled dissent, and it is there that the government’s attention should be directed. Sir Keir’s party ought to be basking in the afterglow of its sweeping electoral victory in July, which ended 14 years of Conservative rule. Instead, he is having to clean up after his vanquished opponents. The Tories governed like characters in The Great Gatsby, smashing up things only to retreat into their “vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess they had made”.
In the rush to patch and mend over the summer, Sir Keir and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, blundered with a benefit cut that made them appear to have instincts at odds with the values of their base and much of the electorate. Whether this government has inherited the worst economic and fiscal conditions since the war is a matter of dispute. Clearly the Conservatives left the NHS and other essential public services in crisis, with anaemic economic growth and the tax burden at a post-second world war high. The country is crying out for change. Sir Keir should emphasise that his government is making the right choices, not just tough choices.
Before the current row over benefits, the chancellor had been signalling – in an encouraging way – that she would take a very different approach to spending than her predecessor. Ms Reeves indicated last month that she may amend the government’s debt rule, allowing her to “borrow to invest” up to £20bn more each year. Sir Keir told trade union delegates at the TUC conference that he wanted to “rewrite the rules” of the economy to fix the crisis he had inherited and fulfil his manifesto pledge to “secure the highest sustained growth in the G7”.
Yet voters to a great extent see “the economy” through the lenses of their personal experiences. The slow recovery from 2008 and the perceptions of pro-growth policies unfairly hitting ordinary households while boosting the rich have fractured the connection between headline data and everyday lives in many communities. That is why cuts cause such anguish for Labour.
It falls on Sir Keir’s government to invest effectively in the population’s welfare and to manage the risks from an over-reliance on market mechanisms. Health and education is a starting point for economic improvement. Cutting entitlements and public service spending when Britain has a growing and ageing population will produce a state focused on reducing fiscal deficits, instead of what’s needed: an “investment state” in which generous social spending is balanced with higher taxes on the wealthy.