The forecast for London on Tuesday promises late summer sunshine and a gentle breeze. Perfect weather to sit in the Downing Street rose garden and hear dire warnings of a long hard winter ahead.
Keir Starmer will be host and weatherman for the occasion. Though his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has done much of the prep work, this is the prime minister’s show, his first major speech since winning power in July.
Among those joining the media to hear what he has to say will be selected members of the public, making this a sort of “people’s garden party/press conference”. If nothing else it is an interesting experiment. The last time the media took their work outside like pupils at the end of term, Dominic Cummings was playing headmaster, furiously telling everyone off for questioning his trip to Barnard Castle during lockdown.
I expect the furniture at tomorrow’s event will be a shift up from Dom’s shaky pasting table. Only a formal Downing Street podium will do for the sombre message on the way. One Sunday paper summarised it thus: “Things can only get worse”. Yes, as if hard times are not bad enough, that flaming song is going to be worming its way into your brain again.
The prime minister is expected to say that things are “worse than we ever imagined”. Worse, even, than Rachel Reeves’ £22 billion black hole. It was already going to be tough to fill that gap, but now more serious problems have come to light, according to the prime minister.
“When there is rot deep in the heart of a structure, you can't just cover it up,” Keir the builder will say. “You can't tinker with it or rely on quick fixes. You have to overhaul the entire thing. Tackle it at the root. Even if it is harder work and takes more time. Because otherwise what happens? The rot returns. In all the same places, and it spreads.”
Whether he will be sucking his teeth and shaking his head at this point we shall have to wait and see. The gloomy message is clear enough: things will get worse before they get better.
Starmer’s government is hardly the first to downplay expectations on taking office, but this doom-mongering from Labour is beginning to get out of hand. Attlee was not a fraction as pessimistic and he had a war to pay for and a welfare state to build.
Attlee adopted an attitude of pragmatic optimism because that is what was required at the time. People had to believe there was a plan, and that it would work. So far, Starmer is unconvincing on both counts. He can wield the stick, but where are the carrots?
Indeed, he is so drawn to gloom he is doubling down on it. Tomorrow he will warn of a “societal black hole” to go with the economic one. A 2-for-1 offer on despondency if you please.
His evidence for the societal black hole includes the recent riots, though they were confined to English cities and Belfast. Scotland and Wales presumably don’t have to worry about societal black holes, just the economic one, though that is bad enough.
The rose garden speech comes a week before parliaments return. It has been a strange summer, and not much of a break on the whole. Time has been spent dealing with riots or, as in Scotland, working to ensure they did not happen here.
MPs, and to a lesser extent MSPs, did not have the kind of break needed to recover from a long parliamentary term and a drawn-out general election. The prime minister cancelled his holiday due to the riots, and there is no time left to cram in a decent break before recess is over. Always assuming he wants to, of course. A large part of the Starmer makeup is his solemnity. To his credit he is the opposite of an "unserious man”, as Kamala Harris called Donald Trump.
If politicians are not feeling the benefits of a summer break they will at least be in tune with the public. Yes, the weather has been rotten and the riots shocking, but there is more to the general mood than that.
Labour worked hard during the election not to over-promise. But when your campaign is built on the promise of change voters naturally expect something to happen. Labour has acted, but not in a way that was expected.
It is beyond belief that one of the first moves of any government, far less a Labour administration, should be to means test winter fuel payments for pensioners. That was not in the manifesto. The ten million pensioners now set to lose the payment would certainly have had something to say if it had been. Imagine the impact on the result.
There is still time for a rethink, even more so now that bills are set to rise. Yet Downing Street is showing no signs of changing its mind. If anything, scrapping the payments now seems to have been part of the plan from the off. Is this an “easy” way for Labour to demonstrate its toughness, its economic machismo? But who is the intended audience here?
In Scotland the policy has gone down badly for obvious reasons. We don’t get much garden party weather up here. It may amaze Downing Street to learn that in some Scottish households the heating has been on all summer.
The government does have a choice here, just as it does over the two-child benefit cap, but it is backing the wrong option. And what does the party’s Scottish leader have to say about it? For Anas Sarwar to be ineffectual on one policy, the two-child benefits cap, is unfortunate. Two policies begins to look like hard-wired incompetence.
When he stood outside Number Ten in July, the prime minister promised an end to the “era of noisy performance”. But it is hard to see Tuesday’s speech as anything other than a show with little meaning, except to frighten those already feeling the chill wind of Labour “change”.
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