In devising policy, the important thing is to communicate winning vibes rather than potentially angular policy pledges you can be held to account for.
If in doubt, just keep saying “change” and trust that the impatience of the electorate, the alienating qualities of your opponents, and the boredom of the press will be sufficient to evict them from power. Once you’ve got your paws on government, that’s your moment to begin defining yourself.
Having pledged nothing, nobody can credibly accuse you of betraying them. If you need to retreat from a position a section of your supporters convinced themselves you actually held, blame unforeseen circumstances, fortune, the Russians, the Bank of England, or the Tories and chalk it all up as a regrettable necessity.
Betraying your base is evidence that you have your eye fixed on higher things. Betrayal is necessary. Betrayal is the nobler thing to do. It is at this stage in the peroration, you should begin to hear stirring strains of Land Of Hope And Glory, if the performance is going well. If not, audience heckling and disgust may ensue.
The current Labour Government is a curious mix of this philosophy – combined with compulsive pledge-breaking.
Presumably to keep their spirits up during the General Election, a remarkable number of people persuaded themselves that the incoming Labour Government was lying to them about its fiscal plans, and that Labour really had a secret blueprint to tack left once the grubby business of navigating the party past the public and Britain’s feral media had come off successfully.
Labour’s decision to cut the winter fuel payment – revealed as one of the earliest innovations of the new Government – will continue to hang around the neck of this administration like a waterlogged albatross because it was one of the first things any of us found out about the new regime’s priorities.
In their innocence, people will tend to assume the things you decide to prioritise are your priorities. If you begin to define yourself like this, people will take you as they find you.
They say it is never too early to make a first impression, and Starmer and his colleagues decided to introduce their new government by doubling down on the two-child benefit cap, emptying pensioners’ winter fuel tanks during a cost of living crisis, and spending the better part of three weeks discussing the properties of millionaire political donors buying senior ministers designer glasses and couture togs so they look the part as they explain why their decisions are deeply regrettable.
Like the Waspi women, there are arguments you can make about the fairness of Labour’s winter fuel policy. Universalism might save you on bureaucracy and reduce the risk of deserving cases missing out on their entitlements, but it also allocates resources to people who already have plenty.
You can question the distributive justice implication of allocating cash, untaxed, to some wealthy, older people who use this energy dividend to top up their wine cellars rather than to stave off cold and damp. But like the Waspi women campaign, you didn’t hear these arguments on Labour politicians’ lips during the election campaign. It isn’t so much the change of policy as the presentational shift which is so jarring.
It isn’t all that complicated. If you think the Waspi women have an invalid cause and ought to have known about the pension changes which impacted upon them, then maybe you shouldn’t have sought their support, endorsed their aims or got photographs taken standing in solidarity with them. People will tend to interpret this kind of behaviour as signifying sympathy with their campaign.
When your leader describes what happened to them as a “manifest injustice” one minute, pledging to “do something about it” if elected, and then decides the injustice isn’t so manifest at all, and nothing must be done – then someone’s been royally kippered.
Campaigners you used to greet warmly will be understandably baffled and affronted when you smugly remind them “there was nothing in the manifesto about it” and begin vigorously briefing the media that the women you and countless other Labour politicians chose to take selfies with are just daft old biddies whose financial illiteracy and ignorance of public affairs screwed up their own lives, who like many entitled boomers before them are trying to push the costs of their stupidity on to the next generation by extracting large sums of money to compensate them for the hardship of knocking off work in their 50s.
If the emotional keynote you’re aiming for is “more in sorrow than in anger” after disappointing your former comrades, if you want the public to buy the explanation that the piggy bank is empty and compensating these people to any extent can’t be a priority – perhaps do less chuckling up your sleeve about how credulous people are, how political pandering is a necessity in opposition, and how cunning it was for you to exclude support for Waspi women from your manifesto so you’d have a good debating point when the time came to screw them over.
This isn’t the gotcha argument some Labour supporters now seem to think it is. Most people aren’t so legalistic.
They don’t look at a grinning MP’s photograph and a brandished banner and think, “I’d better look into the full terms and conditions Labour is attaching to these displays of solidarity before I take them as a sign of goodwill and political support”.
Politics doesn’t operate on the basis of finding technical loopholes in the social contracts parties are seen to make with the people they ask to support them. To think this could work otherwise for the party is beyond political naïveté.
To be a modern politician is to make pledges and break them, I suppose. Pick your partisan poison, and you’ll be able to dig up governments of every political stripe which have reneged on some of the solemn commitments which helped get them elected.
But sometimes, broken promises extract a lasting political cost and come to define your government’s whole ethos.
(Image: Jonathan Brady/PA)
To follow Sir Keir Starmer’s (above) comparatively short political career is like a paperchase – the Prime Minister is constantly kicking up torn-up pledges in his wake, first to the Labour Party, then in advance of the election, now in government.
Starmer seems strangely relaxed about the political consequences of this behaviour for his own standing with the public, but also his government’s, and the collateral harm now weekly being done to Scottish Labour’s chances of displacing the SNP in Holyrood in 2026.
For UK Labour, the logic seems to be – get the pain out of the way now. Take every unpopular decision you can. Burn through all your political capital – and hope the punters are forgetful, forgiving, and give you credit for all your “tough choices” in four years’ time.
But as 2024 crumbles to its conclusion, you can understand why many of the Prime Minister’s supporters are contemplating the polls and asking themselves: “Where is the politics, Keir? Where’s the emotional intelligence?”