'If I spend my life on the losing side, you can lay me down knowing that I tried' Grace Petrie
The Prime Minister Keir Starmer will announce that 'things will get worse before they get better' in his first keystone speech as Prime Minister this week. It's a stark contrast to the slogan 'Things can only get better' that Tony Blair was elected on in 1997, and whose campaign Keir Starmer and the current incarnation of the Labour Party seems to be most inspired by. (And, to be fair to Blair, a fair few things did get better for ordinary people in the pre-Iraq days, and I say that as someone who is no fan of Blairism).
The Government and the Prime Minister at the moment seem very keen to manage expectations. They say that things are far worse than they anticipated before the election, that the Tories have caused so much harm that it's going to take time to clear up. Personally, I'm quite sceptical about this. During the election campaign, the Institute for Fiscal Studies criticised both Labour and the Tories for what they called a 'conspiracy of silence' - essentially, that they'd been shady and unclear about exactly how they'd deal with the country's economic woes. This was then dismissed by Keir Starmer as 'defeatism'. I don't think the party can reasonably claim that it's only recently learned of information that has caused them to have to backtrack on things. I doubt they're telling the truth, but even if they are, it's not a very good look for a new Government to have not made themselves aware of these matters beforehand.
I want to talk about something else though, and that is the way that upon being elected to Government in coalition with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, the Conservative Party led by David Cameron portrayed a very similar narrative. We were repeatedly told of this note that had supposedly been left for them by the outgoing Labour Government that said, 'Good luck, there's no money left!' Whenever the Government was doing anything that was unpopular with the public, it was never done on moral principle. It was always because the previous Government did such an awful job that we simply have to save money, and there is no alternative. We were fed economic gibberish like 'Labour maxed out this country's credit card' to justify the necessity of policies that harmed the most vulnerable people in our society.
In reality, there's quite a lot wrong with this kind of message. To start with, there isn't a national credit card, so it can't be maxed out. The budget for a country is quite significantly different than a budget for a household, because the money you spend on a country will be replenished when people have more disposable income. It's a line that was invented to take advantage of the fact that most people haven't been taught how economics actually works. Secondly, it's untrue that any incoming Government doesn't know how bad (or otherwise) things are. Their entire job in opposition was to scrutinise the previous Government, establish what they were doing and what they themselves would do differently. Thirdly, there is no discernible difference between the modus operandi of either of the two main parties. Whichever one is in power at any one time always says that the previous Government did things badly - but the things they did that were bad are just being continued ad nauseam.
Think about that for a moment. In 2010, the Tory-Lib Dem coalition Government criticised Labour under Blair and Gordon Brown for mismanaging the country's finances, and announced that there'd have to be cuts to public services to make up for it. Now, the new Labour Government is criticising the previous Tory Government and their five Prime Ministers for exactly the same thing, and announcing there'll have to be cuts to things like winter fuel payments to make up for it. And if the Tories ever get back in, no doubt they'll accuse Labour of the same thing. And how will it need to be made up for? Almost certainly, by continuing to harm the most vulnerable, whilst the super-rich get progressively wealthier. This is always the solution, no matter who's in power - and the public finances never improve for the ordinary, because the system just does not work.
There's a reason why the actions of successive Governments always have this justification. The reason is that if politicians told the truth - that they are ideologically opposed to social progress and equality for all - there is no way that ordinary people would put up with it. The only way to justify the unjustifiable is to say, 'We had to do it! The other guys left us with no choice!' And note that it's very rare that the exact logic here is explained - precisely how the previous Government got it wrong, and precisely how the course of action being taken now is going to deal with that problem. Politicians are generally pretty vague when challenged on that, and they take advantage of the fact that political education in the UK is sorely lacking to get away with it. Still, it doesn't work forever. Eventually the people get fed up with hearing excuse after excuse, and are ready to vote them out. And when that happens, the other party is always there to present itself as a sensible option who's ready to resolve all the problems (well, almost ready. They will be ready after a few years, when they've made a few more cuts that the other guys forced them to do) and the whole ghastly cycle starts over again. There's never a point when the crisis is over and we can get on with our lives. The crisis is permanent. That's how the system operates.
The thing that I'm the most sick of in politics, especially politics that pretends to be progressive, is the constant helplessness. Everything about politicians is utterly helpless. Ask a politician for anything, anything at all, that would benefit your life, and 99% of the time the response you will get is something along the lines of, 'We'd love to be able to do this, we hope to be able to do this in the future, we're going to work towards doing this, but we can't do it right now because of xyz.' I've written multiple times on this blog about mine and my partner Owen's work towards re-opening Tudor Street Day Centre in Abergavenny, a former hub for vulnerable adults which was closed down during the 2020 lockdown. It was in late 2022 that it was announced that the building would be demolished, and we've been campaigning to reverse this decision and re-open it ever since. The campaign has become extremely well-known and popular in the local area, and Owen stood as a Parliamentary candidate for Monmouthshire on this platform at the 2024 General Election. Recently, we received the very welcome news that the campaign has been successful, and that Tudor Street Day Centre will re-open its doors later this year.
Make no mistake, the reasons why the building is re-opening are as follows:
1) Because the campaign became very well-known and popular locally
2) Because my partner's decision to stand for Parliament made this an election issue, raised at every hustings
3) Because the local community group The Gathering, which is run by volunteers, created a convincing pitch on exactly how the service could be run going into the future
You might notice that none of these things have very much to do with politicians' imagination or creativity. This is because they don't. For the last few years, we've been given excuse after excuse from politicians, of all parties, for not re-opening this building. We've been told everything - the money doesn't exist, they need that space to house the homeless, none of the vulnerable adults who used the building want it anymore, the building has fallen into disrepair and will need far too much maintenance for it to be worth the energy - and none of it was true. All of this came from the inclination almost all politicians have to make excuses for not doing things rather than finding ways in which they can, and the only reason it's changed now is because ordinary people have made it too embarrassing for them to carry on pretending. We only found out a few weeks ago that the campaign has been successful, and we're hoping the building will be re-opened within the next month. So in reality, it hasn't taken very long to organise. It really hits home what could have been done years ago, had the politicians involved not wasted time with ineffectual excuses.
In our society, we've become so accustomed to this kind of political helplessness that you even see non-politicians engaging in it. This was incredibly evident as the partner of an independent election candidate - Owen and I had even close friends say to me, 'You won't win' upon learning what we were doing, and I really didn't think that was the most helpful comment, and I still don't. I saw quite an interesting forum discussion recently about Shockat Adam, the independent candidate who unseated Labour's Jon Ashworth in the constituency of Leicester South on a pro-Palestine stance. I was quite taken aback by the number of people who were quite scathing about this new independent MP and the fact that his constituents chose him over an experienced Labour Party candidate. The suggestion from a lot of people was, 'Well, what will he do about Palestine? We have very little control over the Israelis.' And whether that's true or not really depends on how you look at it, and in what respect we're talking about 'we' (as an entire Government, I think we could do something about Israel if we actually decided to, but admittedly an independent MP may struggle). But I think a question of more importance is, if the situation in Gaza is the most important thing to you, why shouldn't you vote out a representative of a party that isn't taking a strong stand against Israel? Why should you give the benefit of the doubt to someone like that? If we've got at least the pretence of a democracy, doesn't that mean your vote should actually be trying to achieve something?
I cannot exaggerate enough how capable human beings are when they put their minds to something. It's quite common to look at humans for their flaws rather than their strengths, and given how much we've damaged the planet it's understandable to do that, but I think we're capable of pretty great things as well. We're an exceptionally creative and social species. We've invented astonishing amounts of technology. We've learned insanely sophisticated things about human psychology and philosophy. We've even put people on the fucking moon. We've achieved so much in the few thousand years we've been on this planet of ours, and none of it was done by making excuses. The resources exist to do absolutely anything we set our minds to, if we allow ourselves. But if we're going to do that, we have to let go of this tendency we have to just be utterly helpless, act as if history is over and that because of the actions of other people, the current status quo is the only way things are ever going to be from now on.
It doesn't have to be like this. We can come together and change systems in a single day if we decide to. We do not exist to find reasons not to do things, and politicians are certainly not elected for that.
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