Sir Keir Starmer wants the country to know that he’s not afraid to make “tough” choices. He is ready to make them on tax rises and spending priorities, in order to remain fiscally credible. He is prepared to keep the two-child benefit cap in place, instead prioritising tackling the NHS waiting list.
The bad news for Starmer is that, on a difficulty scale of “tough” choices, these probably rank around level one.
That is not to say these policies will not have painful consequences: whenever the Government funnels money from one group to another, there will be losers as well as winners.
But this is an exercise in ensuring the numbers add up. If you accept you cannot spend and borrow without limit (as the Labour Party has), it follows that, at some point, people will have to be told “no”.
But what about the decisions that have to be made when the Government isn’t calling all the shots? When there are other actors involved and they are not cooperating? How does Starmer handle level two and above?
This thought struck me as he and Rishi Sunak slugged it out in the last head-to-head debate on BBC One this week. I would not have expected Starmer’s strongest moment to come on Brexit (given how much his campaign has tried to avoid the B-word altogether, I assume he wasn’t expecting this either), but it did.
Starmer rejected what he called Sunak’s “defeatist” attitude towards renegotiation. “I do not accept that we can’t get a better deal than the one that we’ve got,” he insisted, as Sunak kept trying to explain – over and over again – that the European Union would not opt for a more generous deal unless immigration was put back on the table.
Starmer ruled out a more flexible immigration system with the bloc, while also proclaiming he’s “going to go back into the EU ... to fight for a better deal so you can trade more easily”. The audience roared.
Is a can-do attitude really going to lead Brussels to open its doors to the single market and expect nothing in return? Is a cheery demeanor really going to allow the UK to take all the benefits of EU membership, no quid pro quo needed?
I suspect Sunak is right about immigration: Europe, after all, is coming under similar pressure on this issue as Westminster. And the bloc considers access to the single market as the utmost privilege: you only get it if you follow their rules to a tee.
Boris Johnson certainly showed up in Brussels with a bigger smile on his face than his predecessor, but he also compromised an awful lot, including giving up seamless trade within the UK. What will Starmer do once the costs of closer ties become clear?
This is a “tough decision” – the kind that requires statesmanship, negotiation and potentially political risk. Pick the wrong fight, make the wrong offer, and you may not come out on top. Just ask Theresa May.
Then there are the decisions that must be made much closer to home. This week’s junior doctors’ strike is the 11th to take place in 20 months. The walkout is once again, according to NHS England, creating “widespread disruption to care”.
The strike is the BMA’s final blow to the outgoing Conservative Party. But it is also a warning shot at the Labour Party, which the union assumes it will be negotiating with imminently.
This is not easy terrain for Starmer to navigate. On the one hand, he has wanted to appear tough in his refusal to capitulate to the BMA’s 35pc pay demands. But what happens if (or when) strikes continue? The BMA may have no love for the Tory party – but this dispute has always been about pay.
In contrast to his well-delivered comments on Brexit, some of the Labour leader’s worst debate moments during this campaign have occurred when pushed on the junior doctors’ strike. The promise to get around the table and negotiate hasn’t cut through, not least because the public understands the Tories have already attempted this.
Sunak failed, in part, to make more progress on the NHS waiting list because of these debilitating strikes. Starmer may be willing to divert the money and the resources to tackling the wait list, but if the doctors don’t play ball, he’s going to struggle as well to make good on his own promise.
At the root of all these issues are genuine tough choices. If you want closer trade ties with the EU, you are going to have to accept its basic terms for getting access to their market. If you want to improve the NHS while keeping the public finances in order, you are going to frustrate the doctors’ unions.
Labour seems to have accepted that not every area of public spending can get a boost; yet it’s not just a question of sums but effectiveness. If you want to improve productivity and growth you are going to have to let down some of your own stakeholders, including those in the public sector.
Starmer surely knows all this but to talk about the really grim decisions ahead is not a vote-winner. So less than a week from the election, the British public remain in the dark about the changes, and priorities, of an incoming Labour government.
New management may end the chaos – at least, of the kind we’ve endured these past few years. But we know far too little about Labour’s plans for stability alone to inspire much confidence.
Kate Andrews is economics editor at The Spectator
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