The Blunders Are All On The Board

Aditya Chakrabortty writes:

When writing profiles on Rachel Reeves, eight out of 10 journalists like to record her past as a chess champion, largely as a pretext for chuckling through metaphors about gambits and defensive positions.

Never in danger of prodigy status, these days I skulk on a chess app, slugging it out with other amateur thugs. But as Reeves and Keir Starmer settle into Downing Street, one of the game’s sayings returns to my mind. It’s from the Polish grandmaster and wit Savielly Tartakower, who observed: “The blunders are all on the board, waiting to be made.”

The blunder is a huge, match-losing error, which only becomes obvious in hindsight. Tartakower is saying that however good either player is, the board will confer a defeat. You can take his point further: loss may not come from that rash exchange, but the foolproof strategy you swore would win. That lesson is one that Labour’s leaders should bear in mind.

Starmer and Reeves don’t do surprises. Deliberative as any club player, they make a plan and stick to it for as long as is tenable. That way, they present the tiniest of targets for opponents and the press.

Over the previous five years, No 10 served sketch writers and columnists a sumptuous feast: a malfunctioning droid (Theresa May), the blond Nero (Boris Johnson) and ChatGPT Thatcher (you know). Now the pack tails this prime minister from Westminster to Berlin to Paris, eager for slips and scandals. Pickings are so thin that not one, but two of the Mail’s star writers grouse that their man is an “undertaker”.

Yet the blunders are all on the board. One theory about the general election is that it was a verdict on the party of wine-time Fridays and gold wallpaper. Britons were sick of being led by donkeys in blue rosettes, runs the story, so they shooed them out. Some around Starmer believe this, and by making this week’s speech in the Downing Street rose garden, the prime minister reminded us that it was the setting for Johnson’s lockdown-busting bacchanalia – of which he was the sober opposite.

But election polling reliably showed that the public’s biggest worry was the economy. As I wrote at the campaign’s launch, Rishi Sunak’s humiliation was already as good as sealed by two factors. First, the last parliament was, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies judged, the worst for living standards for which there are comparable records. Rocketing fuel bills, soaring food prices, medicine shortages – voters don’t forget such things, and in July they did not forgive. Second, with hospitals and schools at breaking point, the tax burden hit a 70-year high. The electorate is paying more for less.

Game over. These are the 10-ton facts of British government after the pandemic, after the banking crash, now the era of free money and cheap energy is over – and on those, Starmer is barely different from Sunak. Labour committed itself to plans that imply spending cuts of about £20bn every year – beyond the £22bn of savings for which Reeves has spent this summer scratching around.

This was no oversight, no unforced error: it was core to Starmer’s plan for winning, by robbing critics of their chance to snipe about a “debt bombshell” and the like. A great election strategy, a dire platform for government. The blunders are all on the board.

The most important political moment for this winter did not come from Starmer. It wasn’t in a speech, or a treaty. It was the announcement from the energy regulator that gas and electricity prices will go up by 10% from the start of October, taking the average annual bill to more than £1,700. While fuel bills are nowhere near the peak they hit in the winter of 2022-23, they remain far above the levels that we were used to. As Katie Schmuecker of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says, for lower income households, this is “an unrelenting cost of living crisis”.

As the country learned last time, higher energy prices blow out nearly everything else, from grocery bills to school budgets. The big difference is that today, there is far less state support. No Tory cost of living payments to people on benefits, worth £900 a year. A much-reduced winter fuel allowance for pensioners. Reeves may well resurrect the household support fund of small handouts for the worst hit, but that is a cocktail umbrella in a gale.

Cast your mind forward to this winter. The bills are hitting the mat, and taxes are going up. This week, Starmer called these “the big asks … short-term pain for long-term good”. But there have been years of supposedly short-term pain. Over 4m low-income households are already in arrears on at least one bill or debt, while the number of poor households going without food, heating or toiletries hasn’t dipped below 7m in two years.

The NHS in England needs an extra £38bn a year to cut backlogs. Seven years after Grenfell prompted all manner of promises about ending the scandal of dodgy cladding, a tower block on the other side of London erupted in flames. After Covid, after double-digit inflation, after austerity, millions of families and whole swaths of our public services are exhausted.

This picture is clear in the statistics and from wandering down the dilapidated high streets of much of Britain, including those towns that saw racist pogroms earlier this month. Yet it barely registers in Westminster discourse. Instead, the newspapers truffle out tasty morsels about Morgan McSweeney v Sue Gray – office politics instead of actual politics, debates about desks rather than social housing.

Commentators ask for Starmer’s vision, without interrogating his actual promises. Take Labour’s pledge to achieve “the highest sustained growth” of all the G7 richest countries – a feat not in any government’s gift. How would Starmer do that, by locking up Kamala Harris and Emmanuel Macron?

The great fight of this parliament won’t be over blueprints or programmes. It will simply be about the degree to which a Labour government is able to show that it can protect its society from a new era of economic instability, while repairing the vast damage done by years of spending cuts and pushing teachers, nurses and other public servants to the very limit. On all this, the very compromises Starmer made to get into power will limit his ability to do much with that power.

The blunders are all on the board, waiting to be made.

And Owen Jones writes:

Let’s call it the Boris Johnson test. When our rightly disgraced former prime minister was collecting numerous freebies at a time of acute social crisis, were you outraged?

It’s only eight weeks into Keir Starmer’s administration, but he has made clear how he intends to rule. The refusal to scrap George Osborne’s two-child benefit limit imposes poverty on 250,000 children, and drives 850,000 kids further into hardship and squalor. Labour’s decision to radically restrict winter fuel payments in England and Wales, meanwhile, will withdraw support from 800,000 impoverished older people who are eligible for pension credit but don’t receive it – an inevitable evil generated by means testing – as well as another 1 million pensioners just above the breadline.

These are choices Labour has made in power. Meanwhile, there has been no talk of meaningful taxes on the mega-rich to raise revenue and ensure security for all citizens from cradle to grave (the richest 350 British households have a combined wealth of £795bn: bigger than Poland’s annual economy). Then there are the choices that cast Starmer’s own behaviour in an unflattering light, as he inherits a country that has suffered an unprecedented squeeze in living standards.

Here is a man who has clearly long had a taste for comfort: when he was director of prosecutions, taxpayers reportedly coughed up nearly £250,000 for his travel costs, including first-class flights and a chauffeur-driven car. Apparently he deemed the latter a requirement, even though he lived just five or so miles from the Crown Prosecution Service offices, which were easily accessible through a direct tube journey. Notably, he claimed nearly three times more expenses than his successor, who had the job for the same amount of time.

Look at this behaviour as Labour leader, and something of a pattern emerges. By last summer, Starmer had accepted more freebies than all Labour leaders since 1997 combined. As analysis by openDemocracy uncovered, that included multiple gifts from wealthy donors and companies, days at the races, an Adele gig, two Coldplay concerts and hospitality at Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur matches.

In total, he received £76,000 worth of freebies in the last parliament. These ranged from hotel stays to more than 20 football tickets (bear in mind that, as leader of the opposition, his £128,291 annual salary hardly left him wanting). Throw in VIP tickets courtesy of the Premier League to see Taylor Swift, worth £4,000, during the general election campaign and, well, you get the gist.

Notably, Starmer also received “work clothing” worth an astonishing £16,200, and “multiple pairs of glasses” worth £2,485 from the Labour lord and businessperson Waheed Alli. This is the Labour donor who has since been embroiled in a cronyism row after being granted a pass to No 10. Again, apply the Boris Johnson test: would you be perfectly comfortable with a wealthy Tory donor being granted access to the heart of power after showering our ex-PM with expensive suits?

This matters. A love of the finer things and a willingness to accept generosity from the well-to-do helps bind politicians to the interests of the rich. You inevitably feel gratitude towards those doling out gifts, and you spend time in the company of those with thriving bank balances living the high life.

All of this cements a sense of class solidarity. When Labour scrapped the Tories’ VIP helicopter contract, they said it represented a past government that was “totally out of touch with the problems facing the rest of the country”. Does the same apply to the current prime minister or not?

As it is, Starmer is the most unpopular leader of the opposition to be elected prime minister since party leader ratings began in 1977. His ratings are dropping like a stone: one poll shows him on minus 16, down 27 points from where it was last month.

The looming attack on pensioners’ entitlements and accusations of cronyism after the appointment of multiple loyalists to civil service posts have not, to say the least, gone down well. What happens when energy bills surge, winter bites, and projected cuts hammer already ravaged government departments?

Starmer’s speech promising misery now for long-term gain is merely a less optimistic riff on David Cameron’s opening statement as prime minister in 2010. The lack of a vision for a crisis-ridden nation becomes ever more apparent to the public.

Everyone now agrees that the warning signs with Johnson were there from the start. That Starmer self-evidently craves the lifestyle of the jet-setting rich, while imposing destitution on children and pensioners alike, well, the evidence is glaringly apparent. And an already unsympathetic public is going to notice it.