Has Labour got a radical economic programme, on a par with 1945 or 1964? Has it stealthily snuck this past a hostile electorate? If you glanced at coverage of last week’s “historic” budget, you could be forgiven for thinking it had. At the election, the party promised minor increases in tax and spending, and now it is proposing major increases in borrowing, taxing and spending. But while this might seem like a screeching U-turn, it is nothing of the sort. Far from being radical, Labour’s programme shows deep continuities with failed Tory ideas and policies that do not meet the requirements of the hour, let alone offer any hope for the sort of transformation Labour once provided.
Public spending was planned to fall so catastrophically over the next few years that Labour had little choice but to increase it. Had they still been in power, the Tories would have been faced with the same necessity. That’s because the scale of public spending in Britain is determined mainly by the need to provide a health service, pensions and benefits (the last on a bare-minimum level, by political choice). Imagine, for a moment, what might have happened if Labour hadn’t committed to raising spending: we would have seen increasing NHS waiting lists, schools with fewer teachers, and public investment falling to only 1.7% of GDP. An already dysfunctional state would not see supposed productivity gains, but would instead cease functioning.
There are political choices to be made about the economy, and Labour has so far made Tory choices. The government has cut the winter fuel allowance (effectively a cut to the universal state pension), maintained the cruel two-child limit, and raised the cost of many bus fares while continuing to cut taxes on motoring. And Starmer’s Labour has not chosen to restore public services to where New Labour left them in 2010; tellingly, it will spend £1.2bn on new prison places in 2025 and 2026, compared with £1.4bn on school buildings. The bigger choices are in how to fund this spending. Faced with a collapsing Conservative party, Labour had a rare opportunity to create a fairer and more progressive tax system. But it ruled out increasing income tax, the major progressive tax, and barely exploited the redistributive opportunities offered by increasing capital gains and inheritance taxes.
Employers and workers have been hit hard, while rentiers have been hit hardly at all. That is the main story from Labour’s economic programme so far. Why else would it choose to raise employers’ national insurance contributions, which is an indirect tax on working people and wages, unlike VAT or income tax? True, there is a possible positive reading of the NIC increase, together with the increased minimum wage, insofar as it rightly forces business to pay more for the cheapest labour. But Labour could have increased tax on business profits through corporation tax. It chose not to.
In an article in the Financial Times, Keir Starmer gave a clear insight into how Labour views its economic programme. He stressed that the party was about growth, not tax and spend: it was the party of business, reform, modern supply-side policies, of world-leading innovation, entrepreneurship, risk-taking and artificial intelligence. And the key policy? Financial stability and getting rid of “overweening regulators and a dysfunctional planning regime”; “[rooting] out the bureaucracy that stifles growth” to attract foreign investment to this liberalised nirvana. Labour’s overarching story is about making the country more attractive to foreign investors.
Indeed, Labour’s basic growth policy is much the same as the Tory policy of the last 40 years: liberalise, encourage foreign investment, support innovation, invest in some infrastructure and now make Brexit work. The national wealth fund, which “will mobilise billions of pounds of investment into the UK’s world-leading and clean energy and growth industries”, is a renamed and modestly expanded version of the Conservatives’ UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB). The UKIB plan for massive support for carbon capture and storage, which directly benefits oil and gas companies, was not only continued but trumpeted as a major feature of Labour’s investment programme. Labour will also continue to subsidise North Sea oil and gas investment. The party hates Tories, but it seems to love Tory panaceas.
There is a bigger history here that Labour is choosing to ignore. The party once offered an alternative political-economic policy that shaped modern Britain. It was never, contrary to Labour myth, a party just of welfare or of growth, much less of tax and spend. It was dedicated to transforming the economy and society, and of increasing equality. There is no going back to Labour’s programmes of the years 1945-1974, which were adapted to a largely industrial economy already growing very fast. Things have changed, not least in that the UK economy is no longer a major player, and above all because we are in a new world in which we cannot drive economies by burning carbon.
Today, our aim should not be growth, but rather more equality, more effective decarbonisation, better public health and more efficient use of all our resources. And the truth is that we don’t need growth for more equality (we were more equal when we were poorer, for example in the 1970s), or for more efficiency (defined as the minimisation of inputs or costs), or efficacy (the effectiveness of an action). It should once again be a central claim of progressive politics that equality, efficacy and efficiency march together, rather than being in conflict. For example, more equality means better health and less health spending. In recent decades we have seen increasing inequality, decreasing efficacy and slowly increasing efficiency – a bad combination if ever there was one.
We now need change rather than growth. Some things should grow, while others should shrink, such as oil production and aviation. We need innovation, but creative imitation more. We need some investments, but not those that will make us less equal and less decarbonised. We need state investment, but we need to stop corporate losers lobbying governments to invest in carbon capture and storage, HS2 and overpriced nuclear power. We do not need “investable” water services, but rather decent water supplies. We should stop thinking of business as being all about entrepreneurship and “wealth creation”, given that many are neither entrepreneurial nor creating shared wealth.
If we want a more equal, more effective, more efficient and happier Britain, we can have it – even with no growth or lower GDP. But we need to want it, and to have a party that is committed to achieving this and fighting those who stand in its way. Most importantly, any form of national renewal needs new thinking, not doubling down on the failed nostrums of the last 40 years.
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David Edgerton is Hans Rausing professor of the history of science and technology, professor of modern British history at King’s College London, and the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation