Don’t disturb Labour: they are very, very busy…
The first few days of the Labour government have been a flurry, with everyone desperately keen to GET ON WITH THINGS. The carefully cultivated message is that change starts now and now was five minutes ago.
Wes Streeting — one of the brightest and most promising members of the new Cabinet — was first off the blocks with his calls to the striking junior doctors and his meeting to renegotiate the dental contract. He even managed to get himself an appointment with a GP surgery, which seems to be somewhat easier if it’s for a photo opportunity than for a medical condition. But good for him. Everyone knows how urgently we need reform.
His decision to describe the NHS as ‘broken’ — and make this official government policy — seems like a very weird hostage to fortune though. At what point exactly will Labour be able to declare the £190bn monolith ‘fixed’? I suspect, by the time of the next election, we’ll be told the patient is on the way to recovery. Although in true NHS style, we’ll probably be left with little idea of when they’re going to be coming home.
Meanwhile, the Iron Chancellor Rachel Reeves lays the foundations for growth with promises of planning deregulation, Foreign Secretary David Lammy jets off to various capitals and the Defence Secretary John Healey meets up with President Zelenskyy in Odesa.
At so many levels, the desire to get things done and deliver some positive change is a breath of fresh air. The previous Tory administration under Sunak was treading water while indulging in infighting and badmouthing Labour.
They had a plan to talk about having a plan.
Labour, on the other hand, is serious about achieving something — for the sake of both the country and its own long-term survival in the wake of an election which produced the lowest share of the vote for a governing party in modern history.
The message that we all need to be DOING something was clearly sent out to all the new MPs, who busily posted on X about their train journeys to Westminster or posed by the steps of Westminster Hall. The overall vibe was of excitable young wizards on their way to Hogwarts for the first time, having received their letter of invitation, which many of them proudly clutched. (I’m only jealous, as I stood twice for Parliament and never got a letter. Bloody voters, eh?)
Apparently, as an MP, you get some kind of ‘induction’, even though you’re technically not anyone’s employee and have a weird semi-detached, self-employed kind of status. Presumably you get shown where the toilets are and are taken to the kind of office that a member of the US Congress would use to store their shoes. I am guessing that six months in, HR will organise a team-building day where people construct rafts and compete to see who can cross the Thames the quickest.
Joking apart, Labour has some very talented and experienced newcomers to Parliament, as well as some very young politicians, which is entirely healthy in a society that has been for so long skewed towards the over 80s and their quintruple lock plus. Let’s hope this does shift the dial on major social issues such as the lack of housing availability and affordability.
The youngsters will look for inspiration to the busiest bee and the eagerest beaver of them all, Sir Keir Starmer, who will — at the end of this term — actually be the oldest Prime Minister since Jim Callaghan. Right now though, he has a spring in his step. The danger is that on his visit to Washington for the NATO summit, he’ll make Joe Biden look 120. The best we can hope for is that the incumbent President mistakes Starmer for the Lord Almighty and decides that he is going to step down.
Sir Keir has been very keen to stress that whatever he said on the campaign trail still holds good. He was pressed heavily on his visit to Scotland over the two-child benefit cap and wasn’t shifting his ground one iota. Was he ruling out revisiting the policy during the course of the Parliamentary term? He referred the interviewer to the answer he gave just before polling day.
When it comes to prisoners though, that’s a rather different story. During the campaign, Labour said they would create the extra prison spaces that the Tories had promised, but failed to deliver. Within a day of coming into office, they appointed a man has Prisons Minister who — in an interview with Channel 4 — said that two-thirds of inmates probably shouldn’t be inside. It’s since been reported that an emergency measure might see anyone doing less than a four-stretch automatically released.
Given that populist right-wingers are breathing down Labour’s neck in many constituencies they won, might not this amnesty potentially prove as politically toxic as it is practically expedient? My advice to the incoming administration would be to focus on the stuff you DID promise, rather than the stuff you DIDN’T.
Build economic stability. Get the extra teachers into the schools. Cut the waiting lists. These are the things Tory supporters lent their votes for. They’re the results that everyone is crying out for. Politicians who aren’t just busy, but who are busy delivering the pledges they made in the run-up to July 4th.
