There is no mystery as to why this should be. Britain remains in crisis – from the NHS to the economy – and Labour has done little to nothing to address those crises. The public frustrations with the state of Britain that kicked the Tories out of power are now transferred onto the current government.
It didn’t have to be like this, and for some time it looked like it might not be. In early 2021, Keir Starmer made his first substantive speech as Labour leader. Much of his first year had been hamstrung by the pandemic and lockdowns. But when he emerged from his “constructive support in the national interest” phase, Starmer had a bold message.
Labour’s 1945 manifesto committed the party to socialism and promised the creation of the NHS, mass nationalisation, and a massive council housebuilding programme.
As an electoral strategy it worked wonders: despite only winning 33.7 per cent of the vote, Labour won a parliamentary landslide as the Conservative and SNP failure opened the door, aided by the insurgent Reform UK.
Starmer’s reference to Attlee was not just a one-off gimmick in 2021. A few days ago, I received Attlee: A Life in Politics as a birthday present. The biography is written by Labour MP Nick Thomas-Symonds, who today serves as Paymaster General in Starmer’s Government.
Writing in the foreword in 2023, Starmer commented: “It is extraordinary that the Attlee government accomplished so much in so little time – and in such inauspicious circumstances… we should take inspiration from the scale of Attlee’s ambition for change.”
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Read MoreIf Starmer wants to turn around the fortunes of his Government, he should turn to Clement Attlee for inspiration. Attlee was faced with a national debt of around 250 per cent of GDP (dwarfing the 100 per cent it is today), a country ravaged by war, and with desperate poverty and housing crises. That didn’t make him trim his ambition – it made him bolder in solving those problems.
The Attlee government also established a European Volunteer Workers programme to encourage Eastern Europeans to fill the UK’s labour shortages. With shortages of doctors, nurses, care workers, engineers and construction workers, only a fool would pander to anti-migrant sentiment when we have jobs that need doing and our own birth rate is falling.
As Starmer wrote in 2023, Attlee “set out a transformative programme that can change lives and change Britain”. Today, the British people have little faith Starmer can achieve the same. Exclusive polling for The i Paper shows nearly two-thirds (62 per cent) of the public do not think the Government will tackle the cost of living crisis in 2025.
Andrew Fisher is a former executive director of policy for the Labour Party
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