The Labour Government begins 2025 deeply unpopular, falling in the polls and with its leader’s personal ratings plummeting.
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.
Labour has broken manifesto promises and implemented unpopular policies – chief among them the cut to the winter fuel payments.
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.
He vowed that Labour would not go “back to business as usual” and said it was time for a reset equivalent to the post-war government of Clement Attlee: “I believe there’s a mood in the air which we don’t detect often in Britain. It was there in 1945, after the sacrifice of war, and it’s there again now.”
Labour’s 1945 manifesto committed the party to socialism and promised the creation of the NHS, mass nationalisation, and a massive council housebuilding programme.
But the party’s 2024 manifesto stood in stark contrast – a milquetoast offering from a party that wanted all the focus on Conservative failure. Labour wanted the smallest possible offering to keep the focus on the unpopularity of the Tories, rather than any scrutiny of Labour’s policy substance (or lack thereof).
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.
But as a strategy for government it has proven a failure. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has torn up her own fiscal rules, has raised taxes by more than £40bn rather than the £7bn outlined in the manifesto, and done nothing to improve the outlook for economic growth or living standards.
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.
Thomas-Symonds’s biography is a well-researched and thoughtful profile with many insights into Attlee’s formative years and his leadership style in government, but it is the foreword to the second edition that is relevant here.
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.”
I would support Rachel Reeves raising most taxes – but not this one
Read MoreLabour is floundering today because the plans they had were inadequate for the times they were in. Attlee did not make that mistake.
If 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 issue of migration was also controversial in the post-war government. It wasn’t small boats that caused a furore, but the HMT Empire Windrush docking at Tilbury that raised alarm. Eleven of his own MPs wrote to him expressing their unfounded concerns that “an influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impact the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and to cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned”. Attlee gave them short shrift: “The majority of them are honest workers who can make a genuine contribution to our labour difficulties at the present time,” he replied.
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.
Attlee got many things wrong too – every leader and every government makes mistakes – but he delivered a healthier, wealthier country, and left a legacy that that stood the test of time.
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.
If the Prime Minister wants to transform his fortunes in 2025, he should look again at what he once described as “Attlee’s great government”.
Andrew Fisher is a former executive director of policy for the Labour Party
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Keir Starmer seems to have forgotten his words about Clement Attlee )
Also on site :
- Jury begins deliberations in Mike Lindell defamation trial in Denver over election conspiracies
- Israeli strikes on Iran ‘completely unprovoked’ – Moscow
- Prince William Suffers Devastating Personal Loss