2 weeks Ago By Aimee Meade
It did not take long in the end – just 78 minutes, in fact. That was all the time that was needed for Rachel Reeves, delivering the Budget last week, to tear up a plethora of promises that she and her party had made over the course of several years. One by one they fell.
Having vowed not to “fiddle” her fiscal rules “to get different results”, she did precisely that. After pledging not to increase national insurance, she did. Despite insisting repeatedly that Labour had “no plans” to increase any taxes beyond those already announced, she unveiled new plans to hike them by £40bn – the second-biggest tax grab in British political history.
In fact, from capital gains tax rises to charging inheritance tax on farmland, most of the specific money-raising measures announced in the Budget had previously been ruled out by Labour ministers. Reeves admitted this weekend that she was “wrong” to say she wouldn’t raise taxes. Well yes, that much was already obvious.
The justification from the Chancellor? That when she made the pledge, she didn’t have the facts that she does now. That is not how promises work. “I promise I’ll be there on time” does not mean “I promise I’ll be there on time unless something delays me”.
A pledge is a pledge. Labour insiders insist that saying there were “no plans” for tax rises is not the same as ruling them out. But what matters is what people heard, and people heard a Labour Party saying it would not increase taxes.
The promise to clean up politics has also failed to survive contact with the realities of government. Within weeks of taking office, Labour was dogged by rows about cronyism : wealthy donors being given access to the highest levels of government, people who had given money to the party being handed plum jobs, Cabinet ministers benefitting from free tickets and clothes and parties. No wonder, then, that trust in the new government has evaporated so quickly.
Starmer is now more unpopular than any new prime minister in history at this point in their term. Labour has, incredibly, slipped behind the Tories in some polls, just four months after trouncing them at the ballot box. Last month, 55 per cent of voters said they thought Labour was untrustworthy .
And that was before the Budget. Labour’s trust problem will not overly concern the party’s leaders – not yet, anyway. They were braced for a bout of unpopularity early on, as tough decisions were taken.
But the trail of broken promises leads to a much bigger threat than Labour’s waning popularity – one that should worry us all. Trust in mainstream politics is already at an all-time low and it isn’t just one leader or one party that voters have lost faith in – it’s the Westminster system and mainstream politics in its entirety. As the main actors fall out of favour, there are others waiting hungrily in the wings.
Those on the political fringes are preparing for their moment. At the last election, one in seven voters backed Reform , backing the party’s promises to freeze immigration, scrap climate change targets, leave the European Convention on Human Rights, stop “woke ideology” and “transgender indoctrination”, and introduce a “patriotic curriculum” in schools. With five MPs, Nigel Farage’s party now has a foothold in Parliament from which to build.
While it only won a handful of seats, Reform came second in almost 100 more and lost many only by a small margin. A small swing could see the party pick up dozens more seats. If it isn’t Reform, it could be another party – perhaps one more extreme – that emerges and exploits the disaffection that so many Britons feel, especially the young.
Either way, Britain is on the cusp of a hard-right breakthrough. The forces of extremism are building, waiting for the shibboleth of moderate politics that has dominated British politics so long to finally topple and fall. So far, Starmer and Reeves have played right into their hands.
They have given anti-establishment politicians more ammunition to argue that the mainstream parties are all the same and cannot be trusted. By burning through trust and goodwill in the way they have since July, they are undermining just not their own electoral prospects but also risk further damaging trust in the bastions of British democracy. Read Next Rachel Reeves will be back for more taxes We only have to look across the English Channel to see the potential consequences.
Swathes of mainland Europe has seen hard-right leaders swept to power and prominence. In Italy, prime minister Giorgia Meloni continues to rail against asylum seekers and the “LGBT lobby”. In Hungary, her ally, Victor Orban, cosies up to Vladimir Putin while chipping away at his country’s democracy.
In France, Marine Le Pen came dangerously close to winning control of the National Assembly. Across the border, in the Netherlands, the far-right PVV party is now the biggest member of the governing coalition, succeeding by promising the “toughest ever” stance on immigrations and a ban on mosques and the Quran. In Germany, the extreme Alternative for Germany party won a regional election in September.
There is nothing to stop this tide of right-wing populism crossing the Channel and sweeping across Britain. True, our electoral system makes it harder for smaller parties break through. True, too, that British voters have typically been sceptical of extreme ideologies.
But as the mainstream loses more and more credibility, that could change easily – and quickly. The last line of defence against this is Keir Starmer. The country has turned its back on the Tories – for now at least.
It is left to the Labour prime minister and his new government to prove that things can be done differently: that politicians don’t have to mislead their electors, that mainstream parties can, after all, deliver what they promise, that moderate politics can still improve people’s lives. Averting the rise of extremist, nativist parties will mean convincing a sceptical country that mainstream politics can be a force for good after all. It will mean the current government proving that, contrary to that common refrain, they are not all the same: that the business of governing can be conducted with integrity, that politicians can work for the public good, not for themselves, and that moderate, sensible politics can deliver the positive change that people want.
It will mean demonstrating to disillusioned voters, particularly younger ones, that there are mainstream leaders that are listening to them and that do care. That will not be easy, but there is still time for Starmer to come good. For now, he could begin by not making matters worse.
Keeping more of his promises would be a sensible place to start. Ben Kentish presents his LBC show from Monday to Friday at 10pm, and is former Westminster editor.
