Labour’s tax-and-spend commitments will hamper ‘change’ plans

Good morning. At the start of the last general election I got myself a flu jab, because I felt the comparatively small risk of getting sick was not worth taking given I would have to work anyway. When this election was called, I started buying large bottles of water because I took the view that England’s well-advertised problems with water would manifest in London after, rather than before, they start to cramp my style.

That in many ways is, I think, the essence of why the Tory party is in big trouble. Getting the flu is an inevitable risk of being alive. Having to buy bottled water is something I associate with visiting my grandfather in Zambia in the 1990s, not something that I expect to happen in the UK in 2024. Unsurprisingly, as this excellent piece sets out, people are pretty irate about it.

The good news for the Conservative party is that no other pollster has yet to follow YouGov in showing the Tory party slipping to third place behind Reform. The bad news is that even pollsters such as Savanta, which show lower Reform scores (and in my view, are more likely to be right, not least because they were more likely to be right in the local elections) are producing apocalyptically bad results for the Conservative party.

The good news for the Labour party is that it means that one big theme of the next few weeks will surely be Conservative infighting and rows over strategy. (Today’s Times reports that ministers and aides are urging Rishi Sunak to attack Keir Starmer personally, and you can expect a lot more of the ‘don’t campaign like that, campaign like this’ sort of thing over the contest’s final fortnight.

The bad news for the Labour party is that this also means the final weeks will be dominated by questions about how exactly it will keep its promises on tax and spend. Some more thoughts on that below.

Chump change

Here’s a chart from the Nuffield Trust that I suspect I will be using a lot after the election:

The Conservative party is losing for a number of reasons, but one of them is simple — when more than six million people are waiting for an NHS procedure it is very hard to win a general election, particularly when, as the Tory party now is, you are reliant on older voters.

One reason why I think the polls are right and the Conservatives are heading for a worse defeat than the one they experienced in 1997 is simply that Sunak’s campaign is targeting a) voters over 60 who b) are culturally conservative, c) aren’t waiting for an NHS appointment, d) don’t have children or grandchildren who can’t get on the housing ladder, and e) are unfussed about the prime minister skipping out on D-Day early.

This group does not strike me as especially large.

The most important word in Labour’s manifesto isn’t the 23,000 words inside it: it’s the one word on the cover, which is “Change”. And yes, I’m sure over the coming years, Labour politicians will tie themselves in knots over what exactly change means, but I think it’s pretty obvious that most people think it means the NHS waiting list coming down, being able to drink the water from their tap without worrying they are going to get ill, victims of crime not waiting years for their day in court and so on.

I don’t think Labour has to be able to get all of the lights on the dashboard into green to be re-elected, but it does have to show that it is turning amber and that it has a serious plan to get them to go green by the end of the decade. (Indeed, this is the not-particularly-hard-to-grasp-subtext of everything Starmer says about wanting a decade of national renewal.)

Can Labour meet those aims for the NHS while keeping its promises on tax and spend? It’s true that one of the NHS’s problems is as much about what the government spends money on (it hasn’t invested in capital or infrastructure) as the amount, which has been about average for the OECD.

But in other areas, such as the crisis in England’s prisons system, it is less clear-cut that the country’s problems can be solved by reform without money. And that reality means that the next few weeks will be dominated by one question: who, in the end, is going to end up on the hook for Labour’s change message? Will it be one particular group of taxpayers — or will it be the re-election hopes of Labour MPs?

Now try this

I had a delightful evening on Saturday, watching the West End premiere of the brilliant musical Hadestown, a retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. On my way out, I overheard two people who had seen various productions saying they thought that this was the strongest cast, and having spent much of Sunday listening to both the Broadway cast and Anaïs Mitchell’s original concept album, I am inclined to agree. Do go and see it if you are able.

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Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.