Andrew Marr: Voters gave Labour a blank cheque but they have to deliver otherwise the backlash will be ferocious
5 July 2024, 06:12
The British public hates to be taken for granted. And in politics, just sometimes, a single comment is so devastatingly self revealing it’s never forgotten. In April 1946 the labour minister Sir Hartley Shawcross, who had been a prosecutor of the Nazis at Nuremberg, replied to Tory critics of his trade union bill, "We are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment but for a very long time to come."
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Shortened by the press into “we are the masters now” it became a symbol of Labour arrogance after Clement Attlee had won his great victory over Winston Churchill. It feels freshly relevant today.
Keir Starmer has won a huge and astonishing electoral victory over the Conservatives. Following the labour defeat of 2019 he was told he had to be, in effect, Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair, covering their stretches of reform and rebuilding inside the party but in only two or three years; and that this was an impossible task.
Well, he’s done it. This is one of the most astonishing turnaround stories there has ever been in British political history. It will still be talked about, this July night, in a century’s time. To get there, Starmer had to be ruthless, focused and impossible to deflect. Behind the slightly bland exterior and the often awkward-seeming grin, he is the toughest of tough nuts.
The scale of his victory means that he now has much more freedom in office to make the enemies and fight the fights he needs in order to, as he sees it, rebuild a broken and demoralised country in which “nothing works.” If he decides he needs more money by taxing capital gains, or inheritance, or making changes in council tax, he will.
If he decides that to grow the economy more effectively, he needs to move towards accepting the European court of Justice oversight, he can do that too. indeed, in interviews on LBC overnight coverage, the mayor of London Sadiq Khan and the Liberal Democrat Sarah Olney both told us they thought it was possible for a labour government to re-enter the customs union in its first term – something that contradicts previous promises and would seem to most people to be impossible.
This doesn’t mean that he will do these things; only that he could, if he chose. But, going back to that poisonous phrase, “we are the masters now”, He would be very wise to tread carefully.
Because the truth is that a lot of his job in this general election was done for him by the Conservatives- the chaos of the 14 years, austerity, then the Brexit referendum and the Brexit wars, then the pandemic, and the corruption around PPE contracts, and the trauma of the lockdowns, and then, following the spike in inflation caused by the Ukraine war, the disaster of the brief Liz Truss premiership, and Rishi Sunak's failure two evolve and sell a new story about what the party was for. Put all of that together and add the worst electoral campaign in modern political history, and the size of the Labour majority almost explains itself.
And as the night wore on it became clearer this was not just a simple Tories-out, Labour-in simple story; How to explain all those Labour people who unexpectedly lost seats, or the extraordinary surge in reform UK votes, putting them into second place all around the country? The more we look in detail, the more this seems the night of the great insurgency - a multi-sided protest and revolt against politics as usual.
I think it was. I think the British public was sending the political class, Labour included, our message which could be summed up as: we, not you, are the masters now and for a very long time to come. Yes, they have given Labour the blank cheque Mr Sunak urged them not to. But it has a date on it, and if it doesn't buy the improvements in ordinary life the electors expect, then in five years time, the backlash will be ferocious.
