This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Tony Benn’s response when politics got personal was to insist that voters wanted to discuss the issues and not personalities. This sounded like high-mindedness, even if questions of character are obviously relevant to leadership. It was also cant. As his published diaries reveal, Benn’s prose rarely flowed more naturally than when making snide observations about his Labour colleagues.
He remained expediently oblivious to the riptides his deputy leadership campaign unleashed. At the 1981 party conference in Brighton, one of Benn’s acolytes launched a flying kick at Neil Kinnock in the Grand Hotel’s gents’ lavatory. But the member for Bedwellty did not take it lying down. “I beat the shit out of him,” the future Labour leader boasted. There was “blood and vomit all over the floor.”
Labour’s current leadership travails have not yet reached this level of muscular socialism. Wes Streeting’s tactic — for so it seemed — of committing himself to reversing Brexit as a manoeuvre to trip up Andy Burnham was a high-stakes substitute for name-calling and failed to foresee that in matters of expediency, the mayor of Greater Manchester is quite deft on his feet.
Suffice to say that there is little love left to lose between those plotting regicide in Downing Street. And why should there be? For if this sparring for power is truly about more than anointing a personality with greater spark than Sir Keir Starmer, then great themes must come to the fore.
But will they? Would a prolonged renegotiation of EU re-entry demonstrate to British voters anything other than the abjectness of the crack team of supplicants Labour sends to beg for Brussels’ mercy?
This, after all, is a government so incapable of hardball that even Mauritius outwitted it. The risk-averse may simply view this through a more cynical lens, seeing Wes Streeting’s geopolitical initiative for what it was, a petty manoeuvre designed to prevent his rival from winning a by-election.
Yet, if the stakes are really about policy not personality, then it would be helpful to know what else to expect. With the tax burden already at an 80-year high, the wisdom of going one better for the all-time record beggars belief and, also, those taxpayers who have not already departed for sunnier countries that cherish them more.
Has Labour run out of ideas?
The same limitations cramp the scope for massive borrowing. It has already been tried and the consequences are that the government is having to find £110 billion per year just to pay the debt interest — accounting for over 8 per cent of all government spending (up from 4.6 per cent six years ago). If only the return on investment accelerated at the same rate.
The bond market’s reaction to Liz Truss’s deficit-financed growth stimulus dealt a grievous blow to the Conservatives’ reputation. But the wiser minds in the Labour Party didn’t crow for long, for it also shut the door on social democratic dreams of a new borrowing splurge designed to stimulate growth.
Some within Labour’s ranks; including Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, grasped this and committed to spending within the fiscal forecasts set out by the OBR.
After all, you can’t claim Truss’s unbalanced budget “crashed the economy” and then announce a yet more unbalanced budget as the remedy. The risk of calamity would be considerable given that 10-year gilt yields are now higher than they were in 2022 when they tested Truss’s nerve to self-destruction.
It was Aneurin Bevan, no lover of the international capital markets, who once said “the language of priorities is the religion of socialism”.
If today’s Labour MPs wanted scope to borrow ever larger amounts to fund investment projects then they could have accepted Starmer’s argument for showing a willingness to first trim the most indiscriminately wasteful features of Britain’s £333 billion welfare budget.
In refusing to do so, they exemplify Margaret Thatcher’s taunt from 1976 that socialist governments “always run out of other people’s money”. It is not much comfort to Labour that it was actually the Treasury under Rishi Sunak, Kwasi Kwarteng and Jeremy Hunt — with their profligate Covid and energy support packages and subsidies — that ran through the money first.
Those who have paid attention to what Andy Burnham actually says ought to have noticed that he has explicitly stated he would stick to Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules. Perhaps this, too, is a tactical fib deployed for leadership contest purposes to safeguard against unhelpful headlines about bond market jitters at the prospect of him winning.
If, however, his pledge is sincere, then we return to the question of the difference any of Starmer’s potential successors would bring beyond a less tone-deaf manner.
Where do they stand on immigration policy? Unclear. Will they bring back rent controls? These have a well documented history of reducing the supply of homes to rent. Tried before, failed before.
The same may be said about 1970s-style price caps, which even Rachel Reeves suggests would work for groceries in supermarkets. These are amongst the most cost-efficient businesses in the country. Their profit margins are tiny, ranging between 1.8 and 4 per cent.
Has Labour so run out of ideas that it is reduced to promoting obvious nonsense merely to give the impression of decisive action?
Whoever emerges as prime minister, the auction of ideas is running out of lots. Are we, then, merely indulging a contest of egos?
