Whatever happens in the outside world, whatever new disasters or opportunities hit the public, one fixed point of British national life has stayed stuck fast for years: the Labour Party is in a mess. It is polling under 30 per cent after nearly a decade of Conservative rule. Its organisational structures are in chaos. It is about to face an Equalities And Human Rights Commission judgement over its anti-Semitism crisis.

Perhaps even more important electorally, its economic policies just have no credibility at all. Among all the other evidence that indicated a Tory majority in December, consider the following: one election poll saw then chancellor Sajid Javid lead John McDonnell as the most capable chancellor by 21 points – outstripping his rating at 45 points to 24. Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s new leader, now has his work cut out to construct an economic policy for the 21st century – and not for the 1970s, which Labour’s last manifesto seemed to envisage.

The first thing that the government will need is cash – and lots of it. Not only has the government gone above and beyond to borrow its way out of potential catastrophe, but public services will not in the medium term be run so lean and “hot” as they have been since at least 2010. The National Health Service has one of the lowest number of acute care beds per head of population in the developed world – one reason it achieves fairly good results on the cheap. But that has left it exposed in a pandemic, leaving ministers scrambling to free up as much capacity as they can.

This might have two effects. First, it will degrade the Johnson administration’s popularity. Second, it will give Labour the opportunity to argue that the burden of tax rises should be spread fairly across those parts of society that can bear the increases.

The last time that a Conservative government tried to balance the books using tax rises rather than mainly relying on public sector austerity, in the mid-1990s, it had the toxic effect of allowing Labour both to shout about “Tory tax rises” and to argue that there must be a fairer way for Britain to bear the load. Big proposed increases to value-added tax on fuel, for instance, saw chancellor Kenneth Clarke defeated in the Commons, having to come back straightaway with a slightly less incendiary list of new levies.

Labour could have a precious opportunity to appeal once more to the ‘white van man’ they have so catastrophically lost contact with

Those tax rises might come at politically sensitive points: chancellor Rishi Sunak has already hinted that the self-employed might have to pay more to compensate for the backup the government has given them during this crisis. Labour could have a precious opportunity to appeal once more to the “white van man” they have so catastrophically lost contact with over the last decade or more.

Other tax rises may look both fairer and more economically efficient. In an era when the efficiency, indeed even the survival, of private industry has been shown to depend on government and not the individual, Labour’s plans for higher corporation taxes might chime anew with the public mood.

Britain in 2021-22 will be crawling out from under a huge burden of unemployment and underemployment. Shifting the balance of government revenue away from personal earnings, likely to be under intense pressure, and towards capital, unlikely to be so squeezed, could now make sense. A land value tax, higher inheritance tax at the top end, the end of higher rate pensions tax relief – all these ideas that have been floating around in the Labour firmament for some time may now have their day.

Those policies might not raise much in the grand scheme of things, at a time when Sunak might be borrowing £200 billion this year – a sum that takes us all the way back to the darkest days of the Great Recession. But they would show that Labour was serious about raising the money it says it will spend. That could start to put right the impression that they had no clue where the money was coming from at the 2019 general election, during the short campaign for which they just conjured up £58bn out of thin air to compensate women whose state pension age had changed.

Confronted with a government that raises national insurance on many of the new voters the Conservatives have only just managed to attract, and an opposition that pushes taxes onto older non-workers, the partly mythical “white van man” of electoral myth might just think twice about plumping for Johnson again.

© Hulton Deutsch

Other opportunities will occur to Starmer. Scientific research and development – the search for a coronavirus test, vaccine and cure – has become critical to national prosperity. Labour’s rather vague talk about boosting clusters and networks of scientific innovation will look better and better if the current government is seen to bungle Britain’s response to the coronavirus crisis with the engineering industry (in terms of ventilators) and the chemicals sector (for the critical testing agents).

Starmer, whose softly-softly approach to party unity often recalls Harold Wilson, might make scientific technocracy interesting again

It was just this appeal to the planned future of the economy that made Harold Wilson look so cutting edge in 1964. Starmer, whose softly-softly approach to party unity often recalls Wilson, might make scientific technocracy interesting again.

Even so, things could easily go the other way. The world out there is frightening right now. Voters walk past each other with some dread of what the other might pass on to them. The private car is bound to seem even more attractive when set against packed buses and trains. Suspicion of foreign travellers may increase. The young may object to paying vast amounts – perhaps forfeiting prosperity as well as some liberty – for the safety of the old.

There is absolutely no guarantee that this moment of crisis will help the Left. It might release all sorts of demons that push it even further away from power. But there is no reason for Labour to despair either. Everything is up in the air right now. A politics that focuses on the efficiency of fairness, that talks of spreading the load, that talks about what the government can do for everyone… that might work. It’s worth a try. Surveying his depleted, dejected party, in the end Starmer just has little to lose.

Glen O’Hara is professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of a series of books and articles about modern Britain, including The Paradoxes Of Progress: Governing Post-War Britain, 1951-1973 (2012) and The Politics Of Water In Post-War Britain (2017). He is currently working on a history of the Blair government of 1997-2007. He blogs at ‘Public Policy And The Past’ and tweets as @gsoh31.

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