Is Keir Starmer ready to be unpopular?
Both Starmer and Sunak are pretending that only the other side’s plans will costs us more – neither is being honest about the true scale of the challenges Britain is facing, says Emma Revell
One of the most frustrating things about elections, if you’re a political campaigner, is that politicians keep talking about what they want to talk about, rather than the things you want them to.
As the contest approaches its final week, press releases are pouring into journalists’ inboxes, complaining that our leaders, and the media, are failing to focus on their pet issues. Anti-knife campaigners are ‘alarmed’ that the campaign is overlooking spiralling knife crime. The Local Government Association wants more focus on social care. The NFU and British Retail Consortium think politicians are ignoring food security (despite Rishi Sunak having spent several days tweeting about it). The Catholic Bishops’ Conference wants more attention on climate change. And on and on it goes.
These individuals and organisations may be justified in saying their chosen issues aren’t getting the attention they deserve. But the bigger problem is that even when politicians have talked about key issues, they have come nowhere close to discussing them honestly – in particular when it comes to the scale of the challenges the country faces, and the cost of fixing them.
Let’s take the NHS. Sure, there has been plenty of discussion on waiting lists for treatment and waiting times in A&E. But few politicians are brave enough to actually tackle the underlying problem. Which is that the system itself is increasingly unfit for the needs of modern Britain, but the country – from doctors and nurses to politicians and the public – has an almost pathological inability to consider any alternatives.
By the end of 2026, the UK will have more people aged over 65 than under 18 for the first time in its history. Unfortunately, this will also bake in enormous and unavoidable costs, especially for the health service, social care and pensions.
To keep the current cost of the welfare state – including the triple lock, estimated to cost £148bn by 2027/8 – at the same percentage of GDP as it is now, the UK will need annual growth of 2.9 per cent over the next 50 years.
Does any politician dare whisper that potentially this could have an impact on public services and that maybe, while going for growth and increasing investment, we need to also look at ways to bring down the bill? Of course not. They risk incurring the wrath of Janet Street Porter, or the Waspi Women, or being torn apart on polling day, as Theresa May was when she tried to fix social care and had her plans branded a ‘death tax’.
Enormous leaps forward in healthcare mean we are living longer than ever. That is a good thing. But we do ourselves a disservice if we don’t talk about the costs of old age.
On housing, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is at least making some of the right noises. We cannot continue to treat the green belt as a sacred cow and brownfield, for all that it should be considered for redevelopment wherever possible, simply is not plentiful enough or easy enough to build on to meet all our unmet housing needs. London, Oxford and Cambridge need to be bigger than they are to unlock the economic and social benefits of a housing market that can actually deliver. But all too often politicians cower before vocal minorities and swallow misinformation from those who claim we can simply ban second homes, bring in rent controls, and reallocate spare bedrooms to fix the problem.
Similarly, an entire column could be devoted to the astonishing cost of simply running the state in 2024 and how experts are unusually united around the fact that tax rises will be needed to keep up with current demand. Politicians however seem fixed on pretending that only the other team’s plans will cost us more.
No one party can be blamed for the existence of these problems. But successive governments of all stripes share culpability for failure to tackle them.
You can understand why individual politicians shy away from difficult conversations to protect their positions, or their future ministerial careers. They have a vested interest in presenting a positive front, pandering to voters, and kicking tough decisions into the long grass.
However, given the scale of the victory awaiting the Labour Party on 5 July, they may still be in power when the impact can no longer be avoided.
Keir Starmer looks likely to walk into Downing Street with a majority bigger than any of us have ever seen before. Of course Boris Johnson had a big majority and failed to deliver but if the Conservative ranks really are decimated as many predict, Labour will have both the ability and the mandate to make big changes and tough decisions.
The key question then becomes whether Starmer is willing to be unpopular – with his party and with the country at large. Labour MPs finding themselves representing traditionally Conservative areas could adopt their predecessors’ Nimbyism, just as the left-most flank of the party will respond poorly and viscerally to any attempt to reform the failing NHS. Experience shows us that the country’s pensioners, regardless of how they voted, will not be backwards in coming forward if Labour attempts any much needed reforms of social care, the triple-lock or the pension age.
Ultimately, Britain needs to be told some hard truths. Perhaps not in exactly the words apparently used by a Labour source when they said “I don’t care if we flatten the whole green belt, we just need more houses in this country”, but pretty close. It is just unfortunate that nothing about this election campaign suggests the quiet, conciliatory Starmer is the man to make us hear them.
Emma Revell is external affairs director at the Centre for Policy Studies