British Labour hobbled and hobbling itself…

WorldbyStorm

Dec 1

William Keegan had a neat line in the Observer about a dynamic in British politics which arises time and time again:

What impressed me most about the delivery of last week's autumn statement was the good-humoured – almost jovial – manner in which our fourth chancellor in three years unveiled a seemingly endless list of measures supposed to promote "growth".
In most cases they were nothing of the sort. But Jeremy Hunt was so relaxed that one wonders if he believed a word of it. I had the wicked thought that as his party is assumed by most observers – not least its own members – to be approaching the electoral scaffold, the prevailing mood was one of "lie back and think of the election after next". Meanwhile, they can enjoy the spectacle of a Labour party struggling to carry out its traditional role of trying to sort out the mess it is likely to inherit.

Think back across the years as how this didn't merely hobble Labour, but Labour hobbled itself in a headlong determination to appear 'responsible'. Consider the incoming Labour administration maintaining Tory spending limits in 1997 for at least two years. That alone made governance more difficult in the successive years (though add to that a near paranoid attitude at the top in that party then at seeming in any sense fiscally radical). Similarly with the current crew who in some ways seem to have integrated that attitude to an even greater degree.

So this wasn't simply a case of having to clean up a mess but of actually allowing the very approaches that led to the mess to be continued into their period of governing. I'm always struck by how brief the periods of Labour rule in Britain as against the Tories. Not difficult to suspect that this is one of the reasons for that.