If this Government is shameless then the Conservatives mustn’t be spineless

“One thing I have learned in my time in politics is that if one of the parties is shameless, the other party cannot afford to be spineless.”

Frank Lautenberg US Democrat Senator 1982-2013

Political communications is the professionalisation of a human tendency to describe the world as we wish it was and not how it is. Most of the time that is the very nature of ‘spin’.

Most of the ‘spinners’ I’ve known are seen as cynical, though that’s not really the case. Indeed making a case, is what really drives them, and behind the scenes in politics there is a lot more ‘seeing both sides’ than you’d think – or maybe agree with.

I’ve tried hard with this government. I have friends who are in it. I’ve given more than the benefit of the doubt even trying to see things from their perspective. I’m sorry, despite  removing my blue-tinted spectacles and being genuinely disappointed they weren’t better at this, I’m now at the point where it has to be said.

They are absolutely shameless.

I’ve written here before that it’s not the specifics – it’s the hypocrisy that kills you.

Last Wednesday Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves sat on the front bench laughing to themselves whilst being confronted with facts everybody else can see – that the economy is not doing well, growth is flatlining. The Budget was a bad one, and seems to have caught it’s architects off guard, but not to worry – blame the Tories.

Let’s go back a step.

I can see the Government claims to have had plan, to grow the economy, take tough decisions, to serve the British people not themselves, and clean up a mess they still place firmly at the door of the Conservatives who they think – and last year too many voters agreed – were incompetent, venal, out of touch, and out of control.

There’s such a list of Conservative calumny they trot out these days you’d need a fictitious £22billion black hole to hold it all. Not to worry Reeves now has a £15 billion one of her own making to fill.

Now fair’s fair. There are too many examples of individuals in the Conservative party – past and present – that have in some way ticked one or more of those outrage boxes. That makes it impossible to form a credible argument that none of Labour’s assessment is true. However as a general blanket-accusation it is untrue and wildly exaggerated to boot.

If you are going to govern with a squeaky clean new broom of integrity, honesty and competency – just imagine the Conservative woes if they had – then you’d better be sure not to get caught, often unnecessarily, in a conveyor belt of entitlement, dishonesty and fumbling of the ball.

We all assumed, after the early expose of the glasses, the tickets, the suits, the flat, the immediate use of private planes they’d endlessly decried, the missing phones, the WhatsApp groups – that they’d get better.

But we learn in recent days Angela Rayner wanted a private safari on an official trip to Ethiopia, and Rachel Reeves got a freebie hospitality ticket to see Sabrina Carpenter in concert – apparently to take a relative.

Now I declare sour grapes having spent, like many other ‘ordinary working people’, forty minutes in a phone queue trying to get an overpriced ticket for my daughter and failing – but I do wonder, since she did get to go, if Rachel Reeves sang along to Sabrina’s track “Busy Woman”, perhaps belting out the first verse

“I’m so mature, collected and sensible

Except when I get hit with rejection

To turn me down, well, that’s just unethical

I’ll turn into someone you’re scared to know”

That could be prophetic.

The hypocrisy is shameless but the excuses for an economy heading in the wrong direction are far worse.

The latest is, it’s Trump, and Ukraine. They might indeed be having an effect but this from a party that was hell bent on brushing aside the economic difficulties brought by the first global pandemic in a century and the first land war in Europe for seventy years when the Conservatives were in charge. For them it was all Truss.

Which gets to the real point. Our time in charge of the economy, even up to the point of the election we lost so badly just isn’t as described in the current Labour spin manual.

Some of the things said in the last few days – to avoid admitting it is this Government’s choices that have stifled growth at the pre-‘green shoots’ phase – are, I don’t know how else to put it, lies. Inflation hasn’t been at 11 per cent for forty years.

Tory MP Nick Timothy has taken the Prime Minister to task in a thread of the multiple occasions last Wednesday at PMQs Keir Starmer said something that just wasn’t true. It is well worth your time reading and it’s quite the list.

I suspect if the leaks about this Spring Statement are true, there won’t be more tax rises, and instead we will get some cutting of Government spending – which as my colleague Harry Phibbs pointed out – is going up, not down. Having lost all her fiscal head room with an increase in borrowing costs she’s on the hunt to find some more.

However whenever I’m exasperated with Labour I’m asked, “go on then, what would the Conservatives do?” We don’t know yet, but as I said at the weekend for it should be big, bold, eye opening and radical. Managerialism is dead.

As the quote I started with suggests, if the other side is shameless its opponents mustn’t be spineless. I don’t think Kemi Badenoch is, and this will become a good opportunity to show that there is “a crackle of electricity” about her – the line I heard from a senior Tory who was looking at her carefully during the leadership race.

I hear many say now, it’s not that they want to do that all over again, but they want that ‘promise of sparks’ on display now. Today would be a good day to crackle – if she can.

The question the Prime Minister constantly asks in a misreading of his brief at PMQs, is what would she do to raise the money?

Here’s a bold idea. Don’t.

Outline some of the things Government needn’t do, shouldn’t do. Perhaps never should have done.

There are whole departments of Government that could not be described as ‘public services’ – I’m with Rachel Reeves if she really does slim the civil service to pre-pandemic levels. There’s some public doubt she will.

So where to look for Conservative savings ?

The three biggest public spending commitments the UK has are Welfare, the NHS, and servicing the national debt.

Labour may have come lately to the need to reform welfare – Mel Stride MP spent eighteen months at DWP working on major cuts that in turn would encourage those that could work into work – but again this Government seem to have fudged it, and like so many other things inflicted a deal of pain for not much gain.

Whatever your views – and no I don’t want to see those absolutely unable to work cast aside – you’d be amazed how much ‘pain’ the public will support if the gain is meaningful and enormous and funds other public services more efficiently.

To give an idea of scale; the budget for the Foreign Office and all its network, building and staffing is more of a ‘rounding up error’ in the welfare budget.

And the NHS, well it’s long past time we got trapped by the “America or us” canard. There are funding models around the world that deliver better patient outcomes and still deliver ‘free at the point of delivery’ than either full taxpayer funding, or the US insurance model.

Add to that cutting some forms of tax, business de-regulation and the announced abandonment of the net zero by 2050 target and there’s a buffet of growth stimulus to at least start on.

It’s time for spine.