Group behind New Labour’s 1997 anthem say they don’t want song used again – and they are not alone
The pop group behind Labour’s 1997 victory anthem Things Can Only Get Better has joined many other artists in requesting political parties refrain from using their songs.
New poll gives Labour its biggest lead since Liz Truss meltdown as ‘Tory towns’ gain most from new funds
The Tory general election campaign hit more trouble on Saturday as Rishi Sunak faced accusations of using levelling up funds to win votes and Labour opened its biggest poll lead since the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss.
As Sunak tried to fire up his party’s campaign before the first crucial TV debate with Keir Starmer on Tuesday, it emerged that more than half of the 30 towns each promised £20m of regeneration funding on Saturday were in constituencies won by Tory MPs at the last election.
The Tories and Labour are forking out more than ever on social media ads, but going viral isn’t easy. We speak to influencers and strategists about the messages and memes
Why would you hold an election in November? The question came from digital marketing guru Mike Harris and was asked in a message to his friend, Labour’s campaign manager, Morgan McSweeney, earlier this year. Digital advertising is more expensive in October and November because the internet is swamped with ads for Christmas and Black Friday, said Harris, the founder of communications agency 89up. Why not pick a cheaper time of year?
Senior adviser who worked for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown says there is an ‘urgent imperative’ for a new government to address wealth inequality in Britain
A key New Labour adviser who worked for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in Downing Street says there is an “overwhelming economic and ethical case” for Keir Starmer’s party to impose higher taxes on wealth if it wins the general election.
Writing in the Observer Patrick Diamond, professor of public policy at Queen Mary University of London, and his colleague Colm Murphy, a lecturer in British politics, say a Labour government will need to look at radical ways to raise money, not least because the plans for higher economic growth that the party is relying on may never materialise.
The Brown-era adage ‘Prudence with a purpose’ could be the way to obtain the economic stability that has eluded every UK government since the 2008 financial crisis
Keir Starmer appears destined for Downing Street. Even so, as the election campaign rumbles on, his party will be challenged to articulate a compelling platform that secures not only the keys to Number 10 but also the economic stability that has eluded every UK government since the 2008 financial crisis. That will demand fiscal discipline delivered not only through a prudent approach to public spending but also fundamental reform of our tax system.
In headline policy, Labour is committed to fiscal rules on spending and debt. Rachel Reeves promises to move towards balanced current spending and to secure a falling debt-to-GDP ratio by the fifth year of the forecast. As her speech on Tuesday argues, Labour believes such rules will underpin “stability” and “growth”.
The prime minister said if Starmer was elected then he would also pander to the left in power
SNP leader John Swinney has urged people to take part in a “Scottish national service” by using the general election to vote Tory MPs out of office, PA Media reports.
Scotland’s first minister said his party could “remove the remaining rump of Tory MPs”.
Keir Starmer will need broad support to undertake a ‘decade of renewal’ in office. This sordid episode suggests he won’t have it
It’s not every day that you see Keir Starmer’s increasingly ruthless electoral machine in a state of confusion and disarray. But its chaotic approach this week to the question of whether Diane Abbott, a Labour MP for the past 37 years with one of the biggest majorities in the country, could stand in the general election – a question seemingly finally resolved on Friday by Starmer saying that she was “free to go forward as a Labour candidate” – has been very revealing about the condition of the party and of our wider politics.
The whole messy episode could be significant in the election, but also in the longer story of the Labour party and its fractious but pivotal relationships with the left, London and Black Britain. If those relationships with three of Labour’s traditionally strongest bases of support break down– and this week considerable damage has been done – then it may become much harder for it to gain and hold on to power, and for these millions of voters to be properly represented in parliament. Abbott’s ordeal, and her apparent survival of it, matter to many more people than her angry, baffled and now relieved constituents in Hackney North and Stoke Newington.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist. His book on Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left since the 1960s, The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies, is out now
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With the Tories’ chances at near zero, Labour is concentrating on fighting an ideological ground war with itself
It’s just over a week since Rishi Sunak got soaked in the rain as he called the general election. Since then he has forgotten that Wales didn’t qualify for the Euros, paid a visit to Belfast’s Titanic quarter and been photographed under an exit sign. Richard Holden, the Tory party chair AKA Baldrick impersonator, has insisted that the campaign has been going exactly as planned. God knows what might have happened if it hadn’t. Then the Conservatives started pumping out policies as if there’s no tomorrow. National service, the pension triple lock, a ban on Mickey Mouse degrees, and driving penalty points for flytippers. If they’re all such good ideas, it makes you wonder why the Tories didn’t do any of them in the last 14 years.
Not that any of them are likely to happen, because the chances of the Conservatives winning the election are currently near zero. A sign of how bad Rish! thinks things are is that almost all his campaign visits have been to what used to be Tory strongholds, to try to shore up the vote. Meanwhile, Labour figures have been touring the country shouting “change” and not much more. They think it’s enough just not to be the Tories. So far that appears to be working. The polls have barely shifted in the last 10 days. It’s all been sound and fury, signifying nothing, and most people will end the week talking of little more than the Donald Trump verdicts. But here are the highlights you may have missed.
Rishi Sunak is so convinced he can’t win he’s promising any old mad thing, while the Lib Dems are deliberately falling off paddleboards – Marina Hyde on the election. The couple on a mission to make it easier for everyone to have multiple children – Elon Musk (father of 11) is a supporter. Few of us have the money to take a long pause from work – but, as Anita Chaudhuri discovers, even a day can make a difference
D:Ream members regret association with Tony Blair and do not want song played at July general election
The pop group that sing Things Can Only Get Better – which became an anthem for Labour at the 1997 general election victory – will deny any request from Keir Starmer to use the track at this year’s election.
D:Ream’s founding members Peter Cunnah and Alan Mackenzie said they were dismayed to hear their song play through a loudspeaker as the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, called a 4 July general election on a wet afternoon in Downing Street.
Labour leader says it was ‘most efficient form of transport’ from Wales and party has offset the carbon
Keir Starmer has admitted he used a private jet to travel to a campaign rally in Scotland where he promised to create “tens of thousands” of clean energy jobs with a new publicly owned energy company in the country.
Responding to media questions after speaking to activists in Greenock, Inverclyde, Starmer said: “We did use a private jet because we did need to get very quickly to Scotland from Wales yesterday and it was the most efficient form of transport in the middle of a very busy general election campaign.”
During the Jeremy Corbyn era, some of the leftwing leader’s fiercest critics gave up and left the Labour party: not so Luke Akehurst.
Behind the scenes, Akehurst was doing what he has been doing since he was a 16-year-old political activist – organising to get his wing of Labour back on the front foot and later to help cement Keir Starmer’s control over the party.
Veteran MP had party whip restored this week, but it was suggested she might be ‘barred’ from running
Diane Abbott is “free to stand” as a Labour candidate in the general election, Keir Starmer has said.
The Labour leader had spent three days insisting her candidacy was not in his power, and it was a matter for the party’s ruling national executive committee (NEC), but the row was increasingly distracting from Labour’s election campaign.
The Conservative party has announced plans for fly-tippers to get points on their driving licences. The party also pledged to pass a law that would allow tenants to be kicked out of social housing after three proven instances of antisocial behaviour.
PA Media reports it said the moves are part of the party’s “plan to stamp out antisocial behaviour across the board to restore pride in place, improve people’s quality of life and boost community cohesion”.
Labour’s purge of Faiza Shaheen and Diane Abbott increases my fear about how it will behave in office
Purging women of colour on spurious grounds while handing safe parliamentary seats to apparatchiks like sweets: Keir Starmer’s Labour is high on hubris and telling us precisely how it will govern. As Tony Blair’s former director of political operations John McTernan put it, the sham investigation process into Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black female MP, was designed to “humiliate”.
The same goes for Faiza Shaheen, Labour’s former candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green. Shaheen is a Muslim woman of colour and the daughter of a mechanic, who defied the odds to become a successful academic and won the overwhelming backing of her local party. Starmer previously described her as a “fantastic” and a “fabulous candidate”, praising her “passion, expert understanding and insight on inequality”. Yesterday, while canvassing with enthusiastic volunteers and carrying her newborn baby, she discovered via the Times newspaper that she was to be purged. Her offence? Tweets going back ten years, one of which, she said, was about her “experience of Islamophobia in the party”. Another related to text above a clip of the American Jewish comedian Jon Stewart on the Daily Show satirising how criticism of Israel leads to online dogpiling by the country’s defenders: text that had a caption about the “Israel lobby”, which she concedes “plays into a trope,” adding: “I absolutely don’t agree with that and I’m sorry about that”.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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The desire to see the back of the Tories seems to outweigh any considerations of policy – or whether Labour will actually deliver much positive change
“Nothing has changed”: those were the ill-fated words during Theresa May’s 2017 campaign. Things certainly did change, though – a large polling lead almost evaporated by polling day and a hung parliament was returned.
In 2024, Rishi Sunak desperately needs a similar shift. But so far the British public seem unmoved. Voting intention, as measured by the opinion polls, remains much as it was when the election was called. Those intentions would see Sunak falling to something ranging between a significant and a historic defeat.
The party needs to move its campaign on from stories about factionalist infighting over seats – and get on with winning
Whatever your view of Diane Abbott, or your view of Keir Starmer, there has plainly been a serious blunder in Labour’s campaign when her treatment ends up leading the BBC news coverage and splashed across most front pages. Quite apart from the bad look, Labour’s big NHS day was blown away by a story on the fate of one MP.
First, remember this. Starmer has pulled off the near-impossible in a remarkably short time: returning Labour to electability after its worst crash in living memory. This miraculous recovery has required unflinching severity in dealing with antisemitism and a resolute “Labour has changed” message after Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. It was risky to expel the former leader – but he was extraordinarily lucky that Corbyn, with characteristic obstinacy, chose to rule himself out by refusing to accept the overall verdict of the independent Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). Had he accepted its judgment and offered a sufficient apology, he would probably still be a thorn-in-the-side Labour MP. If he wins as an independent, that’s a very minor embarrassment as Labour sweeps to power.
The two Tory PMs both told voters the economy had turned a corner – but there is little comparison now with 27 years ago
With a Labour victory looking increasingly probable, John Major’s pitch to voters in 1997 was simple. Britain had come a long way, the then prime minister said in his foreword to his party’s manifesto. “We must be sure that we do not throw away what we have gained, or lose the opportunities we have earned.”
Sound familiar? It should, because it is exactly the same argument Rishi Sunak is deploying as he seeks to defy the opinion polls and win a fifth successive general election victory for the Conservatives.
Exclusive: Labour’s deputy leader talks openly about the impact on her of the Tory-led controversy about her past living arrangements
Angela Rayner has been described as a huge electoral asset by Labour’s campaign chief, but until this week she has been one the party was unable to fully deploy.
For months, Labour’s deputy leader has faced questions about her historical living arrangements, with the police investigating claims by the Tory party that she may not have paid the right amount of tax.
Britain’s first black female MP faced hostility from the media and political establishment from the start. Nearly 40 years on, she is still not giving up. By Andy Beckett
Readers respond to Labour’s investigation following the Hackney MP’s suspension from the party in April 2023, and the long delay in coming to a resolution
I am not on the left on the Labour party – if anything my political views are more closely aligned with Keir Starmer’s. However, this does not matter. I feel the hurt and pain that Diane must be feeling – along with every black person in this country who has faced treatment which can be comfortably placed in the category headed racism. Her treatment by the Labour party is acting as a trigger for us all.
Labour leader accused of ‘cull’ and picking close allies to contest safe seats as others are blocked from standing for party in UK election
Keir Starmer is under mounting pressure to end what his critics say is a “purge” of those on the Labour left before a meeting of the party’s governing body next week.
Party members on Thursday accused the Labour leader of orchestrating a “cull of leftwingers” after several high-profile figures were told they would not be selected as candidates for seats they held or had previously contested.
Labour spent the day in a muddle of its own making over whether or not the north London MP would be standing again
Keir Starmer began his day by taunting Rishi Sunak for the faltering start to the Conservative’s election campaign.
On a visit to Wales the Labour leader said Sunak thought he was laying a trap by calling a snap summer election but a series of blunders since meant he had “caught himself in his own ambush”.
The party seems unaware of the anger from those who fear that a pioneer and others like her have been targeted. It must wise up fast
After one week of campaigning, and successfully so, Keir Starmer is discovering there are some events that defy storyboarding and scrupulous choreography. He clearly had no inkling that on Wednesday, as he took his battlebus and trusted lieutenants to Wales, he would be talking not just about his six steps for the beginnings of a Labour government but would also be forced to address the wide and growing, and increasingly vociferous, concerns about his treatment of the Black Labour veteran, and my friend, Diane Abbott.
And yet the problem here is that the perfect storm that now surrounds the pioneering MP and the party leader desperate for a decisive, steady-as-she-goes election is one that could and should have been planned for. It was foreseeable, maybe even predictable.
The Conservative and Labour leaders come from starkly different backgrounds but both are fighting for the political middle ground
Over the next five weeks the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the leader of the opposition, Labour’s Keir Starmer, will be battling to persuade voters that they are the best person to helm the next government.
If MPs are scared of voicing an alternative view, then debate within the party will dry up – and a Starmer government will suffer
There is nothing new about Labour officials rigging parliamentary selections. In 1985, when I applied for Sunderland South, Labour’s north-east regional organiser instructed the local party not to circulate the details of applicants from outside the region.
Happily, when the party’s national organiser heard about this, she summoned him and ordered him to rescind his instruction. Whereupon the old rogue blurted out: “But you know what will happen, if I do?”
Keir Starmer is in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, launching Labour’s general election campaign in Wales with beleagured first minister Vaughan Gething. Next week Gething faces a confidence motion in the Senedd. We’ll bring you any key lines that emerge. You can watch it here, the event has just started …
The Liberal Democrats have again criticised ITV’s decision to host a debate featuring just Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer and excluding themselves. The Liberal Democrats were the fourth largest party in the House of Commons after the 2019 election.
Well obviously, I’d love it if Ed Davey and the Liberal Democrats did have a voice in the TV debates, and we are setting out our stall every single day – our fair deal for the British people, our focus on the NHS and care system, the cost-of-living crisis and sewage in our rivers and seas.
Party hopes to lure voters who want radical change and strong climate policies, rather than centrism
Labour will face a renewed attack from the Green party in key marginal seats at this general election, as the group known primarily for its climate stance tries to reach voters who want radical change rather than centrism.
In sharp contrast to all of the main parties, the Greens will make an unabashed argument for higher taxes, which they will say are needed to fund the NHS, education and other priorities, alongside their call much stronger action on the climate crisis.
UK relationship ‘isn’t taking up as much of our mental space as it was a few years ago’, says EU diplomat
Since 2016, Britain’s Conservatives have compared the European Union to Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, described a senior EU official’s remarks as “bizarre and stupid” and threatened to break international law with a unilateral rewrite of the Brexit deal. So an incoming Labour government does not have to do much to strike a different tone.
But while the EU is ready to deepen ties with a future Labour government – widely assumed to take office after 4 July – it will not offer radical concessions to Keir Starmer. EU sources, already welcoming warmer relations under Rishi Sunak, are looking cautiously at the changing political weather across the Channel.
Comments at rally in east London follow Keir Starmer’s denial that the Hackney MP would be barred from standing in the election
Diane Abbott has promised to stay on as an MP for “as long as it is possible”, setting up a clash with Keir Starmer after a deal for her to retire from parliament broke down.
Abbott, the UK’s first female black MP, had been expected to make a “dignified exit” from parliament, after a near 40-year career, in an arrangement in which she was given back the Labour whip after an investigation into comments she made about racism.
Sir Keir Starmer should be concentrating on winning power, not becoming distracted by rows over MP selections
Sir Keir Starmer has been having a good campaign. Rishi Sunak’s gamble on an early election has done little to dent Labour’s enormous poll leads. The Labour leader is becoming more fluent in media interviews and more confident meeting voters in his minutely stage-managed appearances over pints and in town halls. So the unnecessary mess surrounding the future of Diane Abbott in the Labour party is an unwelcome reminder of Starmerite intolerance.
Ms Abbott is a significant figure in the Labour party, having become the country’s first black female MP in 1987. Last year she was suspended from her party after she claimed that Jewish people and travellers did not experience racism “all their lives”. This was an offensive mistake, and she rightly apologised immediately. She was suspended from the party, and Labour’s national executive committee launched an investigation into the affair, which was completed by December, resulting in a formal warning to the MP. She subsequently in February took a two-hour online antisemitism awareness training course. That should have been the end of the matter.
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We need a centrist, electable party, writes one Labour member, but a good result for its former leader as an independent in Islington North would be welcome. Plus letters from Libby Telling,Simon Short, Susan Merli and Graeme Smith
A thoughtful article by Andy Beckett (It’s Corbyn’s last stand. But can he beat Labour’s Starmerite machine?, 24 May). The Labour party has always had idealists who have been important to the heart of the movement. They have also often been problematic to their party leaders. Think Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan, Harold Wilson and Tony Benn.
As a Labour party member, I did not vote for Jeremy Corbyn and did not believe he could lead the Labour party to electoral success. Sadly, I was proved right.
Keir Starmer has denied that Diane Abbott has been banned from standing as a Labour MP at the next election, as the saga over the potential end to her 40-year career in the party risked descending into chaos.
The Labour leader’s comments directly contradicted newspaper briefings that the Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP, who was suspended from the party in April 2023 for comments she made about racism, was being barred from standing again.
The Conservatives have been pushing a plan today to expand the number of apprenticeships, pledging “100,000 more apprenticeships a year by the end of the next parliament.”
It is unclear whether this figure includes the “up to 20,000 more apprenticeships” that Sunak previously announced ten weeks ago.
Under the plans, there would be legislation granting greater powers to the Office for Students, the universities regulator, to close degree courses that are underperforming. These would be chosen based on drop-out rates, job progression and future earnings potential.
The Conservatives claim to have delivered 5.8m apprenticeships since 2010. But the number of people starting out on apprenticeships in England is in decline, falling from 500,000 in 2015 to 337,000 last year, according to Commons library statistics.
First of all, you cannot generalise about entire subject areas. In almost all subjects there will be some institutions delivering well, and some not doing well. So for example, you take computer science, you know, you get earnings outcomes from young people studying computer science degrees which will range from £18,000 pounds to £80,000 pounds so it’s not about an individual subjects but about specific courses.
The second thing I genuinely don’t think it will be right or fair to young people who are currently on an undergraduate course to have a politician come on the radio and namecheck that particular course that they are on.
These debates are rarely useful, let alone enlightening. Let’s have a head-to-head of progressive parties instead
For the 2008 televised vice-presidential debate in the United States, Sarah Palin was opposite Joe Biden. Reportedly, she’d so frustrated the efforts of her team to get her on point with her arguments that they’d simply taught her 40 minutes’ worth of script. She says at one point, “I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear”, which is to say, I can’t answer the question unless it corresponds directly to a gobbet I prepared earlier.
The transcript is extremely revealing of the chemistry of political debate. When you put one agile politician, summoning his powers to answer the question, against one who has learned some patriotic lines by rote and has no intention of engaging with the questions, the whole thing is inert, its elements don’t connect. So nobody can win in the classic sense, which means the less impressive party has scored a victory by definition. You can commentate the life out of it, ask a sample of the audience for verdicts in real time, but you’ll never get to the heart of what happened because there was no button for “I got bored and stopped listening”.
Wes Streeting says another Conservative term could result in waiting list swelling to 10m cases
Labour has promised to clear the NHS waiting list backlog in England within five years, with Wes Streeting warning that the health service risks becoming “a poor service for poor people” while the wealthy shift to using private care.
In an interview with the Guardian, the shadow health secretary said that in another Conservative term the total waiting list in England could grow to 10m cases, with healthcare becoming as degraded as NHS dental services.
Rishi Sunak is so palpably convinced he can’t win he’s promising any old mad thing. Meanwhile, the Lib Dems are falling off kayaks
People say manufacturing has declined under the Conservatives, but the sheer volume of outrage manufactured by Rishi Sunak’s national service wingnuttery at the weekend was last night compounded by his decision to unveil a quadruple lock to the state pension. Truly the seven-blade razor of advanced pensions technology. It’s so innovative it might even spin off and manufacture another deranged Loose Women segment. I am still howling at the moment on the show a couple of weeks ago when Janet Street-Porter demanded of Sunak: “Why do you hate pensioners? WHY DO YOU HATE PENSIONERS? That is the only conclusion I can come to.” State of the art lunacy, made end-to-end in the UK. Let’s face it: this is what you call a joined-up manufacturing industry.
But look, for whatever reason, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves preferred to spend their afternoon at a facility where they manufacture something other than abstract nouns: Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage. A lot of election campaign visits are to places connected with jobs the politician probably wanted to do when they were little. Digger driver. Train driver. Biscuit factory worker. Today’s broadly fell into the category “spaceman”. Airbus are serious manufacturers in aerospace and defence, and recently won a new contract to maintain the Skynet military satellite system (although, I obviously massively misunderstood the movies because I hadn’t realised we were supposed to think calling things Skynet was cool?).
Labour has opened applications for a string of safe seats after six MPs announced last-minute retirements, with key allies of Keir Starmer expected to be lined up to take their places.
Those standing down include the former shadow minister Barbara Keeley and the chair of the parliamentary Labour party, John Cryer, as well as John Spellar, Virendra Sharma and Kevin Brennan.
Labour reiterates claims that pensions will have to be cut to fund Tory idea to scrap national insurance
Labour has opened applications for a string of new safe seats after half a dozen MPs announced last-minute retirements, with key allies of Keir Starmer expected to be lined up to take their place.
Those standing down include the former shadow minister Barbara Keeley, the chair of the parliamentary Labour party Jon Cryer, as well as John Spellar, Virendra Sharma and Kevin Brennan.
Pensioners used to have a bigger personal allowance than people of working age – it was the Conservatives who got rid of it.
So this is one of many examples actually of tax policy that has been reversed by the same Government. George Osborne got rid of it in the 2010s when the personal allowance of people under pension age continued to rise.
Labour is throwing everything at growth and running away from thorny issues such as Brexit, tax rises and our ageing population
It wasn’t quite John Major’s vision of old maids cycling through the mist to church. But the sepia-tinted memories Keir Starmer recounted in his first big campaign speech of growing up in Oxted, the Surrey town he called “about as English as you can get”, weren’t a million miles away. He talked about growing up in a house where the phone was sometimes cut off because his parents couldn’t afford to pay the bill; about how he identifies now with young couples realising they can’t afford a longed-for second child because of rocketing mortgages.
But he also talked nostalgically about the ramshackle football pitch he played on, and shared with grazing cows, and what he called the British air of “quiet uncomplaining resilience” in an era when there was sadly a lot to be resilient about. Shades of those “do you remember … ?” pages on Facebook, where the middle aged reminisce about pork scratchings and playing on a ZX Spectrum.
Labour leader says damage done to economy by Liz Truss and other Tories means he can’t fulfil some 2020 pledges
Keir Starmer has insisted that he is a socialist and a progressive, but said the country does not have the money to allow him to fulfil some of the pledges he made during the 2020 Labour leadership race.
Starmer, who has been under increasing pressure to spell out whether he will raise tuition fees if Labour wins the election, made a personal speech in Lancing, West Sussex, on Monday, reflecting on how his working class upbringing has informed his politics.
Small campaign pledges risk inhibiting Labour’s ability, if elected, to improve people’s lives
Sir Keir Starmer was asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last Friday whether, if he achieved his goal for the UK to attain the highest sustained growth in the G7, he would readopt plans to scrap university tuition fees. He had committed to their abolition when running to be Labour leader in 2020, but dropped the policy last year because he said money was tight. Mishal Husain’s question exposed a contradiction in Sir Keir’s plans: the argument that he ditched his tuition-fee pledge to prioritise the NHS melted away if higher public spending could be financed by faster economic growth. Sir Keir parried, leaving the issue unresolved.
On Monday, Labour’s leader sought to further deflect from his rowback by leaving the door open to raising fees. Polling suggests that would be unpopular. Many voters might not want English university education to be free, but most want to see the cost reduced. Last year, Public First suggested that cutting fees to between £6,000 and £7,500 was the most popular option. Sir Keir was first elected to the Commons in 2015 on a Labour manifesto pledge to trim fees to such levels, with universities’ income made up through increased state support. But it would not be lost on him that even though his party had won the argument, Labour lost that election.
After 14 years of youth bashing, the Tories’ plan to ‘toughen up’ British teenagers might be just what it takes to bring them all out to vote
When the Tories reach the very bottom of their bad ideas barrel, they come up with a dead rat plan for conscription. The notion is so decrepit that those old Sir Bufton Tuftons who used to rise in the Commons to declare national service had made them the fine men they were today are long retired and mostly dead, six decades after conscription ended in the UK. It’s that never-ending Tory cry of youth hate: cut their hair, square-bash some discipline into them, bring back the lash! “Toughen up teenagers,” declared the unlikely defence secretary, Grant Shapps. If Tory campaign managers still need to secure their over-80s core vote, they really are in trouble.
This dying gasp is the exemplar of their 14 years of governing. Everything has been performative – all about announcements, not reality, and moving on before anyone queries outcomes or value for money. National service swept all the Tory front pages: job done. Marching 18-year-olds into a compulsory year of service marks Tory high command’s final abandonment of younger voters. They and their media inhabit the oldie planet of the ancients, every year limping further away from modern life on earth. David Cameron’s legacy project, the National Citizen Service, had its funding cut by two-thirds after attracting a fraction of its expected participants despite devouring 95% of all the youth service funding.
The way to ‘stop the boats’ is to create safe routes of travel. Instead, the Labour leader is obsessed with trying to appear tough
Keir Starmer isn’t interested in “gimmicks”, “talking tough” or, God forbid, protesting. He wants to roll up his sleeves and get things done – on this much he has been clear. Except, that is, for the times when it suits him to indulge in some “gesture politics”. This is especially true for asylum: Labour is headed into the snap July election promising to be tough on the “small boats crisis” and, if Starmer’s speech in Dover earlier this month is anything to go by, its plans are not good.
Gimmicks – the policies behind which could do untold damage – seem to be all Labour has.Starmer swapped Rishi Sunak’s “stop the boats” slogan for “border security”. He invoked the widely peddled myth that the UK, which has an incredibly strict asylum system, is a “soft touch” – suggesting deporting people more quickly would serveas a deterrent. And he promised a new border security command, which seems strangely similar to the small boats operational command. Granted, Labour does not look set to be quite as harsh as the Tories in every respect; Starmer committed to scrapping the Rwanda scheme. But that is the very least it could do, given how unpopular the policy is with the broader public.Look beyond the headline announcements and you find more of what we’ve had for decades – more borders, more brutality, more suffering.
Maya Goodfellow is an academic at City, University of London, and the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats.
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