‘A black hole, CQC woes, prison crisis: Tories get taste of their own medicine’

Labour strategists will be pleased to have notched up yet more frontpage stories on multiple newspapers this morning on dire warnings about the state of the country the party has inherited.

The Daily Telegraph splashes on the suggestion Rachel Reeves will warn of a £19bn hole in the public finances in a major speech pencilled in for next Monday about the state of the government’s financial inheritance. The Times splashes on the “stunned” Wes Streeting dubbing England’s health and care regulator so unfit for purpose he can’t say its ratings of providers are accurate. Meanwhile Shabana Mahmood says rising violence shows “our prisons are in crisis”.

It’s the latest dose of the ‘bring out your dead’, Eeyore strategy that kicked into gear almost immediately after the election. It feels like history repeating itself, except it’s Labour not the Tories slamming ‘black holes’ and ‘the last government’ while the opposition turn inwards – using the coalition playbook to give the Tories a taste of their own medicine.

It’s being widely seen as pitch-rolling for tax hikes in a Budget later this year, reflecting multiple assumptions: that Labour wants to hike taxes to mend services (and reassure investors in government debt), that capital gains and inheritance tax hikes weren’t entirely ruled out mid-campaign for a reason, and that now is the best time to do it – in your political honeymoon, and as far away from the election as possible.

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Tax hikes do feel likely, but a further large factor not getting enough attention too is expectation management. Sometimes it’s the hope that kills you – as the likes of Nick Clegg and Francois Hollande learnt, and arguably Tony Blair and Boris Johnson too.  The hope must be that the worse voters think Britain’s crises are, the more patient and less susceptible to disillusion they’ll be about the only-gradual progress Labour may be able to make in many areas.

This messaging could need months to start working though – as the saying goes, the public only start hearing it when journalists tire of it. Remember only 11% of voters know Starmer’s father was a toolmaker. Labour’s doom-mongering will also get more media pushback than the Tories got post-2010.

It’s a risky strategy too – millions still voted for ‘change’ and the manifesto’s still highly ambitious, for all the rowbacks on Corbyn-era policy. Millions are so disillusioned they didn’t vote at all.

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Labour’s doomsayers will find it increasingly hard to resist pressure from the public, the media and bolder rival parties to promise swift results.  The Tories’ continued immigration pledges are a good example, with ministers repeatedly unable to resist unattainable promises. But they also indicate the dangers of over-promising and under-delivering, with a sense of betrayal fuelling the rise of UKIP, Reform and of course Brexit.

Perhaps the plan’s to lay the pessimism on thick for a few years, and then pivot to a more optimistic ‘we’re on the right track – let us finish the job and go bigger now we’ve got more funds to do it’ message in the run-up to the next election. But perhaps that’s hope speaking…

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