(Read on, or view here: https://youtu.be/Ddcx5WvG8Bg )
With Parliament reopening this week as well as schools, MPs will be sitting up especially straight, because the silly season never really happened. Meaning they’ll have an unusually huge pile of topics to chew over. Some bits, as our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, more palatable than others.
The standout story, that’ll run and run right through to Guy Fawkes night, is about the money.
Sir Keir Starmer all but reprised Churchill’s blood, toil, tears and sweat speech during his assessment of the nation’s woes in the Downing Street rose garden a few days back.
Heaping the blame on the legacy left him by the Tories, he foretold a seriously beastly autumn budget, stuffed with spending cuts and tax rises.
Forget the venue, he sure as hell did not promise a rose garden.
Which begs two questions. Was this good politics? And was it fair?
Starmer clocked during the election campaign that he tended to get the biggest rounds of applause when he levelled with audiences about how bad things were.
Against that, there’s always the danger that depressing the punters might discourage them from putting their hands in their pockets, thus making matters worse.
Time alone will tell which argument will end up on top. But in the short term the effect has been a tanking of the new government’s poll rating.
The novelist Stella Gibbons’ delicious definition of the life of a journalist seems to apply just as well to Starmer’s political honeymoon: ‘Nasty, brutish and short.’
But as to whether the Tories really did leave the country in a state of shambles, and covered their tracks in the process, the answer’s harder to pin down.
At the election, the voters’ verdict was impossible to miss: After fourteen years of make-do-and-mend everything was ripping apart at the seams, so it was high time to give the other lot a go.
Of course the Conservatives insist that with inflation and unemployment levels pretty low they left things in pretty good shape. And they didn’t hide anything from anyone.
But crumbling schools? Record hospital waiting lists? The list is endless. All Starmer’s ruthlessly effective response to the post-Southport riots did was expose the dire overcrowding in our prisons.
It also vividly displayed the contrast between the swift and efficient justice in this instance, and the delays which are the lamentable norm in our court system.
As to covering things up, the Institute for Fiscal Studies points to one shameful example. The Home Office’s habit of understating asylum and illegal immigration spending.
‘Woeful,’ was the word the respected economic thinktank used.
Then there’s the twenty-two billion pound so-called black hole in the Tories’ figures that the new Chancellor goes on about – and which the Tories claim is much of her making.
Okay, you can argue the specifics until you’re blue in the face. But the leading policy analyst Sam Freedman suggests that it hopelessly underplays the problem. In short, things are much, much worse.
In the meantime, it’s crucial for Starmer to shape the blame-the-Tories narrative and make it stick.
Labour has the advantage that while the Conservatives are busy talking among themselves about who’s to be their new leader, they’re not exactly in rebuttal mode.
The right-wing newspapers are doing their best to do the job for them, but they don’t have the same clout.
Any more than left-wing papers trying to defend the outgoing Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the months after the American-led financial crash of 2008.
In point of fact Brown did much to limit the damage by bailing out the banks and persuading other countries to do likewise.
But while the party was busy finding a replacement for him, his Tory successor David Cameron managed to convince people that somehow the whole thing was his fault.
Illogical, as Brown was PM of UK, not world king. But still, the story stuck. And now, by the same token, it’s Labour’s turn to dish the dirt.
Doesn’t mean they’ll win the argument, mind. And, even if they do, it won’t happen overnight.
A YouGov poll last week suggested that a majority of voters aren’t convinced that Starmer’s inherited a worse state of affairs than he expected.
Against that, people minded to blame the Tories for the forthcoming tax rises and spending cuts outnumber those who want to point the finger at Labour.
Nonetheless, the new government can see the need to get a wiggle on with producing swift and tangible results.
Cue the Deputy Prime Minister’s surprise-not-surprise announcement last week that she’ll be beaming her chaps and chapesses across the country to knock planners’ heads together.
They’re tasked with getting bogged-down projects up and running sharpish and never mind the nimbies. The aim being to make a visible start on delivering the promised one-and-a-half million new homes.
Starmer made much of this during the campaign, tying it in tightly with pledges to boost economic growth.
He’s hoping his awaydays in Germany and France last week might yield similar dividends, as boosting trade with those countries could also end up making us richer.
All that’ll involve a lot of toing and froing, and it’ll take a while to yield any results. But when it comes to upping Labour’s popularity, there’s a free quickie very much in prospect.
Hardly needs saying that the hospitality industry’s spitting nails about the likely ban on smoking in pub gardens and other outdoor spaces.
Also no great surprise that plenty of Tories are grumbling that nasty nanny-state Labour hates freedom, and is obsessed with controlling people’s lives.
But it deserves pointing out that Rishi Sunak got the ball rolling, with his idea of making sure no one born after 2008 could ever legally buy ciggies.
More to the point, in the here and now, surveys show that well over half of us are well up for Starmer’s idea, and only a third think it’s jolly mean.
Seems poor old Fag Ash Lil isn’t quite the pin-up she once was. Bit by bit, times they are a-changin’. Hard to escape the fact that one way or another the fags take out some eighty-thousand people every year.
Then again, all sorts of things that once seemed pretty safe can turn out otherwise. Like going for a walk in the woods.
Eighty-eight-year-old Giuseppina Bardelli had been doing just that since forever with no problems. Until she got lost a week or so back, in spite of being quite close to her home on the Italian-Swiss border.
Things went from bad to worse when she took a tumble and broke a couple of ribs.
Notwithstanding a huge search operation, no one managed to find her for four whole days, during which time she drank rainwater from puddles and slept under trees.
But, probably because she’s en experienced hiker and climber, she wasn’t unduly troubled by any of it. Not even by an inquisitive wild fox that kept sniffing around her.
In fact, far from being frightened, it seems she talked to her new fluffy friend, and they became quite good chums.
A lesson there, maybe, for our new Prime Minister. Go with your instincts, cross your fingers – and try and be brave.
(Also, here's how I put that … on the box: https://x.com/i/status/1829759518621757658 )
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