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This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
By Tuesday afternoon, any doubts that Labour’s honeymoon period might be over were put to bed as footage of prisoners popping Champagne coincided with a vote in the House of Commons to take away the winter fuel allowance from millions of pensioners. The party elected just two months ago with a majority of 167 saw its numbers trimmed to 120 as scores of Labour MPs refused to vote against a Conservative motion to kill the Bill. John Trickett, who has spent the best part of his parliamentary career fighting against policies advocated by the Tories, cut a lonely figure as he was forced to side with them in a move that, as yet, has gone unpunished.
It’s hardly surprising that Sir Keir Starmer’s blissful period in Number 10 has come to an abrupt end given the mess that he inherited. Prisons haven’t become stretched to the point of breaking since July 4th. As we revealed in our Wednesday exclusive, former justice secretary Alex Chalk was well aware of how bad the situation was and had been actively urging Rishi Sunak to do something about it. Without an early prisoner release scheme, he had warned the PM, they would be in a position where they’d have to “get down on their knees and pray” for the criminal justice system. The term “pray-date” had even become part of the regular commons between the MoJ and Number 10, and was used in a meeting with Sunak two days before the election was announced on Monday, June 20th.
The £22 billion ‘black hole’ in the UK’s public finances is also more money than you can just sweep under the carpet, as is the broken NHS, the public sector strikes and the stagnant economy, which are all problems that have been inherited. Real fixes, it turns out, require getting honest with the public rather than offering up three-word slogans and culture wars to distract their attention, and in return, the public must acknowledge that. We all like to talk about how our water industry is in disrepair, how the streets are littered with potholes and our public infrastructure and services are creaking at the seam, but fixing it requires tough choices and not pithy populist slogans, which are what landed us in this mess in the first place.
Unfortunately, getting this country back on track means moving to populism’s only remedy; unpopulism.
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