Last week was a piece in the FT which at first I was just going to bookmark, but thinking about it if the article was in any way right Labour may well already be doomed to being a single-term government. The key point and title of the piece is Labour having to ditch their tax pledges.
Labour broke the spirit of their taxation pledges with the employers’ national insurance rise but to break the letter as well will see them lose the South for a generation. Assuming school fees VAT has not already done that. In a repeat of what happened when students got stiffed early on in 2011, Labour certainly will never get back the business vote they courted before the election.
The LibDems in 2010-2015 is a cautionary tale of what happens when a party breaks its headline promises. They were finished the moment £9,000 tuition fees passed parliament because ever since people just stopped listening to them point-blank. To this day they are an irrelevance practically everywhere north of Northampton. Students went Green Party and never returned.
But more toxic for Labour is the reports of department being asked to model budget cuts of up to 11% which would cement the Labour government as one of austerity. The Conservatives in 2010 at least had some sort of a mandate for cut-backs but for Labour it would be viewed as going against what they stood for. And unlike 2010 it would be after over a decade of famine rather than feast so it is even harder to justify and the effects would be worse.
On top of this an increase in the defence budget will not go down well with a good portion of Labour’s grass-roots for whom defence spending is already an anathema. They think NATO should not exist and would view it as little more than an attempt to curry favour with Trump. Many who think Labour were right to whack up taxes regardless of election pledges won’t like this.
If all this is correct about the course the government is set upon then it will end up mostly acting against the mandate it has. This tends to be very bad for the prospects of re-election and if they do end up being a single-term administration this is the point they became doomed to be.