Three-day weeks, ballooning debt, a crippling energy crisis, a slaughterhouse of a health service – there’s one particular difference between this and the 70s.
Our modern leaders have so little personal effect that listening to them is like reading them off an iPad.
When Edward Heath spoke in the Commons – I only heard it once over 20 years ago – it was an event. The rafters trembled slightly. Tigers sound like he did, surrounding their listeners. No one has a voice like that in modern politics. Heath had been on Normandy Beach, of course. Denis Healey had been Beach Master at Anzio.
But enough of that. While it hasn’t been Normandy Beach or Anzio, fair play to Sir Keir – he has survived a pretty hostile environment in the Labour party. Understandably, most weeks he compares his personal courage with the PM’s, pointing out how he has stood up to his party and transformed it while the Tories are holding the Sword of Damocles over the PM’s head – in the case of the Leader of the House, “literally” (sic).
He began with a description of a Bladerunner Britain broken in ways old and new. Prison system wrecked. Murderers and rapists on the streets. Porous borders. Pensioners having to eat their grandchildren to keep warm because Tories. Why, Keir asked, with what sounded to supporters like silky wit, “is he so scared to call an election?”
Rishi retaliated with a silvery reply: A late election would at least give Labour time to come up with a plan of its own.
What might that be?
Stephen Flynn entertained his own party, plus the Tories and also a covert but considerable part of Labour when he said: “With his back benchers looking for a unity candidate to replace him, which of the now numerous born-again Thatcherites on the Labour front bench …” laughter drowned him out. He resumed with “the conspiracy of silence on the front benches regarding the £18 billion of cuts,” and the general similarity of Rachel Reeves and Jeremy Hunt.
It was “a serious point to be made,” he said, concealing an even more serious point. While there may be little to distinguish Labour prudence with Tory austerity, £18 billion of cuts is neither here nor there in the current disintegration.
Any plan to “unlock” the necessary billions of investment as the shadow chancellor suggests will need a period of creative destruction more extensive than democratic politics allows. The general population has at last universally understood that it can, in the old phrase, “vote itself largesse from the public purse”.
How can Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer, with their adenoidal oratory, sell us national rejuvenation with all the carnage that requires?
Layla Moran’s description of the NHS treatment of one of her constituents was a successful exercise in wither-wringing. Held for an emergency operation and nil by mouth all day – the man failed to secure a slot in the operating theatre.
Taken in overnight on the threat of missing his place in the list, he was held in windowless cell for eight hours on a plastic chair and then on a pillowless gurney, to be told in the morning the operation has been cancelled for lack of personnel.
It was all too believable.
But for a parliamentarian to blame this on Tories is to misunderstand Parliament’s impotence in the face of the Declaration of Independence made throughout the public sphere. Police, Health, Justice, Energy – they are not out of the control of Parliament, but beyond control.
The question on which Edward Heath fought the 1974 election was “Who Governs Britain?”
The answer then was, “Not you, chum.” The answer after the next election will very likely turn out to be, “And not you, either.”
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