By Victor Anderson

Elections provide opportunities for a new start. The slate can be wiped clean, to some extent at least. It’s a democratic way of bringing an official end to a situation which can’t last. The handover from Sunak’s Government to Starmer will be a good example.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that this will create a new situation that can’t last long either. There are five key reasons for this, which can help guide how the left responds to the new administration.

1.  Most obviously, there’s an exceptionally wide gap between the predicted large size of the Labour majority and the small amount of enthusiasm and hope that surrounds the prospect of the next Labour government. Such shallow support could very easily turn into dissatisfaction and opposition.

2.  Where there are hopes and aspirations for the new government, there’s a contrast between those hopes and the amounts of money available. The new government may even find itself imposing further cuts in money for crucial public services, including those provided through local government. This is the consequence of ruling out many of the more obvious ways of bringing in extra tax revenue and wanting to avoid at all costs being seen as ‘anti-business’. That circle is squared by an appeal to ‘growth’, but there are few economists who believe economic growth can deliver much additional revenue in the first two or three years of the next government.

In some cases, particularly for infrastructure, there is another way of solving the problem, by attracting in money from the private sector, including overseas investment. However this is going to want a return on its investment, and we will be on our way back to the situation that the Private Finance Initiative created under Blair and Brown, with the government tied into expensive long-term contracts. There is also a danger of going soft on regulation, as we are already seeing with Labour’s soft messages on the water industry, driven by fear of putting off foreign investors.

3.  The left has been on its best behaviour over the past year, through a mixture of loyalty and intimidation, playing its part in carrying the ‘Ming vase’. This surely cannot last, particularly given the Labour leadership’s failure to call for a ban on arms sales to Israel, and the efforts to block left candidates such as Diane Abbot, Faiza Shaheen, and Lloyd Russell-Moyle, from standing for Labour.

4.  Elections are about power and they are not always the best way of creating forums for public debate. However the current election has been exceptionally quiet about seven key issues, arguably the seven most important issues the next government will face. Briefly, these are: (i) Brexit, (ii) the urgency of the climate crisis, (iii) the need to raise more tax revenue to pay for the public services improvements most people want to see, (iv) Palestine, (v) the need to combat the injustice of extreme inequality, (vi) the future impact of Artificial Intelligence, and (vii) widespread public dissatisfaction with the current political process, including an electoral system which is increasingly unrepresentative (and which Labour’s plan to clear 80-year-olds out of the House of Lords does nothing to address).

The silences on these issues surely cannot continue, and won’t need to.

5.  Elections give a misleading impression of the distribution of political power. Minority parties with millions of votes get a hearing during the campaign, but when Parliament assembles they may find themselves (as Greens and UKIP did in the past) with only one or two MPs each. That is likely instead to channel a large proportion of dissent at government policies through backbench Labour MPs, Labour mayors and devolved representatives, and Labour-affiliated trade unions.

A Labour victory is essential of course for putting an end to the Tory farce, but the situation it is soon going to create is very unlikely to bring about the stability being promised.

Victor Anderson was until recently a researcher for a backbench Labour MP and is a member of the MP Watch climate campaign.

Image:British Houses of Parliament. Source: The British Parliament and Big Ben, Author: Maurice from Zoetermeer, Netherlands, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.