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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are both fighting defensive election campaigns — albeit of very different types. Starmer is running a safety-first campaign designed to reassure voters who have switched from Conservative to Labour — or from Conservative to “don’t know” — that his party can be trusted.
Sunak’s strategy, on the other hand, is throwing the kitchen sink at voters in a bid to regain those who supported the Conservatives in 2019, but now tell pollsters that they will vote Reform, or do not know. His aim is not necessarily to win, but to save as many Tory seats as possible.
What both have in common is their focus on voters who are past retirement age. There is much to be said about the electoral shortcomings of this approach. On the Labour side, it means that Starmer essentially wakes up every morning and finds another way to limit his freedom of movement in government. Everything from changing the UK’s relationship with the European Union to tax rates to immigration policy has been ruled out. This makes his campaign to return Labour to office easier but it carries with it the risk of a short stay in power.
On the Tory side, Sunak’s approach is hampered by inconsistency. Over the past year, he oversaw two budgets in which the government handed out the best part of £20bn in cuts to national insurance — a tax that most of the older voters he is wooing do not pay.
It would have been better, even from the position of Conservative self-interest, if Sunak had spent that £20bn on the public realm instead. Particularly if it had targeted services such as the NHS, which older voters are more likely to use. Splashing £20bn on a tax cut for a voter bloc he has no interest in is now fruitless. Along with the self-defeating decision to launch his core vote charm offensive with a half-baked policy on national service, the prime minister’s whole endeavour smells of desperation.
In ageing democracies, it is possible for parties to win with a near-exclusive focus on people in the final third of their lives. But there are policy reasons why they shouldn’t. Doing so distorts how political parties think. In the end, no one is happy: the old and the young get poor services, while everyone else feels neglected.
One reason for this is that, inevitably, we cost the state the most at the beginning of our lives and then again as we get closer to the end. Parties that compete solely for the older vote will have many more opinions about how the state should spend its money than how the economy as a whole should operate.
There are important debates to have about state spending, including the role of private providers in healthcare and the use of machine learning and other forms of innovation in schools and hospitals. But too often, these become about cheap tricks to promise the old more for less money, rather than the result of deep engagement with the policies in question.
The same problem is repeated when a party that almost exclusively talks to the old tries to think about the very young. Spending again looms large. Small wonder that both the main UK political parties have narrowed their offer to working-age voters in terms of childcare and recruiting schoolteachers: the youngest, like the oldest, are most in need of state largesse. This is worthwhile, but it is also expensive, and unlikely to raise enough money or produce enough talent to succeed.
What makes a party successful in policy terms instead of just electoral ones is an ability to go beyond spending promises for targeted voters in order to create the type of voters it wants. David Cameron, the last prime minister with a legacy that extended beyond mere election victories, had the same type of voter in mind as his two Labour predecessors: a socially concerned person who worked in financial services. This approach fell out of vogue in the Tory party because he never succeeded in winning over sufficient numbers of those voters to win big majorities. But Cameron managed to oversee policy achievements, for good and for ill, that have endured.
The absence of a similar focus is one reason why Rishi Sunak’s government has been so scattershot. Apart from a culturally conservative pensioner who does not use the NHS or worry about potholes, his imagined voter seems to be a national service graduate with a military commission and a maths A-level. Meanwhile Labour’s idealised voter seems to be a person in a post-industrial town that now makes solar panels. It remains to be seen whether a Labour government will be able to break the UK’s recent run of chaotic leadership with little vision beyond the elderly.