Anti-Labour hysteria reminds me of the 1970s

But both politics and media have changed out of recognition

The leading political story here in Britain is the accusation that the Chancellor misled the public in the run-up to the Budget last week. The Conservatives, led by Kemi Badenoch, are calling on her to resign, and that is reflected in much of the media coverage.

The first thing to say is that the story is being hyped out of all recognition, and that respectable commentators should not be giving it any oxygen. What we saw was a botched episode of media manipulation which demonstrates the less-than-sure grip of the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer on events: but nothing that especially stands out by the standards of recent British politics. In my piece on the Budget I referred to the more optimistic revenue forecasts by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) as “something that turned up” to ease the choices about raising taxes. My narrative made best sense if this had happened after the extraordinary pre-Budget briefing made by the Chancellor, but before they changed the story on changing the income tax rate. In fact the revised forecasts had been around for some time before the briefing, and the government chose not to use this as part of its scene-setting. This was a bit underhand, but given that none of this briefing took the form of definitive government announcements you can’t call it a serious breach of public trust. The interesting question is what caused the apparent change of heart after the briefing if it wasn’t this. My guess is that it was a loss of nerve from Sir Keir Starmer, who got himself into a tangle trying to pre-empt challenges to his leadership.

Loyal readers will know that I follow pro-Reform agitator Matt Goodwin’s Substack (without a paid subscription). I also subscribe to the Daily Telegraph’s daily email newsletter, without subscribing to the paper itself. I find these useful in understanding the narratives being developed on the right of British politics, encompassing both the Tories and Reform. Both are getting very hysterical about the Labour government, which is accused of crashing the economy and bringing an end to civilisation as we know it - I’m barely exaggerating. Attacks on Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, have been a running theme for some time, so of course they are piling in on this latest episode. I am reminded of when I first started to follow politics closely, as a teenager in the 1970s - and the hysteria surrounding the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. I used to read a cross-section of newspapers in the school common room, and what an education that proved to be! I was a Conservative supporter at the time, but even I could that this was mostly nonsense. It is one of the achievements of the Blair-Brown years of 1997 to 2010 that they suffered rather less of this sort of hysterical coverage. In return, perhaps, the government did not do as much as it should have to curb the predatory practices of the news industry. But then the current government is pretty lax too.

Does this kind of political coverage work? Clearly in the 1970s it helped to sell newspapers. At that time income tax was very high. The top rate was 83%, and 98% for investment income. Corporation tax was 52%. This set up a clear basis for better-off people to loathe Labour politicians. In those more equal times that meant an awful lot of people - we would call it today the “mass affluent”. This was the core readership the Telegraph and the hyper-hysterical Daily Mail. Other mass-readership papers, the highly successful Sun, and the sinking Express seemed more driven by proprietorial interests than using politics to drive circulation. The Sun did not major on political coverage, and many of its readers saw through it. The Labour government remained politically competitive right up to Mrs Thatcher’s narrow victory in 1979.

What of now? It’s a very different world. Newspaper readership is a shadow of what it was. Much of the news agenda is set online - but the newspaper publishers do have some influence here. The BBC, still the prime mover in broadcast news, allows its news agenda to be heavily shaped by the newspapers, in an effort to show that not politically biased. This is what is giving the Rachel Reeves story more traction than it deserves. Also respectable political correspondents from the BBC and elsewhere feel somewhat abused by the government’s ham-fisted manipulation of the narrative, and aren’t inclined to give it a clear ride.

But for all the sound and fury, the political divides don’t seem to be as stark as the 1970s. When parties on the left talk about attacking the rich, they take aim at the top 1%, not the top 25%. When those on the right talk about slashing government spending, they don’t refer to state pensions or the NHS. The shadow of racial tension also lay heavily on the 1970s, when Enoch Powell loomed large. Somehow there seemed be a lot more at stake in the 1970s.

But the political debate is important. Amid the kerfuffle the right is trying to establish a simple narrative: Labour is raising taxes in order to fund welfare for working-age people who don’t deserve it. The problem is that the government is so distracted by the nonsense that it isn’t doing enough to counter this narrative. It is one a number of narratives that could do huge damage in time.

And as for the focus on Ms Reeves: she doesn’t inspire much excitement, but she is not reckless, unlike her two immediate predecessors (Jeremy Hunt and Kwasi Kwateng). If anybody should be taking the blame for this hapless government, it should be its leader, Sir Keir Starmer.