Cometh the hour, cometh the man(ager)

The 17th November—the day of the ‘Autumn Statement’ - looms large. It’s going to be make or break time for the Tories. Indeed, for them (and us) it could (actually inevitably will) lead to considerable financial pain if all the briefings coming out of the Treasury prove to be true. But I think the briefers are probably over-egging the pudding to make the actual pain to come seem less worse than predicted. Nevertheless, now is the time for Sunak to inflict a few tax rises here and there, so that come an election in 2024 (and there is no reason he'd want to hold an election sooner) he will have that magic leeway to make some pre-election tax cuts. Will this strategy work? I doubt it. Over the coming year and a bit the electorate will feel the pain, and some giveaway announcement in two year’s time will not suddenly rekindle its love of the Tories, even if Sunak ‘restores the public finances.’ Clearly the Tories have run out of time. 12 or 13 years seems the maximum for a governing party, and the Tories’ 18 years in power from 1979 to 1997 can perhaps be seen as an aberration. One hopes so. But, according to Electoral Calculus, Starmer is set to have a majority bigger than Blair’s in 1997—twice as big in fact with an improbable 350 or so. I’ve seen no indication that such a majority would lead to the radical shift the size of it suggests should take place. On the back of a massive vote, Labour seems likely to just plough on with a bit of managerialism here and a few tweaks there. There’ll be soundbites aplenty, but no cathartic awakening. I hope I’m wrong, but so far there is little cause for hope, since the Labour Party is likely to ride to power on purely anti-Tory sentiment rather than its promotion of a real alternative which breaks the chains of big finance, market forces, globalisation and their consequences of embedded inequality.