The morning before the next five years

Labour's honeymoon period won't last long, and there's urgent work to be done to build a fairer country if they are to avoid losing public support

We have a Labour government. So a new era begins. And the warm glow of victory won’t last long. If anything, the huge list of problems facing the country looks even more daunting in the cold light of day on the morning after the night before.

Top of the list - we’d argue - is making Britain a fairer country by tackling the inequality, of all forms, that blights our society and will undermine any chances of achieving Labour’s missions for government.

Earlier this week we published a report, The Canaries, that set out the evidence that based on our current trajectory, unfair inequality is going to get worse over the next five years, with knock-on impacts on our society, economy, democracy and prospects for reaching net zero by 2050.

The Observer wrote up the report’s warning that a failure to reverse these trends in the coming years could see unprecedented far-right gains at the 2029 general election. While Reform are arguably more populist right than far-right, their strong performance last night (with a vote share so far of 14%) is a sign of things to come, alongside increasing support for actual far-right parties across Europe, not least in France. Unfairness feeds populism and the far-right.

The Labour manifesto tells us very little about what they will do in government to address inequality. The Institute for Fiscal Studies was far from alone in criticisingthem for joining with the Conservatives in a 'conspiracy of silence’ about the challenges facing the country over the coming years; Paul Johnson at the IFS pointed out that “Labour’s additional day-to-day spending commitments are essentially trivial. They offer nothing concrete on welfare.”

We know, of course, that breaking down barriers to opportunity is one of the new Labour government’s five missions. And Labour clearly understands that this requires action outside as well as inside the classroom. Their manifesto acknowledges that “greater opportunity requires greater security”, and talks of tackling poverty and inequality through promoting good work, reviewing social security, reducing child poverty, and improving housing security and standards by reforming regulation of the private rented sector, in addition to introducing new education targets such as recruiting 6,500 expert teachers and opening 3,000 additional nurseries. But there’s no real sense of how the new government plans to rise to the formidable scale of the challenge, given that opportunities are so unequal in today’s Britain that, by the time they take their GCSEs, pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are almost 19 months behind their peers.

Manifestos serve a particular purpose, and that purpose has now been served. Labour set out its first steps for change in May. Now it needs to work out its next steps. Missions are long-term projects, but if the new Labour government is not able to noticeably improve people’s life chances and living standards by 2029, there is a real risk that far-right parties will capitalise on this failure and achieve a result in that year’s general election that has to date been dismissed as impossible. Labour’s healthy parliamentary majority gives it both an opportunity and a responsibility to bold. Failing to take calculated risks now by spending political capital will only open up far bigger risks down the line. A good example of a calculated risk would be concrete action on “unlocking wealth and putting it to work”.

We’ll be publishing a report next Tuesday, Deepening the Opportunity Mission, that will look at why the new Labour government needs to tackle inequality before it can make real progress on the opportunity mission, what kinds of policy goals might be useful in orientating government policy towards tackling inequality as a result, and how to work across government to make progress on tackling inequalities as part of a wider shift to mission-driven government and working practices.

Next week’s edition of Fair Comment will be published on Tuesday, a day later than usual, to accompany the launch of the report. And we’ll be running a launch webinar on Zoom at 1pm on Tuesday 9 July, in partnership with the Policy Institute at King’s College London - find out more and sign up here.