Six weeks after winning a landslide victory in the UK general election, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government is making it clear where its priorities and preferences lie.
The party has rewarded its friends in the Labour movement with substantial pay rises for junior doctors and train drivers, and the repeal of Conservative trade union legislation establishing a minimum threshold for the proportion of workers needed to vote for strike action. Just as ominously, it has also shown no mercy for middle England, promising to impose 20 percent value added tax (VAT) on private schools and signaling that it would raise taxes on pensions, inheritance and capital gains, reduce landlords’ rights to get rid of tenants, and build houses in the exurbs and shires.
It is easy to dismiss all this as politics as usual: You reward your supporters and stuff your opponents — “dance with the one that brung ya,” as an old US political adage has it. Yet there is something vindictive about Labour’s policies.
Illustration: Constance Chou
Labour is bringing forward the date for imposing VAT on private schools to January in a way that seems calculated to cause as much disruption as possible. An analysis of Labour’s house-building plans by The Times found that constituencies represented by Conservative Cabinet ministers saw nearly double the average rise in new home targets (42.79 percent) compared with those represented by Labour Cabinet ministers (23.71 percent). British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves sounds uncomfortably like former chancellor of the exchequer Denis Healey who once promised to tax the rich until “the pips squeak” — only this time the pips belong to the middle class as well as the rich.
Starmer sold himself to the British public as a moderate alternative to the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn who led the party from 2015 to 2020 — perhaps even as a new Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. However, Starmer is already forgetting Blair’s most important political lesson: The road to long-term political and economic success lies not in coddling your supporters but in keeping middle England happy.
Any competent politician can win a one-off landslide if the other side has messed up badly enough, Blair argued.
What takes real talent is winning over the Conservatives’ natural constituency and turning yourself into their champion.
“Middle England” is a frustratingly imprecise term and all the more powerful for that. It is partly a geographic term that refers to the provinces and suburbs. However, plenty of middle Englanders live in pebble-dash villas in the less fashionable parts of London. It is partly a social term that refers to people who are neither rich nor poor. Yet the inhabitants of multi-million-pound houses in Surrey are also middle Englanders. So middle England is as much a cultural or even spiritual term as a sociological one — the equivalent of la France profonde or “silent majority.”
There are lots of things that are infuriating about middle England, as a glance at the Daily Mail will demonstrate. It is both the capital of “not in my backyard”-ism (NIMBYism) — hence the Conservative Party’s failure to build enough houses over the past 14 years — and the land of hypocrisy. Middle Englanders — particularly the older ones — like to boast about their enterprising spirit, but for the most part they have got richer because of asset price inflation. They like to call for cuts in the welfare state, but wail like babies when the government cuts their fuel allowances.
However, Starmer’s Labour Party is in danger of turning irritation around middle England’s vices into a broad-based attack on its virtues. Many families make significant sacrifices to send their children to private schools — particularly if those children have learning or emotional difficulties. In the process, they drive educational excellence and increase the amount of money the country spends in the creation of human capital. Yet Starmer’s government is treating them as if they are nothing more than queue jumpers.
Middle Englanders also work hard to keep England’s green land as pleasant as possible. NIMBYism is driven not just by opposition to change, but by a well-merited fear that new housing developments are unnecessarily ugly, with boxy, homogenized houses built to satisfy planning rules rather than to fit in with the local environment. Polling suggests that people are far less opposed to new housing developments if they are aesthetically pleasing. However, British Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Angela Rayner has imperiously removed the requirement that new buildings should be “beautiful” on the grounds that “beautiful means nothing, really,” a notion that would have come as a surprise to those two great progenitors of the modern Labour movement, John Ruskin and William Morris.
Blair’s respect for middle England was based on two insights that revolutionized left-of-center politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The first insight was best expressed by former US president Bill Clinton in a speech in April 1992: He referred to “the ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you’ll be rewarded, you’ll do a little better next year than you did last year, your kids will do better than you.”
The second insight was summed up by Philip Gould, one of Blair’s most trusted political operatives, in his 1998 manifesto The Unfinished Revolution: How Modernizers Saved the Labour Party: “Mass politics is becoming middle-class politics. Winning the century means winning middle-class support.”
Starmer has forgotten both insights. During the election, the Labour leader was so focused on recapturing the Red Wall seats that were lost to former British prime minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party in 2019 that he forgot the force of Gould’s embourgeoisement thesis. Far from being a guide to future electoral success, that election was a one-off affair driven by fear of Corbyn and exhaustion with Brexit.
Now his chancellor is threatening to rewrite tax rules that were originally put in place, by both the Conservatives and Labour, to encourage people to buy their own homes, invest their savings in individual savings accounts, found their own businesses and plan for their children’s futures.
Why should the prime minister care about the growing anger that he is stoking up in middle England given the size of his majority?
The obvious reason is that his majority, though large, is fragile, based on only 34 percent of the vote (Corbyn got 40 percent in 2019), and driven by hostility to the Conservatives rather than affection for Labour. It would not take long for middle England to forgive the Conservative Party for its failures and withdraw its temporary support for Reform or the Liberal Democrats or indeed Labour if it begins to see its pensions raided, its children priced out of private schools and deprived of their inheritances, and its views ruined by ugly new builds.
A deeper reason is that needlessly antagonizing middle England would do nothing to address the country’s underlying problem, its dismal growth rate. Labour’s central promise was to improve productivity. Yet it failed to use pay rises as a way of pushing through productivity improvements — and now risks setting off a competitive round of wage inflation. It was all quid and no quo. Giving productivity-free pay rises to strike-prone workers while claiming that there is a financial crisis is not a good way of building sustainable support for your policies.
Britain is on track to lose 9,500 millionaires this year, more than double the number who left the country last year and more than any country in the world except China, fleeing to friendlier tax regimes such as Dubai, the United Arab Emirates and Italy. Most middle Englanders might be too deeply rooted in the country to follow, but they are likely to respond to a harsher tax environment by pulling in their horns — working less, moving money abroad, putting off house moves, retiring earlier and, as soon as they get the chance, voting for a friendlier government.
Starmer and Reeves are right to believe that it is better to be “right but repulsive” than “wrong but wromantic [sic],” in the words of C.W. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman’s 1066 and All That. There is no justification for giving free fuel to wealthy pensioners, for example. And it would be impossible to build the more than 1 million houses that the UK needs without spoiling some people’s views.
However, there is something dysfunctional and distasteful about the way that the new Labour government is antagonizing such an important voting bloc. Blair’s Institute for Global Change reportedly has significant influence over Starmer’s thinking. The former prime minister would do the government and the country a service if he were to speak up about the group that he understood so well.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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