Keir Starmer’s government is suffering from a “lack of narrative” about what it is trying to achieve and should be more fiscally bold and consider a tax on wealth, Neil Kinnock has said.
The former Labour leader said too many of the government’s achievements were being overshadowed. A year after a landslide election win, the party is struggling in the polls and has U-turned on policies including cuts to winter fuel payments and welfare.
“It’s not a mess, but what has gone wrong is really the lack of a narrative, a story of the objectives of the government and where they’re working towards it and how they’re working towards it,” Kinnock, who led Labour into to two elections, said.
The government had implemented “a series of really commendable and absolutely essential policies”, he said, but that they had been obscured by controversies over things such winter fuel and welfare, “all those negative things that really are heartily disliked across the Labour movement and more widely”.
“And that means that, apart from the distaste for undertaking those policies, the cloud hangs over the accomplishments of the government, which are substantial and will become greater.”
Kinnock was scathing about the move by Jeremy Corbyn and other former Labour MPs to set up their own leftwing party. “I understand the difficulty of thinking up a name, and in a comradely way, I’d suggest one: It would be the Farage Assistance Group.”
Amid increasing speculation that the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will have to raise taxes at the autumn budget, Kinnock said Labour’s election focus on fiscal discipline was vital for restoring credibility, but “it did mean that they depressed expectations and limited themselves by saying they were going to rigidly stick to fiscal rules”.
He said there was a risk of the government being “bogged down by their own imposed limitations” and he believed a number of cabinet ministers would want more fiscal boldness.
One option, he said, would be a form of wealth tax, which would be useful not just to raise revenue but as “a gesture, or a substantial gesture in the direction of equity fairness would make a big difference” at a time when “earned incomes have stagnated in real terms while asset values have zoomed”.
He said such a policy should target wealth above £6m or £7m, where a 2% tax would raise £10bn or £11bn a year.
“That’s not going to pay all the bills, but it does two things. One is to secure resources, which is very important. But the second thing it does is to say to the country: we are the government of equity, and this is a country which is very substantially fed up with the fact that whatever happens in the world, whatever happens in the UK, the same interests come out on top, unscathed all the time, while everybody else is paying more for gutted services.”
