WILL Labour be better than advertised? “Soft left” supporters of Sir Keir Starmer are trying to reassure themselves that Labour’s bleak promises to do very little redistribution or reform are just a ruse: Labour is trying to sneak into government past the right-wing press and reactionary voters by adopting a low profile. 

Once elected, they hope Rachel Reeves will say: “We’ve looked at the books, and it looks like we will have to tax the rich after all.”

Reeves’s recent announcement in the Telegraph that she has torn up her own former commitment to a “wealth tax” prompted another round of “she’s only saying that to get elected and doesn’t mean it” from the soft left.

Reeves told the newspaper that “I don’t have any spending plans that require us to raise £12 billion worth of money. So I don’t need a wealth tax or any of those things … We have no plans for a wealth tax.” 

Reeves confirmed Starmer’s leadership election pledge to raise the top rate of tax has been binned. The paper said Labour frontbenchers are being told they should “identify schemes that can be scrapped if they want to fund new projects” as “the money is simply not going to be there.”

Politics Professor Rob Ford described Reeves’s bleak announcement as “Another one to file under ‘Understandable caution to protect polling lead, but will bring serious problems once in government’,” adding: “A chancellor Reeves will very likely either have to disappoint a lot of voters hungry for change, or break some of these pledges.”

Starmer supporters are trying to make themselves believe she will break these pledges and switch to a tax-the-rich, spend-for-the-poor stance in office.

It’s an odd politics, that believes you can lie your way to reform rather than build a case for change, a kind of curdled top-down Fabianism with added dishonesty. 

It’s also hard to think of many examples where reforming governments haven’t delivered less, not more, than promised: in office, reforming governments can use the pressure of their democratic mandate — if they actually stood on a reform platform — but get counter-pressure from the City, media, US embassy and so on to trim their programme.

There is one example of a government that appeared to “underpromise and overdeliver” in tax and spend that probably gives the soft left some hope — the first Blair government.

Labour got into office in 1997 with a plan to “stick to Tory spending limits” for “the first two years in office.” 

Tony Blair’s Labour used arguments about Tory “mismanagement” meaning Labour had to stick to Tory spending limits that are very similar to Starmer and Reeves. 

Labour’s 1997 manifesto said: “Our decisions have not been taken lightly. They are a recognition of Conservative mismanagement of the public finances.” 

Labour said that Tory failure meant they had accept Tory spending plans, adding: “We will resist unreasonable demands on the public purse, including any unreasonable public-sector pay demands.”

Then in the 1998 Spending Review Gordon Brown did an about-turn: New Labour did many bad things, like PFI, but Brown significantly increased spending, especially on schools and hospitals.

Is Reeves doing a “Brown”? Will she allow spending and taxes on the rich, despite her promises?

It’s worth looking at the history to answer this question.

Firstly, the 1997 pledge was very clearly “for two years.” It was designed to allow for big spending later — which is why Brown announced spending in 1998 that would begin in 1999. Reeves has not put any such time limit on her “no wealth taxes” pledge.

Secondly, Brown was under pressure from his own party, from unions and from the Lib Dems.

Crucially, Labour was failing on its other pledges. In June 1998 the Telegraph gave the background to Brown’s turnaround.

“Labour could not both meet its generous election pledges and also stay within the tight spending framework of the Tories. National health waiting lists have been getting longer, not shorter. Classroom sizes have been growing, not shrinking. Something had to give, and after the back-bench revolts on lone-parent benefits and student tuition fees, it was inevitable going to be the spending restraints of the Iron Chancellor.”

A 1998 Observer editorial makes clear how much was at stake. It said: “If a Labour government cannot improve the public services on which everyone except the secure and cocooned wealthy depends, then there is no point to a Labour government.” 

The liberal-left paper added: “We did not vote for a continuation of the Tory squeeze on a public sector that Conservative, Bupa-covered, privately educated MPs neither knew nor cared about. We voted for change, but it is far from clear we are going to get it.” 

Will Hutton wrote in the same paper that sticking to Tory spending limits was only part of the problem as: “Whether on law and order, commitment to lowering corporate taxation, the refusal to enlarge trade union rights, on extending the principle of privatisation (notably prisons), on the private financing of public-sector investment, on the retention of selective grammar schools … on introducing student fees … New Labour has persevered with Conservative policies.”

Responding to these pressures, the Guardian reported that Brown “mapped out Labour’s strategy for winning a second full term in power when he unveiled a £56bn increase in public expenditure on voter-friendly services like health and education over the next three years.”

They added that the plans were “heavily dependent upon the economy avoiding a grinding recession over the next to years — and on continued public-sector pay restraint.”

These were the conditions for Brown’s spending turnaround. So if we want Starmer’s Labour to have any reform programme at all, we need to get actual reform pledges from the party, we need backbenchers ready to revolt, unions ready to protest, have rival parties ready to pressure, and so on, rather than just hope Reeves is lying.

Follow Solomon Hughes at twitter.com/SolHughesWriter.