This Labour government lacks a future

You might be forgiven for thinking that the Labour government is focused on the future. Since before his government’s first Budget, the Prime Minister has repeatedly asked the British public to stomach short-term hardship in exchange for promised long-term good. This rhetoric seems to contradict the common complaint that politicians’ need to win re-election leads them to neglect the big, ongoing problems that loom over society’s future, in favour of quick fixes that do little more than help them secure victory. Politicians can normally defend themselves against such complaints by saying that’s what voters seem to want. These competing logics contribute to what Michael Mackenzie calls a “democratic myopia thesis”: the idea that democracy is, inevitably, short-sighted and insufficiently future-orientated. Is the Labour government putting paid to that thesis, or at least, an exception that proves the rule?

No, because the Labour government’s version of being long-termist is guilty of the modern democratic tendency to neglect the future as the object of a principled vision. The prelude to, and announcement of, this week’s somewhat messy Budget show you the problems that causes.

A politics that is fully future-orientated not only considers the long-term outcomes of short-term decisions, but imagines and aspires to the kind of society those decisions are intended to create. As Jonathan White puts it:

increasingly rare is a particular kind of future orientation, expressly centered on values, normative principles, and the pursuit of far-reaching change. What lies ahead remains of concern, but the willingness to abstract from particularity and construct a more general vision is diminished. Future-regarding policy abounds, but future-regarding politics is pared back.

Keir Starmer talks about getting the country’s future back, building services that are fit for that future, and delivering change. This rhetoric is fleshed out in the form of concrete missions with future target dates—future-regarding policy. But at no point is it clear what, in general, that future is imagined to be like, in terms of the values and principles that future society should represent—where we are really trying to go, beyond somewhere supposedly better. Amongst a few quite absurd retorts offered up by the Leader of the Opposition, in her widely praised response to the Budget, came one convincing criticism of Labour’s politics: “you need to start with knowing what kind of country you want to be and make a plan to get there”.

Its empty invocation of the future leaves the Labour government unable to make compelling arguments in support of its policies. Announcements like the recent change to the asylum system confound commentators precisely because they are not presented in terms of a consistent political argument. The pre-Budget flip-flopping on income tax was the result, too, of policymaking that is not convincingly cast as part of a process towards the realisation of some principled vision.

The pitch of short-term pain for long-term gain is in itself insufficient to support such an argument. This pitch merely states a truism—pursuing change often brings some immediate hardship—and is not a basis for arguing that those difficult times should be endured or that the change should be sought. Argument requires logic, an ability to keep answering the follow-up “but why?” without contradicting yourself. In democratic politics, that logic falls back on a vision for the future, a promise of what society can be and why we should want that.

The ideologically shallow idea that things will simply be better leaves us looking for signs around us that it is starting to happen. When we fail to see those signs, we lose trust in the delivery of the long-term rewards for our short-term sacrifice. A future evoked, instead, in terms of values and principles, in terms of a meaningful political project, is not so sensitive to short-term results for its validation.

The Budget even revealed that this empty formalism of short-term pain for long-term gain is liable to invert itself when things don’t go according to plan. For example, the Chancellor announced a removal of the two-child limit on Universal Credit that the Prime Minister suspended MPs for supporting last year. The original justification for keeping it was precisely that “tough decisions” need to be made—the same kind of short-term pain that the country needed to endure to achieve some imprecise long-term gain. Yet the justification for removing it now is to reduce child poverty almost immediately when the change takes effect next April. The move will be (partly) funded, we are told, by a “mansion tax” that will be introduced in 2028.

Of course, by saying the logic has been inverted here, I don’t mean imply that reducing child poverty is a short-termist thing to do at all; on the contrary, it means that future generations have less precarious childhoods and are more likely to thrive in the future. But that is precisely why the government’s choice to frame issues of this kind largely in terms of a short-term/long-term cost/benefit trade-off is equal parts vapid and toxic. This Labour Party, it seems, values the end of reducing child poverty. Valuing an outcome like that, in democratic politics, means building it into a vision for the future that can be argued for on its own terms, and in turn can be used to argue for the policies pursued to produce such an outcome. As Jo Michell argues, about the overarching but politically empty prioritisation of “growth”:

Starmer and Reeves… are unable to articulate why, beyond loosening fiscal constraints, growth is desirable. Eighteen months into the first Labour government of a generation, the greater purpose of the Government remains not so much undefined as absent…With a clear understanding of the destination, Labour could articulate a narrative that balances pain, in the form of broad-based tax increases, with gain, by explaining how peoples’ lives will improve.

Democratic politics is future-orientated not only insofar as it makes trade-offs between present and future costs and benefits, but insofar as it is over visions of which values and principles we want to define that future that we contest political questions. If the government is to have any hope of getting itself back into the driver’s seat of our political moment, of getting its future back, it must start arguing in terms of a bold and coherent vision for the future.

Matthew Barnfield is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He researches future-orientated political behaviour.