Potholes and honeymoons
Labour’s start in government and what it needs to do to deliver
In decades past, newlywed Brits returned from holiday resorts in Europe with stories about the warm sunshine, stunning beaches, friendly locals and delicious food. But the local roads? Terrible.
Today, the pothole is closer to home. It’s pretty much everywhere. As well as being ubiquitous, it has become significant in British politics, symbolic of the country’s decline and the inability of anyone to fix things.
Roads have got worse because of austerity’s swingeing cuts to local council budgets plus the damaging effects of climate change. A succession of Ipsos polls have found road maintenance to be the most reviled public service in town. Some might say that deteriorating road surfaces are a ‘first world problem’, but they have been a top tier issue for voters at local elections for some time now.
Even during the period when the media and political spotlight shone brightly on RAAC (commonly known as ‘crumbling concrete’) the public were as likely to identify roads as most in need of improvement as public buildings such as schools, hospitals and court houses. And where once potholes were a mildly amusing story involving eccentric characters such as Mr. Pothole, the ‘yellow pimpernel’ and the ‘guerilla gardener’, the public’s mood is now a combination of frustration and disappointment.
Labour tapped into this during the election campaign with its assertion that Tory neglect meant that there are more potholes on Britain’s roads than craters on the surface of the moon (this was quickly disproved by BBC’s More or Less programme). According to Ipsos, the party’s manifesto pledge to invest in fixing 1 million potholes per year was second only to delivering more NHS appointments in the popularity stakes.
In his book, written before gaining election to Parliament, Torsten Bell pointed to repairing roads as something which could be proof-positive of a new ‘investment nation’:
“In time, public investment drives growth, but in the short-term it means something almost as important: potholes that are filled in, rather than providing a daily, jolting reminder of the country’s stagnation.”
But can Labour deliver? Time will tell and patience will be necessary as the Government has its work cut out to address a long to-do list of wicked problems including securing economic growth, building new homes, improving the NHS, achieving safer streets, as well as fixing the roads.
Will things get harder? Probably. One school of thought is that the new Government should “move fast and fix things”. This was apparently a key learning from Labour’s first term under Tony Blair 25 years ago; leverage your political capital as a large majority government before ‘mid-term blues’ set in.
But there is no single policy lever to pull, no button to press or magic bullet to fire. The fiscal inheritance will stifle ambitions, a message Labour has put on repeat over the past month.
In the absence of levers, buttons and bullets, political capital is being used to create the narrative and set the scene for slower burn, more modest, incremental change which Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox show to be more successful than radicalism anyway.
Honeymoon or mini-moon?
Labour’s political capital has been buoyed by signs of a political honeymoon. After just a week in office, Keir Starmer’s net favourability was +7 compared to -13 before the election. Indeed, as many thought he was doing a good job as Prime Minister as thought the same of Boris Johnson during the period the Coronavirus vaccine was rolled out.
Ipsos has already found signs of the public becoming more positive about Labour delivering on its missions than before the party entered government. Between the launch of Labour’s manifesto and the Kings Speech there was an increase of ten percentage points in the proportion of people who rated Labour’s package of policies as representing positive change.
Sentiment was already positive though, something which serves to remind us that identifying the country’s problems isn’t that difficult especially in a period of ‘declinism’ (of course, it is much harder doing something about them!).
We should also consider that public opinion is prone to confirmation bias, a phenomenon which conveniently pushes our perceptions away from realities — ‘I think X is successful and, look, there’s an example, and there and there….’ It is human nature to fit the facts to your worldview rather than the other way around.
This was one of the themes of ‘Deliverism Defeated’, a 2022 paper by Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams and Harry Hanbury which used Bidenomics (among other things) as a case study to illustrate the far from linear relationship between policy outcomes and public recognition of success.
The authors called for a less “economistic approach” suggesting that delivery is insufficient on its own. Instead, they advise providing “the milk with the cloth — the material with the emotional” and “a more holistic approach to addressing people’s fears and anxieties.”
The implication is that policy needs careful crafting, benefits from sharp insight, and effective storytelling. Similarly, Sam Freedman — senior fellow at the Institute for Government — has attributed policy failures to the absence of clear aims and outcomes and an unwillingness to confront difficult decisions. This is partly (in my words, not his) because of a faulty reading of public opinion.
Hope might spring eternal
According to Ipsos, people’s most common response to the election result was to feel hopeful and relieved. They also attributed the Conservatives’ defeat to incompetence and scandals. There is a chance that that once people detect change — or sniff failure — they might not stop, just as Black Wednesday and the mini-budget were cliff edges in public opinion terms.
This underlines the importance of framing the narrative to secure a foundation. Thus, the culture and mindset around housebuilding and planning needs to shift from pain to gain, from loss aversion to the prospects for progress, from a presumption ‘against’ to a presumption ‘for’.
People need convincers or signals, signs of successful interventions which improve people’s lived experience. Bell describes “down payments — early victories which will incrementally rebuild faith…” Such an approach was at the heart of ‘zero tolerance’ involving the relentless targeting of even minor crimes by the police and authorities as a precursor to tackling more serious ones (the ‘broken windows theory’).
Expectations matter. Britons are net positive that Labour will do a good rather than bad job on each of its five missions, especially ‘building an NHS fit for the future’ and ‘breaking down the barriers to opportunity at every stage for every child’. But there are doubts that the full package of policies is deliverable. For example, whilst 40% are confident that Labour’s policies are affordable within their tax and spending plans, 49% are not.
In 1997, there was a sense that ‘things can only get better’ (this wasn’t simply a slogan). That doesn’t exist today. Labour need to earn trust and optimism.
The new government has made an energetic start and has worked hard to frame its core purpose — economic growth — and, subsequently, the context — an unenviable inheritance. It has impressed a higher proportion of people than voted for it at the start of July. It appears as willing to make the political weather as adapt to it.
The focus of the next few months, at least within the Westminster and Whitehall bubble, will be matters of tax and spend. This ought to be a means to an end, perhaps the end of the beginning, creating a foundation for policymaking. Beyond this, Labour must seek to make a tangible difference to people’s lives, something made possible by understanding and responding to people’s conceptions of what change looks and feels like.
The road ahead is long, bumpy and uncomfortable. Filling in the potholes ought to make it an easier ride. And it could also extend the honeymoon into a more enduring relationship.
