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There’s good reason politicians are more unpopular than ever

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After a week of two budget debates, one in the House of Commons, one at Croydon Town Hall, ANDREW FISHER reckons it is time that our politicians stopped pretending…

British politics are in a dire state, nationally and locally, as demonstrated with this week’s budgets at Croydon Town Hall and in the House of Commons.

When I was a child in the 1980s, there was an entertaining television programme called Let’s Pretend. I thought of that when reading Inside Croydon’s write-up of the council’s dismal budget meeting on Wednesday night.

In a bankrupt borough that is cutting vital services for vulnerable people, Conservative Mayor Jason Perry pretends he has some autonomy and that the decisions are not being made for him. And the Labour opposition pretends to be an opposition before capitulating and nodding through a budget to which only a few minutes earlier they had recited all their principled objections.

In Westminster earlier that same day, a similar farce played out across the Commons Chamber. Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative Chancellor, regaled us with talk of growth (we’re in recession) and “the progress we’ve made”. What’s that then? Record NHS waiting lists? Increasing levels of child poverty? The numbers of homelessness and rough sleepers going up?

Still, Mr Hunt did cut higher rate capital gains tax for owners of multiple properties like… Mr Hunt.

The Chancellor continued with words even more detached from reality: “More investment. More jobs. Better public services.”

The Chancellor’s Budget speech is just the parliamentary Punch ‘n Judy Show. The real stuff is contained in the Treasury “Red Book”, the Office for Budget Responsibility’s “Economic and Fiscal Outlook”, and the analysis of independent think tanks like the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Scroll through the pages of those reports and you find “business investment is expected to contract by around 5% this year”; unemployment, currently at 3.8%, will peak “at 4.5% in the last quarter of 2024”; while public services will face yet another round of austerity with £20billion of cuts facing public services (outside of the NHS, education and defence) from 2025-2026.

On and on Hunt went, for well over an hour, reading out news that had already been passed to the press in the days before.

‘We don’t want to oppose for opposition’s sake’

Unkind souls say that politics is showbiz for ugly people. That’s unfair, and imprecise: politics is increasingly a pantomime consisting of people who aren’t very entertaining. Nor very honest.

Talking of which, up next was Keir Starmer with similarly flat, scripted jokes, which I’ll spare you. The Labour opposition leader described Hunt’s Budget as “the last desperate act of a party that has failed”. He accused Hunt and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of “stubbornly clinging to the failed ideas of the past, completely unable to generate the growth working people need”.

No opposition: Rachel Reeves, Labour’s shadow chancellor

Starmer claimed the British people would “recognise a Tory con when they see it”, just as they did in November’s autumn statement.

And then just like the Labour opposition in Croydon – all that was solid evaporated into thin air. In a press huddle afterwards, a spokesperson for Starmer told journalists there was nothing that the Labour Party opposed in the Tories’ Budget: “We don’t want to oppose for opposition’s sake.”

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, confirmed this in an interview with ITV’s Robert Peston, “We’re not going to oppose things just for the sake of it.”

Labour is like someone who claims to be a vegetarian, but only between meals. The awful Tories will be attacked, their policies derided, their failings traduced. But when it comes to it, Keir Starmer and his shadow ministers can’t actually say what they would do that is any different.

In Croydon, the council is in massive debt that has been run up over the past 15 years by parties of both stripes, and receives significantly less government funding than it did in 2010, yet has to cope with increasing demand for services.

The books cannot be balanced.

The situation is unsolvable without outside intervention – a point made by Mayor Jason Perry who told Croydon’s budget meeting, “Croydon cannot fix this on our own.”

Perry made the same point last year. He also said last year that he was in conversation with government. That resulted in a 15% Council Tax hike for us (Pay More, Get Less) but, like this year, no debt write-off.

No power, no money, no idea: Croydon Mayor Jason Perry. Pic: Paul Harper

One year on, Perry and his cabinet member for finance, Jason Cummings, have achieved nothing. No bailout, no restitution for decades of structural underfunding of Croydon, and no debt write-off. They are still having “conversations”, though they refused to say with who, or when, or how often.

Perry and Cummings have no money, no powers, and therefore no chance of solving Croydon’s problems. So they pretend, as they draw their generous council allowances.

Croydon will have unbalanced budgets for years to come, with capitalisation directions (upfront loans from government, while the council flogs off public assets) to make up the shortfall. The frontmen may be Perry and Cummings, but it’s now Tory minister Michael Gove and Tony McArdle, the chair of his appointed (and ironically named) “improvement and assurance panel” that call all the shots.

Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Croydon budget meetings meet that description. Really, it’s just a grand old game of dress-up and let’s pretend when a room full of people with no power and no money put on a not-very-entertaining panto.

The situation is different in Westminster, though not any better. The Government has powers to raise revenue, borrow, to do things differently. It’s just that neither frontbench, Tory or Labour, has either the will or courage to make the case.

No wonder a recent survey showed the British people’s faith in politicians and political parties had sunk to an all-time low.

In Croydon, they impotently grandstand to cover up for the fact they can’t do anything. In Westminster they grandstand to disguise the fact they won’t.

Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:

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