With Labour seeming certain to form the next government, with one week to go before the General Election, our columnist ANDREW FISHER argues that political engagement after July 4 is going to be even more important

If this was a boxing match, the referee would have stepped in by now to stop Rishi Sunak and his supporters suffering more damage. Several Tories have already thrown in the towel.

Time running out: the Weakly Standard sums up Sunak’s predicament

According to Ipsos Mori, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has the worst net satisfaction score of any PM tracked by the company since they started polling in 1979. That’s a period that has included Thatcher, John Major at his lowest ebb, Gordon Brown during a global economic crisis, Cameron, May, Johnson and even Liz Truss.

Forecasts show the Conservatives on course for a devastatingly bad result when the votes are all tallied up just over a week from now. YouGov forecasts Labour winning 425 seats to just 108 for the Tories.

It’s even worse with another pollster, Savanta, which predicts the Tories reduced to just 53 seats, only three ahead of the Lib Dems on 50, and Labour on 516. It would represent the fewest number of seats that the Conservatives have had in Parliament in almost 200 years, and is less than one-third of the seats held by the Tories after Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide.

Not that there is a groundswell of favourable opinion for our likely next Prome Minister, Keir Starmer, of whom Ipsos says, “his net satisfaction score (-19) would be the worst for a Leader of the Opposition entering No.10”.

Polling shows Starmer’s personal ratings are worse than Jeremy Corbyn’s at the same stage of the 2017 election campaign.

Mercifully, there are only seven days left of this.

But while the election campaign will end on July 4, politics won’t stop.

What happens from July 5 is vitally important – with huge problems facing our country, problems we can see around us every day here in Croydon.

Bad news all-round: Tory Sunak’s stats may be abysmal, but Labour’s Starmer has hardly won approval from the nation, according to these IPSOS figures

And this election campaign has given us little hope that those problems are about to be solved, or even noticeably improved, under the likely Labour government.

Yet another round of austerity is baked into Labour’s manifesto – with little to no funding for core public services. The independent economics thinktank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said there is a “conspiracy of silence” from the two major parties about the need for higher taxes or further austerity. The IFS described public service spending increases promised in Labour’s manifesto as “tiny, going on trivial”. The tax rises proposed by Labour, the IFS said, are “even more trivial”.

The NHS has record waiting lists, there’s a crisis in social care, huge backlogs in our courts, councils collapsing around the country and universities on the financial brink, too.

There are shortages of GPs, dentists, doctors, nurses, care workers and teachers. Yet Labour, like the Conservatives, say they will bring down immigration and not raise taxes.

It is fundamentally dishonest.

We will need to fund training for more of these workers and welcome more migrants to fill these vacancies, at least in the short to medium term. The alternative is ever depleted services, longer backlogs and rationing of services.

Labour’s answer to this has been “growth”.

When Keir Starmer announced his “mission” for Britain to achieve “the highest sustained growth in the G7”, the cornerstone policy was “a Green Prosperity Plan that will provide the catalytic investment needed to become a clean energy superpower”.

Gone with the wind: Starmer’s Labour has abandoned its commitment to green growth

Labour’s Green Prosperity Plan had promised an “additional £28billion of capital investment in our country’s green transition for each and every year of this decade”,  which would fund new energy infrastructure, green transport and better home insulation.

But in February this year, that plan was scaled back and when the manifesto was published the plan was left with just an extra £4.7 billion investment.

So does Labour actually have a plan for “growth”?

Labour’s argument now seems to rest on two claims:

1) the mere fact of having some stable government after years of Tory chaos; and
2) some liberalisation of planning laws (especially around housing and energy infrastructure) which will trigger greater private investment and therefore create jobs.

That may help, if delivered. But it’s not enough alone.

Two things are usually prerequisites for sustained stable growth: rising investment and rising wages.

Britain has long lagged behind other nations in terms of public investment. So it becomes a question of scale – is what Labour is proposing sufficient to stimulate sustained higher growth? The answer is that it is unlikely, given the Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank said it means “both the Conservatives and Labour plan to reduce government investment over the next parliamentary term”.

Then there’s wages, which have fallen in this Parliament. In an economy that is 80% service sector, if people don’t have much spare money in their pockets, then they can’t spend it and the economy won’t grow. Businesses large and small tighten their belts and cut costs rather than invest. That is a big part of the problem. Without boosting wages or social security benefits or significantly boosting investment, it’s hard to confidently predict sustained higher growth. There is no money allocated in Labour’s “fully costed” manifesto to boost wages or increase benefits.

All in all there are huge question marks about Labour’s strategy for growth and its funding of public services.

That means whoever are our newly elected MPs, we will have a role to hold them to account. Where’s the money to sort out the council? To reduce NHS waiting lists and  settle the junior doctors’ strike? Or to start building the council housing our community needs?

We also need to be vigilant against our new MPs finding scapegoats rather than solutions. The amount of bile poured out against people on benefits and migrants has made this campaign especially dispiriting, and neither of the major parties comes out looking good …

Labour alienates Bangladeshi communities

It’s not just the entry of Nigel Farage that has brought anti-migrant and dog-whistle racism into this campaign.

Scapegoated: Apsana Begum has spoken out against her party leader’s comments about Bangladeshis

Speaking at a hustings event organised by The Sun (the Murdoch-owned rag that drips poison into our society on a daily basis), Starmer said, “I’ll make sure we got planes going off… back to the countries where people came from. At the moment people coming from Bangladesh are not being removed.”

And the Labour Party leader said: “Those people who shouldn’t be here when they come from countries like Bangladesh or wherever, we’re gonna send them back.”

The phrase “send them back” has a particular resonance, as that’s what the racist thugs of the National Front used to chant in British streets half a century ago.

On BBC Newsnight earlier in the week, Jonathan Ashworth, a member of Starmer’s front-bench team, had expressed similar views and used similar language: “When they come from countries like Bangladesh or wherever, we’re going to send them back.” When pressed on what he meant by “wherever”, Ashworth also mentioned India, Afghanistan and Iran.

Most asylum seekers are coming from Afghanistan, Iran and Syria – countries that are far from safe, where persecution is rife and opposition to the despotic regimes in charge often results in imprisonment, torture and even death.

Amnesty International says the increasingly authoritarian government in Bangladesh is “restricting liberty and rights to privacy as well as freedom of expression” and is using “legislation to target journalists and human rights defenders, subjecting them to arbitrary detention and torture”, adding there was “a concerning increase in enforced disappearances and lack of accountability for deaths in custody”.

Apsana Begum, standing to be the Labour MP for Poplar and Limehouse, and the daughter of Bangladeshi migrants, released a statement saying, “I am so proud of the East End’s diversity and that our communities include migrants from all around the world.

“Let me be very clear: I will never stand by and let migrant communities be scapegoated.”

Meanwhile, Sabina Akhtar, the deputy leader of the Labour group on Tower Hamlets council, resigned from the party in protest, saying “I cannot be proud of this party anymore when the leader of the party singles out my community and insults my Bangladeshi identity.”

After Labour’s appalling and cack-handed treatment of Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen at the start of the election campaign, Starmer’s party’s only saving grace is that it’s alienating voters at a slower rate than the Conservatives.

For the full list of all the candidates standing for election in your constituency in the General Election on July 4, use our widget here:

• From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn. Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
• Fisher is also a regular, welcomed pundit on The Croydon Insider podcast, and is a guest on our latest episode – Why Vote? – answering a range of questions on the election and politics. This is FREE to download now from iC’s Patreon page or Spotify. Click here for more info

Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:

• Bringing the parties to book: manifestos are empty of promise
• Splash and purge: just another five weeks of campaigning to go
• ‘Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others!’
• How myth of shared ownership has made housing crisis worse

• Click here for more by Andrew Fisher

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