The long, hot summer of discontent is finally over. Parliament returned this week if not exactly with a rush of back to school energy, then at least with the sense that the government is now back to fill what was becoming an increasingly dangerous August vacuum.
When exhausted ministers retreated to lick their wounds over the summer, Nigel Farage saw his chance and took it, filling the slow news days with encouragement of protesters over asylum seeker accommodation. He was rewarded by polling showing voters now see immigration – the terrain on which Reform UK is palpably desperate to fight an election, because it’s terrain on which Labour can never go far enough to please some supporters without horrifying half the rest – and not a broken economy as Britain’s biggest problem, an impression arguably only reinforced when the government’s first announcement on returning from recess was a crackdown on refugees bringing their families to Britain.
Yet its second move, more hearteningly, was a reshuffle of economic policymaking that suggests Reform isn’t necessarily guaranteed to have everything its way this autumn. Having hired the former deputy governor of the Bank of England Minouche Shafik to advise him, Starmer has also now poached Rachel Reeves’s restless deputy Darren Jones to work for him on delivery. Both moves come ahead of an autumn budget marking what may be Labour’s last real chance to get out of its defensive crouch and move on to the attack.
Do you blame migrants and the politicians who let them in for Britain’s problems, or wealthy elites plus the politicians who let them get away with too much? It’s a depressing question for anyone seeking something more inspiring than a choice of scapegoats to hate, and also arguably a trick one, given neither is obviously to blame for a small country’s struggles with low productivity plus the cumulative blows of a banking crisis, austerity, Brexit, Covid, and several years of lousy government. But it’s shaping up to be the question of the autumn anyway, for a country pulled one way by surging rightwing populism and the other by a nascent leftwing version, springing up around the Green leadership contest and what may or may not turn out to be the second coming of Jeremy Corbyn.
A genuinely popular government could come straight through the middle, but an unpopular one risks being left for dead if its only answer to such a fundamental “whose side are you on?” question is to squeak that actually it’s more complicated than that. When forced to choose, research for the thinktank Persuasion found 44% of Britons blame the rich for our national woes compared with 38% who blame migrants, though with some important nuances. (The over-60s are twice as likely as gen Z to blame migrants, while graduates are angrier than non-graduates at wealthy elites, despite being statistically more likely to join them.) But while Reform UK voters are unsurprisingly heavily anti-migrant, Labour voters who would consider voting Reform – the ones who stalk Downing Street’s nightmares – are still more inclined to blame the rich for their troubles.
That may help explain why, when Persuasion ranked imaginary Labour policies earlier this year by how likely they were to keep Labour 2024 voters loyal, a wealth tax on the top 1% was the second strongest contender, boosting Labour at the expense of both the Greens and Reform. (Pledging to scrap human rights law and deport all asylum seekers, by contrast, actively helped the Greens recruit while cutting little ice with Reformers.) If immigration divides Labour’s big city liberal voters from their “red wall” cousins, the one thing on which they still agree is soaking the rich.
None of this makes a specific levy on the 1% an intrinsically brilliant idea, popular as it is with the 99% of us who wouldn’t pay it. Any income stream reliant on a tiny handful of highly mobile multimillionaires with excellent accountants is too precarious a basis for funding public services, and even if it worked, it would be nowhere near covering the future needs of a country facing various existential challenges. But the broader principles of taxing the wealthy – that in a national crisis those with more should contribute more, and that assets get off relatively lightly compared with income under the British tax system – is one whose time has come.
It’s still hugely risky territory for a chancellor with no electoral mandate for raising taxes, who promised after last year’s budget not to keep coming back for more. But a big fat political row over taxing the rich is arguably less dangerous for Labour now than getting trapped in the doom loop of arguing about immigration, and it would make life more uncomfortable for Reform, a party of the economically squeezed led by some very rich men.
Over summer, the Treasury has let speculation run wild about budget tax raids on everything from inheritance to pensions, property and rental income. Many of the kites flown will ultimately come crashing to the ground, but the overall message is that the once unthinkable can at least now be considered. Whitehall has noted the rising profile of the junior Treasury minister Torsten Bell, a well-networked former adviser to chancellor Alistair Darling, among others, and a creative thinker who argued for bold tax reforms in his recent book Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back. (He also used to run the Resolution Foundation thinktank, which led an inquiry into the causes of economic stagnation chaired by Shafik; another Resolution employee turned MP, the economist Dan Tomlinson, joined the Treasury in Monday’s mini-reshuffle).
Last autumn’s painful budget measures were presented with much hand-wringing about how ministers really didn’t want to do this but had no choice, a strategy meant to pin blame on the last government which inadvertently left the new one sounding oddly unsure of itself. Listening to Bell arguing on air this August with LBC’s Tom Swarbrick about Reeves’s plans to extend inheritance tax to pension pots was a reminder of what confidence sounds like. Why shouldn’t he pass unused retirement savings on to his children after his death, Swarbrick asked? Nonsense, Bell scoffed: pensions are for supporting people in old age, not avoiding inheritance tax. Like many a Treasury aide turned not remotely humble MP, he isn’t universally beloved by colleagues, but Bell knows how to put up a fight – a skill that will be in demand this autumn. For a government this far behind in the polls, everything is now going to be a battle. What matters now, as all good generals know, is picking the most favourable terrain on which to fight.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
