After the first TV debate

2024 General Election

Last night’s head-to-head debate between Sunak and Starmer will not change the fact that Labour will still win the general election. Predicted outcomes do not always happen, as Narendra Modi’s missing landslide this week demonstrates, but Britain is moving inexorably to a Labour government.

Everyone must now regret agreeing to a format involving forty-five second responses that militated against giving actual answers, and led the programme to appear more interested in the timings than the answers.

Here are five points from the ITV debate.

One, Sunak has more to gain from these debates than Starmer and showed it.

Sunak appeared more hungry to intervene, often with wild assertions. The downside is that he came across as grating, shrill and sniping, frequently talking over Starmer and Julie Etchingham. But the upside for the Tories is that he forced his way into the debate, particularly with his charge that Labour will raise taxes by £2000. Keir Starmer seemed unable to settle on a tactic to deal with Sunak’s sharp elbows. One of the problems we encountered in the TV debates in the London mayoral elections of 2008 and 2012 - particularly the former - was Boris Johnson’s calculation that talking over everyone to get his point across and block others out was more valuable than any of the downsides. Sunak is no Johnson but either consciously or otherwise he resorted to Johnson’s playbook.

Two, living standards.

The first question in the ITV debate was rightly on the collapse in living standards over the last five years. Placing living standards at the top was correct since it is the principal concern of the majority of the population - but most strikingly neither candidate for Prime Minister made a serious proposal for rapidly improving peoples’ material living standards. Oddly, Sunak’s combination of a Labour threat - the £2000 tax threat - and a Tory offer of tax cuts, was superficially more in the domain of the living standards debate than most of what was offered by Keir Starmer. However outlandish Sunak’s claims on this matter, Labour does have a problem with its offer on immediate living standards - that is, it largely does not have one. Some living standards relief in Labour’s programme can be found in education with measures such as childcare reform and breakfast clubs, but for the most part Labour is camped out on its sequence of: (1) stability first and above all else with self-denying conservatism over fiscal rules, tax, redistribution, public investment, public spending; and (2) some supply side measures to promote growth and encourage private investment. Measures to ease pressure on prices, incomes, poverty - or increase spending on public services - are then rejected in favour of ‘growth first’. Labour’s ‘iron-clad’ position on the economy has denuded it of a policy programme to lift people out of the living standards squeeze, a fact all too obvious in last night’s debate. Labour is able to capitalise on public anger over falling living standards without having a solid platform to raise them.

Three, tax.

Sunak launched his claim that Labour will raise taxes by £2000 right at the start of the debate and stuck at it for the whole hour. Sunak’s claim is very much in the vein of previous Tory attacks on Labour in earlier general elections. Thus it was strange to watch Keir Starmer not confront it immediately. You can either ignore such an attack in order to focus on your own narrative and not engage with your opponent’s, or you have to find a way to confront it, shut it down and/or turn it back on your opponent. Starmer tried the former but it was apparent to the viewer that it was not working. Keir Starmer then finally switched to a somewhat technical refutation of Sunak’s assertion - but this was inadequate to the jabbing headline simplicity of Sunak’s tax claim.

In fact tax is a big issue for the incoming Labour government, just not in the way Sunak raised it last night. When Julie Etchingham put it to the two leaders that those government budgets outside protected departments are set to face significant cuts, neither fully had an answer. Similarly, local government faces a funding crisis. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned that the two main parties are ‘avoiding the reality that they are effectively signed up to sharp spending cuts, while arguing over smaller changes to taxes and spending.’ In March, Paul Johnson of the IFS argued that both Conservatives and Labour were joining in ‘a conspiracy of silence in not acknowledging the scale of the choices and trade-offs that will face us after the election’ which included ‘eye-wateringly tough choices’ on public service spending. All of that is before any preferable and necessary measures to ease the cost of living crisis, such as universal free school meals, abolishing the two child benefit cap, or public sector pay rises. It is in the context of the pressures on spending that even a former adviser in Tony Blair’s government, Patrick Diamond, has argued alongside Colm Murphy that Labour should look at higher taxes on wealth. Last summer the TUC set out a proposal for a wealth tax on the richest 140,000 people in the UK, which it says could raise more than £10bn to help pay for public services. So on the one hand Labour is seeking to fend off Sunak’s £2k tax claims, but on the other it is weeks away from inheriting the reality of public services that require an injection of public expenditure: the problem with Labour’s stance is not so much last night’s attack line from the outgoing Tory PM, but the far more serious problem that the party is not committed to a programme of progressive tax policies that would rescue public services, confront poverty, and initiate a period of redistribution in favour of lower and middle income households.

Four, Gaza

Israel’s onslaught in Gaza has reverberated through global politics. During the ITV debate the short time devoted to Gaza was characterised by a cessation of hostility, with the two leaders turning temporarily respectful and polite. But millions of people have taken different positions to the two front benches over a ceasefire and arms to Israel. In Britain, Labour offered Israel a blank cheque from the start, then refused to back a ceasefire, and is still not committed to ending arms sales to Isreal. Mass mobilisations have shown there is a huge movement in Britain for Palestine and for a foreign policy agenda that is not determined by Washington’s agenda. As a consequence of its bad line, the Labour leadership has faced its most sustained period of internal dissent since Keir Starmer became leader, and lost the Rochdale by-election. None of the real choices on Gaza and Israel were given a real airing in the debate.

Five, the real debate

It is too late for the Tories. They are now working on damage limitation, not victory. Consequently the TV debates in the general election are only a precursor to the debate that will open up once there is a Labour government. Labour in government will face pressure and demands from its own base, whilst at the same time a battle erupts to lead the right’s opposition to the government - which is the meaning of Nigel Farage’s entry into the election.

What will happen to the debate under the Labour government is to some extent already reflected in the arguments of the trade unions, campaigners, and social movements aiming to push their priorities into the election campaign towards the politicians who will soon be elected. That can be seen with Palestine for example.

After July 4th very deep tensions are bound to take shape under the new Labour government’s self-imposed economic framework: over working class living standards; pay and household incomes; tax; public investment; broken public services; redistribution; poverty; and the scale of the climate crisis. Immediately, the politics of the movement for the Palestinians will be directed at Labour in power. Questions of military spending or spending on public services will become concrete decisions.

The election TV debates will soon feel like a long way off.