It’s the economy, stupid: The US election was another reminder of people’s biggest political priority (Elliot Keck, 8 November, 2024, The Critic)
.The Trump campaign placed the Biden-Harris administration’s failed economic record at the centre of its messaging, but looking around the world and indeed looking at home, this approach was far from unique.
This is something that Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and effectively Starmer’s number two, picked up on in his broadcast round on Thursday morning. When asked for his analysis about the US election, McFadden drew on his own experience as part of the project to “change” the Labour party post-2019 and ultimately win power. As he put it “we had a real focus on living standards and how people felt, and the question ‘are you better off than you were four years ago’… was actually one that we posed during the election.”
That relentless focus on what Labour dubbed a “Tory cost of living crisis” and “Tory tax rises” certainly delivered a decisive victory. And while Conservatives may not want to hear this, the Labour opposition arguably had a more sophisticated and holistic understanding of what a cost of living crisis feels like than the Sunak government.
Whereas Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt twice pulled the lever of tax cuts on pay slips through the two 2p cuts on national insurance and waited for gratitude that never arrived, Labour recognised that actually it wasn’t just in payslips where people felt the impact. It was mortgage costs driven by higher interest rates, rental costs due to the failure to build, inflation driven by the covid spending binge and more, all compounded by the perception of significant government waste and failing public services. Most barely noticed the national insurance cuts.