Starmer or Sunak: City A.M. delivers its verdict on the 2024 General Election
Much has recently been made of whether Keir Starmer works after 6pm. For the record, he does. But as smart City bosses know, it’s not when you work, or how much, but how effectively you do so.
The government, for instance, has been grafting for some fourteen years. For large chunks of the latter half of that period, whether up with the lark or burning the midnight oil, they have produced little of note from their toil.
In truth, this version of the Conservative party was doomed when, rather than casting off the Liz Truss budget or moving on from the Brexit wars, Rishi Sunak elected not to serve his country but to keep his party together.
Since Sunak took office, the government has stood for almost nothing; it has shown little vision, little idea of what Britain it wanted to be build, and those chinks of light that were offered were directly contradicted by the government’s actions. It is all very well saying you’re building a low-tax economy; doing it whilst cranking the tax burden up to a seventy-year high is another thing altogether. Likewise it’s no good promising to build the houses this country desperately needs having capitulated to Nimby backbenchers on mandatory targets.
We believe that somewhere in Rishi Sunak is a man who gets the markets and instinctively understands the high-tech, high-investment economy that Britain can have, and that government must enable. However, over and over again, he has failed to articulate it; he has pandered to his party’s worst instincts on immigration, on personality politics, indulging in some of the most childish political campaigning we’ve seen in a generation and becoming carried away by the fantasy politics of Rwanda deportations and an £8.3bn pothole fund. The party’s ‘big offer’ is to continue doing the things it has either been doing or trying (and failing) to do, and hoping for a different result. With years of mismanagement in the rear-view mirror, that is an unappealing prospect.
City A.M. hopes that what emerges from the inevitable battle for the soul of the Conservatives is a party once again committed to freedom, choice and opportunity. Recent political chaos has obscured the essential truth that free markets are a force for good and an engine for prosperity – and Britain will need politicians capable of articulating that message to a sceptical public.
But for now, it is hard to conclude anything other than this: this government is out of energy, out of ideas, and should, therefore, be out of office.
Does this mean a full-throated endorsement of Keir Starmer’s Labour? That is, unfortunately, beyond us.
The party’s ‘big offer’ is to continue doing the things it has either been doing or trying (and failing) to do, and hoping for a different result
As Starmer has said to us in the past, almost everything is easier in opposition than in government. Pro-business rhetoric has not been matched thus far by concrete policies and more specifically, concrete promises of what won’t happen. We remain spooked by the possibility of changes to capital gains taxation, effectively a levy on entrepreneurship. Whilst Starmer’s commitment to get Britain building is welcome, we are still concerned that others in the party may shake from their belief when they are constituency MPs, and we too know too little about whether – if growth proves more difficult to achieve than Rachel Reeves et al hope – the party’s historic instinct to lean on the public sector and a larger state has been controlled.
What you do with your vote is your business. We aren’t arrogant enough to tell you what to do with it.
But should the polls come to fruition, we hope Starmer and Reeves can fulfil their ambitions for growth. Britain is stagnant; it has been for many years. A lack of political will has stopped the country from addressing the fundamental issues at play, from planning reform to infrastructure investment. And should he become Prime Minister, we are hopeful – optimistic, even, we will be surprised to the upside.
Above all: he is a self-evidently decent man, a grown-up, almost a technocrat but more than that, too. For all his public sector experience, the suspicion is he understands the role of business and indeed of London and the City. He has shown himself fitting of the office to which he aspires and his party has campaigned, with some exceptions, in a similar vein. Now he must deliver on his promise.