Keir Starmer promised us a rose garden – but instead we just got déjà vu

A rather cheeky article by Matt Rudd appeared in The Sunday Times recently. The touch of the piece was light and kindly, not often to be found in major newspapers. It challenged the gloom perpetrated by Keir Starmer in what has become quickly known as The Rose Garden Speech; a message from the gardens of 10 Downing Street packed full of grim warnings. 

The speech may go down in recent political history as a brave attempt at sobering up the electorate, or a foolhardy piece of thoughtlessness that threw away any optimism left over from the election. 

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

Realism was stamped all over it. It echoed the speeches made by David Cameron and George Osbourne after the Tories came to power in 2010. The main theme was that financial recklessness had dominated the ancient regime-like indulgences of the previous administration. Sunak in the most recent case, and Gordon Brown in 2010. 

It seems essential in politics, and it might be its most unsavoury part, that one defines one’s politics by the failure of others. That is, government – and indeed opposition – find it necessary to gain currency for their political thoughts and actions by telling us what a bunch of twerps are their opposite number. 

I cannot recall a government that craved being seen as astute, even in its dying days, not being described as craven and myopic when replaced. 

Of course, it could be completely truthful that in the thirst to remain in office, unhappy financial figures might be stuffed down the back of the treasury sofa, so to speak, in order to keep the electorate on side. With the hoped-for new government promising not rigour and austerity but a Cockaigne of plenty, and as Shakespeare might have put it, cakes and ale for all – only then to see the books and be bamboozled by figures that don’t add up. 

Perhaps there should be an agreement among the competing parties, wrung out of them by a tough interrogator on a sharp TV debate, not to play that one so soon after they get into government. 

The Starmer administration might well face a true crisis wrought by a desperate Sunak/Hunt alliance not to tell the complete economic truth in the setting sun of their days in office. 

But it does throw light once again on government itself, which seems at times to be the worst defender and custodian of the public finances. 

Matt Rudd’s Sunday Times article was a fun piece that suggested all is not doom and gloom in the world. For instance, that in 2010 – not so long ago – we were 7% carbon neutral. Now we are almost 50%. But the encouraging thing he pointed out was the obsession of government with the £22bn. Pointing out that as the government has £1,200bn at its disposal, this represents under 1% of the total budget. 

Certainly, that £22bn is only part of the problem that Reeves and Starmer have rushed to tell us: that there are deep-seated irregularities in government being able to meet all of its financial commitments. 

But I think the point is that the language being used sounds like an endorsement of a coming austerity. Preparing us all for a Cameron/Osbourne-like retreat into cutting social support, as was done 14 years ago. 

Austerity was a social disaster. Making the poorest among us pay for the banking crisis of 2008/9 is still reflected today in our vast waiting lists in the NHS. And in the shrivelled social services that support the neediest of us. In short, austerity is too expensive. 

The rose garden speech by Starmer looks like déjà vu. Girding the loins of those who can least afford cuts and expecting them to pick up the tab. With so many more poor people around than in earlier times, I’ll leave it that vague because I don’t always trust figures; borrowings are going to be made to simply to keep the costs of poverty supplied. 

• Poverty prevention is our best hope. Here’s some tangible ways to keep people warm, dry and fed
• When it comes to poverty prevention it’s minds we must change – before anything else

Poverty costs a fortune, with roughly 40% of government expenditure going into maintaining it. Surely it’s time to co-ordinate poverty policy and programmes into one department? As advocated ad nauseam by yours truly? 

An increase in poverty means we are not exiting people from it or preventing it. Just growing it. 

It’s an unpopular idea among government to create a new ministry, like my suggestion for a Ministry of Poverty Prevention and Cure. (Yes, I’ve just added cure: MOPPAC.) But the scattergun effects of eight ministries with their finger in the poverty pie is ludicrous. And I would suggest it’s why we continue to keep people warehoused in poverty. 

Unfortunately, another anomaly of our governmental system is that giving people the job nearly always falls to a person who has never done it before. The senior offices of state exude such power and attached charisma, such grandness, that one cannot admit that one does not have all the answers. Nor that often the answers supplied by advisers are largely a variation on what’s been tried and tested, and
failed, previously.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.