Looking for a boost on a grey day full of awful news, I was trying to remember the last time I felt politically optimistic. Was it for a real reason, or just a surfeit of youthful idiocy? Anyway, I accidentally diverted to a different memory, a time I looked around the Timpson Prison Training Academy at HMP Wandsworth donkey’s years ago.
Here was an objectively good idea: train prisoners for a job they could plausibly get when they were released. Politicians talk constantly about reoffending rates and very rarely about what drives them: the difficulty of making a living once you have served a prison sentence. They also talk constantly about the private sector as though it’s universally pro-social and efficient, when in fact it’s rare to see a CEO and think: I would love to put him in charge of a problem. James Timpson is the only businessman I have ever thought that about, so it seemed like a certainty that politics would never call upon him. Yet here he is, minister for prisons.
There are more reasons for optimism in the early days of this Labour government. Its stance on Israel, for example, which is getting lost in the narrative about independent MPs who won on the issue of Gaza, and whether or not that was legitimate. That is a displacement conversation for a much more important one: has Labour’s position changed since last October, when the party took the legally and morally bizarre stance that Israel had a right to do what it liked? The answer is yes. The foreign secretary, David Lammy, is calling for an immediate ceasefire now and, while pushing for the release of all hostages, is calling for urgent humanitarian aid in Gaza. Labour has pledged to recognise Palestinian statehood; the government is expected to drop the UK’s challenge to the international criminal court over Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest warrant. Even though peace campaigners are still calling for an end to arms exports, and even though none of this came soon enough, it’s still better than many predicted. Moreover, it appears to come from a sense of purpose, rather than outside pressure.
Has Ed Miliband’s push for solar power – three huge sites that the Tories have blocked for years, plus new-build requirements that aren’t a million miles from the far greener manifesto pledges of the Greens and the Lib Dems – come as a surprise? Miliband was, after all, the architect of the Climate Change Act 2008, which remains some of the most ambitious legislation in the world. Years of Tory rhetoric, twisting any which way according to whim and making promises that lasted no longer than a news cycle, wiped my memory of politicians who believe in the climate crisis and want to fix it. I’m still bracing for disillusion, though, just because it’s worse when you don’t.
Lisa Nandy is trying to put an end to the culture wars – not by adjudicating once and for all on Ulez, just by drawing a line under it, saying: let’s move on. How many times since 2016 have you wished for someone senior in government to correctly identify an argument that was being performed just for the nastiness? Sure, other members of government are doing the opposite, possessed by some unscientific zeal about puberty blockers, locked in a complicated losing battle with yesterday’s conversation, but still – still – there are reasons to be cheerful here.
I dislike the formulation “the grownups are back in charge”, suggestive as it is of a technocratic, post-ideas world in which the most we can wish for is basic competence, so we can all forget about politics and go back to doing whatever we did before (was it gardening?). I disliked the manner of this electoral victory, the hushed tones in which ambitions were delivered, as if the most important thing was to make sure everyone remained asleep and a government could install itself by stealth. I remain sceptical about a large number of things: in no particular order, the plan for dealing with the far right, beyond “pretending it’s the same as the centre right”; the idiotic political metaphors (“looked under the bonnet”; “maxed out the credit card”) that spill out of new ministers like lullabies, designed to make us switch off and leave someone else to worry about the economy. And yet, 11 days into a government – and particularly if you were never that invested in England’s sporting victory and if you don’t care about the weather (which is nobody) – there are reasons to be in a good mood.
