Liz Truss is haunting Mel Stride

Photo byMel Stride wanted this job. Tory MPs believe he ran to be party leader to raise his profile and shore up his chances of getting this job. But he must have known what it was. If Rachel Reeves' task – managing the economy at a moment of ever-increasing spending demands and ever-stagnating funds – is a tightrope balancing act, the role of the shadow chancellor is a juggling one, where the balls have been replaced by a couple of chainsaws and a live hand grenade.
The grenade is Liz Truss. Labour loves to talk about her. Reeves reminded the House yesterday of two awkward facts: what the mini-budget had done to mortgage rates, and that Nigel Farage heralded it as 'the best Conservative budget since the 1980s'.
Half an hour earlier, Kemi Badenoch accused the Prime Minister of bringing up Truss to deflect from his own record. Fair, perhaps. But Kemi also has no idea how to deal with the toxicity of her predecessor-but-one. She has proved reluctant to criticise Truss publicly and last week purported not to even know whether the erstwhile MP for South-West Norfolk was still a party member.
Stride has taken a very different approach. Last week he offered a comprehensive apology for the Truss era, promising the Conservatives would 'never again' put the economy at risk. It's a message he reiterated to journalists after the spending review, arguing that fiscal responsibility was 'in our DNA as a party'. But in his parliamentary response to Reeves, he tried to skirt clear of the Truss landmine – only for the Chancellor to seize on his omission with a mocking put-down ('Stride by name, baby steps by nature').
The shadow chancellor is no doubt aware that his intervention was not universally popular within his party. There are worries that, by apologising for Truss, he has shown weakness and handed Labour yet more ammunition to keep punching this bruise. In the words of one party insider: 'It's like if Ed Miliband apologised for Gordon Brown deregulating the banking sector too much – you bet the Tories would make hay.' At the same time, others feel the Truss's shadow cannot be escaped until she is expelled from the party. Stride tried to argue that Reeves had 'trashed the economy' – but until the Conservatives figure out their Truss position, lines like that will continue to ring hollow.
And Truss isn't the only ghost of Tories past derailing the party's ability to respond to Labour. A pointed accusation against the government is that Reeves is taking the country back into austerity – or, indeed, that austerity never ended in the first place. This is a charge the chancellor robustly rejected head-on in her speech, but despite her championing a slate of areas that will enjoy more cash (namely defence and health and social care), other departments are about to see serious real-terms cuts. There is a major row coming up on disability benefit cuts, plus anxiety over funding for police.
Yet unpopular as austerity is, the Tories can hardly accuse Reeves ushering it in without acknowledging who was responsible for the first. If Truss remains a liability for the Conservatives, so does George Osborne – and, indeed, Jeremy Hunt, who paid for a reduction in national insurance by theoretical swingeing cuts to unprotected departments which no economist ever believed were credible. (In his interview with the New Statesman last week, Hunt predicted Reeves would be 'doing exactly the same thing that she criticised me about in opposition' but declined to justify why he had left the public finances in such a precarious position.)
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The final obstacle blocking a coherent Tory response on the economy is the party's lack of any kind of policy programme. Badenoch's weekly tirades against the government's employer's national insurance rise can be batted away by the rejoinder that she hasn't said whether or not she'd reverse it or how she'd fund the NHS investment it was intended to pay for if she did. Stride was similarly unable to say what other taxes he would raise instead of the ones he thought Labour should never have increased. Nor could he say when the Tories would have got defence spending to three per cent of GDP (another of his gripes against Reeves), or if his party would reverse the cash injection to the NHS. 'We wouldn't be starting from here' was his general refrain.
This is fine for a party in opposition that is still focusing on post-election soul-searching. Or it would be, if its position as the opposition party were secure. Badenoch's strategy of not rushing into policy was considered the right one for a party that has so recently suffered such a crushing defeat. But the government's struggles less than a year into office (including Reeves' personal unpopularity) alongside the rise of Reform have raised the stakes. People are already casting about for alternatives, long before voters who abandoned the Conservatives are ready to even consider returning with the party in this state. The Tory party can't afford to wallow in its thinking phase. The economy has a key battleground, and Labour's position is looking more wobbly than you'd expect from a government this early in a parliament. But the Tories are going backwards in terms of economic credibility. That should terrify them.
In its own way, Stride's job this week was even harder than Reeves'. While he got in some good jibes about the 'tin-foil chancellor' and the 'Corbynite catalogue' of potential tax rises she had been handed by Angela Rayner, the smoke-and-mirrors of scripted one-liners don't cover up the lack of substance underneath. The Conservative message is that 'Labour have lost control of the economy'. Allowing for differences in political perspectives, many people will find it compelling. The problem is that few genuinely believe the Tories would do any better.
[See more: Ireland's anti-immigrant rage will not go away]
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Where Labour needs to be careful is not to re-enact the same decade-long mistake it made with the wholesale adoption of the identity politics of America – without checking its relevance to Britain. The Danish political debate on immigration and multiculturalism orbits around the 'Ghetto Package' of 2018. Introduced by the right, Frederiksen's winning coalition of 2019 continued the policy with few adjustments, save it being renamed the 'Parallel Society Act.' The Act empowers the government to designate areas 'vulnerable' where they exhibit a mix of factors related to a lack of education, low incomes and higher than average crime rates. People that might in a less PC-era have been referred to as 'the poor'. There's a further factor common to all the 'vulnerable' areas – most of their residents are officially designated as 'Non-Western'. This group includes migrants from South America, Asia and Africa and their children. 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Alongside this, the emergence of a form of politics that votes along ethnic, racial and religious lines more so than by ideology. It is difficult to imagine the kind of cultural chauvinism whereby Danes see their society as superior taking root in Britain, but it's exactly this that leads to both their approval of high taxation, high trust and to their unforgiving focus on integration. But just like we are not America, we are not Denmark. Danish ghettos are a result of the country's quietly unacknowledged, decades long, nativist approach to housing. In the supposedly liberal nordic countries, Asian and African migrants and asylum seekers have been pushed into conurbations of undesirable housing and became second-class citizens. The Danish Left has been more forthcoming than Britain about the effects of this ghettoisation, phlegmatic when it comes to publishing the racial details of criminality and working backwards from the numbers. But Britain, by contrast, has not developed a culture of sublimating morality to statistics and that is a strength – Britain loves a triumph over the odds, we give second chances. At no point in history was there a working class life that wouldn't be doomed by quick statistical contextual rundown. Britain has done significantly better, historically, in creating a country where migrants contribute and become part of the country's social fabric. Contrary to the dominant liberal left view of Britain as an avowedly racist country that has barely moved on from the 50s, the most diverse areas of Britain are the most socially mobile. Almost every ethnic group out-performs white working class children at school. We have fewer 'ghettos'. Our housing policies have largely mixed social tenants with private tenants in the same estates. It's almost certain that Britain would never tolerate a racialised idea of a person as 'non-western'. If applied as in Denmark, this label would encompass the former Prime Minister, celebrities like Mo Farah, Linford Christie, Idris Elba, Bernadine Evaristo and the Reform chairman Zia Yusuf. Most of all, it would be an enormous mistake to interpret the SDP's success as solely oriented around issues of immigration. By 2022 the issue had largely fallen away from Danish political debate, with only the rump of Danish Democrats (the DPP successor party) still citing it as one of their main political motivations. Frederiksen had succeeded in neutralising the issue, but she had won on a platform of reducing cuts to social welfare and maintaining taxes much higher than in Britain. Her voters in 2022 placed welfare as their highest priority. Labour, boxed in by fiscal rules and an unwillingness to make the case for taxation, is about to enact the biggest cuts to social security since the coalition. Where Frederiksen did truly excel was in leading her party openly and authentically into this new era. Starmer has so far chosen to hold this conversation in the back offices of Labour HQ, ignoring his party's members, winning consent to lead with a fake mandate. Now, trailing in the polls, time has run out for back room meddling. Labour needs its own reckoning. Related