The single biggest thing that happened over the last Parliament was the Covid crisis. It had an immeasurable impact on our economy and society. And Labour’s record in that period, especially during 2021, was appalling. Indeed it was sufficiently bad that at the time many people said Starmer’s errors ruled him out of any possible future as Prime Minister.
Why, then, have Labour’s Covid mistakes almost entirely escaped scrutiny in this campaign? Perhaps, before we install them in office with a huge majority, we should remind ourselves of what they are like?
At many phases of the pandemic, Labour demanded more restrictions even than Boris Johnson’s government imposed. It opposed the gradual relaxation of restrictions during 2021 at almost every stage. Whilst polls suggest that most voters favoured extra restrictions at almost every point, and there were plenty of doctors arguing for just that, once we get to mid-2021 the really terrible, perhaps unforgivable, errors can most clearly be seen.
Johnson’s government finally removed almost all the restrictions that had blighted our lives in mid-July 2021. Yet Keir Starmer denounced that decision in an infamous speech Labour circulated widely on social media. In it, he declared Johnson reckless, said the wave of cases – which he, wildly inaccurately, predicted would reach 100,000 per day – would be known as the “Johnson variant”, inevitably creating an NHS summer crisis and leaving millions needing to self-isolate.
It is rare that an opposition leader’s preferred policy can be tested definitively and said, with absolute certainty, to have been right or wrong. This was one of those rare occasions. Starmer was not just wrong. He was spectacularly wrong. He would have kept the country under quasi-house arrest for several extra months at least. We now know that that would have been unnecessary.
Under almost any other circumstances, a party leader demanding that the country be placed under demonstrably totally unnecessary authoritarian restrictions for many months would rule that party out of any consideration for becoming the government. Yet we seem simply to have forgotten.
And Labour was not content to stop there. Throughout the autumn of 2021 Labour repeatedly demanded the re-imposition of restrictions. For example, in October 2021 Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves demanded that the government introduce “Plan B” – including mandatory masks and mandatory Covid passports – to counter what Labour repeatedly predicted (again, completely wrongly) was going to be another wave of the delta variant.
There was eventually, in December 2021, a new variant – omicron – that created a large wave of much more mild cases than delta. And the Government did introduce mandatory mask-wearing. In my view that was totally unjustifiable, and I think it is clear from the data that I was right. But at least the Tories, for all their failings, stood firm through the Autumn of 2021 against Labour’s repeated urging to reintroduce restrictions. Labour would have banned your hobbies, forced you to wear masks and made us all carry health passports, not to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths but, rather, just to try to stop the NHS from being a bit busy – a prediction that didn’t even happen!
Early in the pandemic, many policy errors were made by all parties, as they sought to deal with a situation no-one in Britain had encountered in living memory. But by mid-2021 there was no such excuse. Starmer denounced the relaxation of restrictions. He was wrong. Labour demanded restrictions be reimposed, for month after month. They were wrong.
This was not being wrong about the precise rules that ought to be followed for digging up a road, keeping bees or selling replica football shirts. It wasn’t subtle judgements over ideal macroeconomic management or arguable trade-offs between taxes and public spending. This was a major party demanding that our lives be blighted beyond recognition, for many extra months, demonstrably without justification. These were epic, repeated and sustained errors that, if Labour had been in government, would have had huge consequences for us all.
We are ready to punish the Tories for their many failings and Reform for the shady history of its candidates. Are we so ready to forgive Labour for errors that were so much more serious and would have harmed our lives so severely?
