On cakeism

Boris Johnson famously said, “My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it”. It’s not just him, our entire political debate is currently hooked on cakeism.

Governing is rife with difficult choices; on that we all agree. Many politicians say it and use phrases like “in the national interest” and “putting the country first”. But the trouble is, when it comes to the big pitch – tabling the big ideas to the nation in manifestos, we like to tell people they can have it all. Of course, after an election it quickly turns out we can’t.

We can’t have a state that does everything and low taxes, we can’t at once sign shiny new trade deals but not expect some goods to flow into our country, we can’t eliminate our reliance on cheap foreign labour and have a high-wage economy and then be surprised when British food costs more or the cost of care homes goes up, and we can’t dish out public sector pay rises that are well above inflation and not have it be, well, inflationary. Simply put, we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Tasty though it may sound.

Photo by American Heritage Chocolate on Unsplash

In politics we over-simplify everything. Stop the boats. Get Brexit done. Build back better. Change. Then when things aren’t so simple, people are rightly annoyed. We do it in no other walk of life. Imagine going into hospital for brain surgery, being told it would be a simple procedure, only to wake up to discover you have to learn to walk again. Politically, this is what has been done to the British public again and again and again.

Politics is only simple when we’re honest – we’re going to improve x but you need to pay for it through y or we’re going to cut your taxes, but you need to accept the state can’t do everything, so we’ll stop doing z. It’s rare you hear either of those pitches, but they are our reality. On the doorstep during the recent general election, I met a man who said, “I’ll vote for anyone who tells me how they’re going to do all the things they promise to do”. He had a point. Like a healthy diet, politics is about balance…. well, governing is anyway.

Unfortunately, we’re all addicted to sugar. And there is no greater purveyor of fine sweet treats than Nigel Farage and, unlike we Conservatives or Labour, he’s not restricted by the slightest possibility of being in government. Increasing the basic rate income tax threshold to £20,000? Sure! Abolishing Stamp Duty below £750,000? Why not. Collect billions of pounds in unpaid tax? Why didn’t we think of something so simple. 3% of GDP on Defence within 6 years? Sign me up now. The Reform Manifesto (or Contract, more on that in a moment) was in many places a decedent Tory treat. A lot of the stuff we fanaticise about in one document. In other places, it delved deep into socialism. It was politically confused but, in the words of Simon & Garfunkel, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. The price tag? Oh, only £160bn in unfunded promises that made the Kwarteng mini-budget look like a trip to Poundland. Farage is a brilliant salesman and like so many parties of protest (I won’t go into the Greens today) it frankly doesn’t matter that what he promises is undeliverable in the near term.

So how do we beat Reform? How do we stop our addiction to cakeism? Better people than me have tried for over twenty years and he’s still here periodically blowing up our party. We can’t just be Reform-lite while the full-fat version is on the shelf next to us.

More importantly, how do we beat Labour who aren’t immune to saying we can have our cake and eat it too? Prior to the election they very carefully ruled out increasing income tax, national insurance or VAT. That specificity should have, and did in some circles, raise alarm bells that they would raise other taxes. But of course, they didn’t mention that or what they would raise. They wanted the electorate to think they could have it all. Now, with the election an increasingly distant memory, it’s time for Rachel Reeves to snatch the cake away. Once onto the serious business of governing, she will take to the stage to – quelle surprise – say things are ‘worse than she thought’. This, despite the fact she had access to the figures for months, admitted she had access and wouldn’t be doing what she’s just done because now we have the OBR. The IFS has even stepped in and said a claim of ignorance is not credible. So, come the autumn we can probably expect a raid on one, or all, of pensions, capital gains and inheritance tax alongside cuts to much needed programmes – like new hospitals. This will hit communities like mine in Bury St Edmunds hard. My dad worked at the West Suffolk when it was a new hospital, and it was never intended to last this long.

Reeves could have said all this prior to the election. She knew it was coming but she didn’t say anything because politicians, on all sides, are addicted to peddling cakeism.

Perhaps this is just a nice way of saying lying, or at least concealing the truth. Political interviews are exercises in gymnastics and we all leave none the wiser. A subject for another day. But how do we break the cycle? Can we win without going there ourselves – is anyone brave enough?   

When we’ve tried before it hasn’t gone awfully well. The 2017 Manifesto is a case in point. Social care needed fixing, we said exactly how we’d fix it. It turned out it would be horribly expensive and the rightly unpopular ‘dementia tax’ was born, then quickly dropped. It’s now 7 years later and we’re no closer to a solution.

So, we need honesty not just about what we want to fix and how, what we want to fund and how but also those problems that are too big to fix without widespread political and social consent for something that will be painful. We need to rebuild our party and ask these questions and slowly rebuild trust.

The relationship between voters and politicians is a contract. Farage was clever to call the Reform manifesto that, despite the fact he’d have breached it in weeks if, by some miracle, he’d found himself in Number 10. Therein rests the problem. Time and again politicians have breached the contract they make when asking for a vote. We’ve said we’ll do something and not done it or not properly explained the price of doing it. So, when Farage pulls up will a shopping trolley full of undeliverable tasty diversions, can we blame people for having their heads turned? No, because we’ve all been at it and that is why parties of protest like the Greens, Lib Dems and Reform are currently thriving.

We need to break the cycle. The 2017 manifesto came in for much criticism and was politically disastrous, but it tried to get one thing right. It took a major issue facing the country, said it needed fixing and said how we proposed fixing it. We should have seen how unpopular the solution would be, and that it wasn’t the correct one, but the approach was right – honest answers to honest questions, then test that at the ballot box. Convincing all political parties to do that simultaneously is, however, beyond unrealistic.

I’m a firm believer that the voting public is as intelligent as you treat them to be and all political parties have been stuck in a cycle of treating them like fools. Rachel Reeves’ rapid about turn on the state of the economy is yet another example of this. She will further erode trust at a time when it’s in desperately short supply. As a result, at the time of the next general election it will be even more scarce.

Returning to our core values and being honest is the only way to get the trust we’ve lost back. Looking inward and steadily rebuilding faith may sound boring but, despite their own lack of honesty, boring just won a general election with a record majority. Starmer is so devoid of personality that all I really know about him is that he says he likes football and his dad worked for Black & Decker. Yet, there he is in Number 10. The Farage cake stand is a sideshow, and we can either have our heads turned by his flirtatious glances and stay out of power or we can knuckle down and start telling it like it is. Once people start trusting us again, then and only then, will we have an opportunity to deliver on the promises we make. This time, let’s make sure they’re ones we keep.