Things Can Only Get… Very Much Worse for Labour

Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman and the ghost of New Labour: this is not a comeback. It is a séance

After catastrophic losses in the May local elections, Keir Starmer reached for the past. He found Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman.

They ran in 1997 to the sound of D:Ream telling a battered country that things could only get better. Nearly thirty years on, with the wreckage of the May local elections still smoking, Keir Starmer has answered that anthem with something so bleak it might have been scripted by Samuel Beckett: things can only get very much worse, and our plan is to hire the people who made them worse in the first place.

The scale of what happened on 7 May demands plain statement. Reuters described the result as the worst defeat for a governing party in local elections since 1995. Labour lost more than 1,400 council seats and control of Wales. Tameside in Greater Manchester, held continuously since 1979, fell to Reform UK. In Wigan, a former mining community where trade union banners still hang in the civic hall and where Labour has been the dominant political force for over half a century, the party lost every single one of the twenty seats it was defending. In Salford, it clung to three of sixteen. Rebecca Long-Bailey, the MP for Salford, called the results “soul-destroying.” That word will do. Thirty Labour MPs have now called on Starmer to resign.

Starmer’s response was to appoint Gordon Brown as a special envoy on global finance and Harriet Harman as the Prime Minister’s adviser on women and girls. The country looked on with something that lay some distance beyond disappointment. That something is contempt.

“When a government runs out of ideas, it raids the archive. When a government has lost the working class, it sends for the people who helped lose them in the first place.”

Gordon Brown: One of Thatcherism’s children. We Forgot to Bury

Gordon Brown liked to present himself as a scourge of market excess. In practice, he deepened the model of financialisation that has hollowed out the British state. It was Brown who granted the Bank of England independence, a reform many economists now accept contributed to the asset price bubbles of the 2000s. It was Brown who, in his own later admission, made a “big mistake” over financial regulation in the run-up to the 2008 banking crisis: following Alan Greenspan’s low-interest orthodoxy while the banks lent with reckless freedom.

Then there were the Private Finance Initiatives. PFI was sold as a way to build schools and hospitals without upfront public spending. What it actually was is visible in the figures: in 2023-24, annual payments on PFI contracts signed two decades earlier were still running at £10.5 billion. The National Audit Office has found that privately financed projects can cost forty per cent more than equivalent public investment. By the time all contracts expire in the 2040s, the taxpayer will have paid out an estimated £199 billion for around £60 billion of initial investment. That is not prudence. It is intergenerational theft dressed up as accounting.

But perhaps nothing captures Brown’s economic judgment more cleanly than the gold sales. Between 1999 and 2002, the Treasury sold 395 tonnes of Britain’s gold reserves at an average price of around $275 per troy ounce, announcing the sales in advance, which served to depress prices still further before each auction. Gold has since risen almost fifteen-fold. Critics still refer to the historic low as “Brown’s Bottom.” The loss to the public purse has been calculated by some analysts at more than £48 billion.

That is not a chancellor who understood wealth. That is a man who treated a strategic national asset as loose change down the back of the sofa.

Then there was Mrs Gillian Duffy of Rochdale. In April 2010, during the general election campaign, Brown encountered her on the street. She raised concerns about immigration, about borrowing, about the future. He smiled, endured, and climbed into his car. Then, forgetting his microphone was live, he turned to an aide and said: “Everything, she was just a sort of bigoted woman. She said she used to be Labour. I mean it’s just ridiculous.” When the recording was played back to him, Brown’s head fell to his hands in what became the defining image of his failed campaign. That was not a one-off gaffe. That was a window into a political class that had learned to tolerate the places it no longer loved.

He is now back, unpaid and part-time, advising Starmer on economic resilience and “defence-related investment.” The voters of Rochdale, of Hartlepool, of Wigan, are supposed to find this reassuring. They will not.

“Brown sold the gold at the bottom of the market, deepened the financialisation that led to the 2008 crash, and called a working-class woman a bigot for asking reasonable questions. He is Starmer’s new man for economic resilience.”

The Harman Question: Judgment, Secrecy and a Shadow That Will Not Fade

Harriet Harman’s appointment as adviser on women and girls will be presented as a signal of the government’s commitment to equality. On its face, the case is coherent: she is one of the longest-serving women in parliamentary history, the first woman to serve as Solicitor General, a figure associated with domestic violence and equal pay legislation across four decades. The Fawcett Society, which she chairs, is a respected institution. That record is real and should be acknowledged.

What cannot be airbrushed out is the record that sits alongside it. Between 1978 and 1982, Harman served as Legal Officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties, the organisation now known as Liberty. During those years, the NCCL was affiliated with the Paedophile Information Exchange, a group that actively campaigned for sex between adults and children and sought to lower the age of consent. The Guardian’s 2014 investigation acknowledged the context: this was a period of broad civil liberties absolutism on the left, PIE was small and marginal, and the NCCL had more than a thousand affiliated organisations. It would be wrong to attribute PIE’s views to the NCCL membership at large.

Those qualifications, while accurate, do not settle the matter. A 1978 NCCL briefing note urged amendments to the Child Protection Bill arguing that images of children should only be considered pornographic if it could be proven the subject had suffered.

Harman said in 2014 that this was intended to protect parents from prosecution for innocent photographs. That may be a sincere explanation. It is also one that requires a remarkable degree of trust in a politician’s retrospective gloss. When the Daily Mail published its account, Harman said she had “nothing to apologise for.” Ed Miliband backed her and praised her “huge decency and integrity.” The judgment question, for the Prime Minister’s new adviser on women and girls, does not go away by being avoided.

There is also the more recent and entirely unambiguous record. As acting Labour leader in 2015, Harman ordered MPs to abstain rather than vote against the Conservative government’s Welfare Reform and Work Bill, which contained measures including the £26,000 benefit cap. Forty-eight Labour MPs defied the whip and voted no. The Labour whips said no member of the front bench had rebelled. Jeremy Corbyn was the only leftwing leadership candidate to oppose the bill outright, but Andy Burnham stressed he regarded Harman’s amendment as a vote against the bill and would take a tough line with the bill in its further parliamentary stages.

The SNP voted no. The Liberal Democrats voted no. The official opposition sat on its hands. That is not triangulation. That is the official opposition making itself indistinguishable from the government it was elected to oppose, on a vote that directly affected the poorest working-class families in the country.

A Party Trapped in its Own amber

A defender of these appointments might argue the following: Brown and Harman are unpaid, part-time advisers, not cabinet ministers. Their roles are symbolic rather than substantive. And in a crisis, a leader reaches for experienced figures who have seen it all before.

But symbolism is not neutral. Symbolism is the message you send when you have nothing else to say. And the message Starmer is sending, to every voter in Hartlepool, in Wigan, in the Welsh Valleys, is that the Labour Party has learned nothing. It is still the party of PFIs and “bigoted woman” and civil liberties absolutism. It is still the party that cannot quite bring itself to believe that working-class grievances are legitimate. That is not a rescue plan. That is a surrender notice.

What unites Brown and Harman, beyond their shared New Labour inheritance, is that they are both figures from a Labour Party that lost the working class long before it lost these elections. Brown’s “bigoted woman” comment was not an isolated lapse. It was the unmasking of a political culture that had learned to hear prejudice whenever the working class spoke plainly. Harman’s NCCL record, however defensible on narrow legal grounds, reveals the same instinct: a liberal establishment so committed to the principle of permission that it failed to notice when it was standing next to the morally indefensible.

The working class did not abandon Labour. Labour, across three deliberate decades, abandoned them. It abandoned them when it called their concerns about immigration bigotry. It abandoned them when it used PFI to build schools and hospitals that cost twice as much and delivered half as much. It abandoned them when it instructed its own MPs to abstain in the face of welfare cuts. Starmer’s response to the worst local election results in a generation is to double down on the inheritance that produced them.

Labour’s problem is not that it lacks advisers. It is that it lacks purpose. It has no convincing story about wages, no serious plan for council housing, no courage on public ownership, no instinctive loyalty to the people who once saw it as their political home. And after a public hammering of historic proportions, it offers Brown and Harman as evidence that it has heard the message.

That is the message. Labour has not changed. It has gone back to the cupboard marked “New Labour leftovers” and reheated the old failure.

Tameside fell to Reform last Thursday for the first time in forty-seven years. Wigan returned not a single Labour councillor. These are not statistics. They are communities that were promised representation and received condescension instead. They are the working class. They have rendered their verdict. No appointment of Gordon Brown or Harriet Harman is going to change it.

I have spent a decade reporting from the places that New Labour forgot and that Starmer made no real effort to remember. The factories closed. The high streets emptied. The youth clubs shut. And through it all, the Labour Party offered managerial competence and vague promises of “social mobility”, a phrase that sounds hopeful to a focus group but means nothing to a 22‑year‑old with no job, no training and no future.

The people of Rochdale, the people of Gillian Duffy’s street, did not need a lesson in bigotry. They needed a government that took their anxieties seriously without abandoning their principles. Instead, they got a chancellor who called them names when he thought no one was listening.

And now, sixteen years later, they are supposed to welcome that same chancellor back?

“The heartlands have a long memory. And on Thursday, they voted accordingly, and while you can call a voter a bigot once and lose an election. Bring the same man back sixteen years later, and you might just lose the next century.”

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