Lowri Griffiths on the Specific Anxiety of Wanting a Government to Succeed While It Is Visibly Struggling to Do So
My father called me on the morning after the July 2024 election result with the specific tone of someone who has been waiting a long time for something and is now uncertain whether what they waited for is the thing they actually wanted or the thing they told themselves they wanted because waiting for something requires a fixed point. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well.’ A man of fourteen years of Conservative government summarized in one syllable, repeated.
I share, I think, the specific anxiety of the North London Labour voter who genuinely wanted this government to succeed and has spent its first year in a complicated negotiation between that genuine desire and the observable evidence that governing is harder than the opposition benches suggested and that several specific things the government has done are difficult to defend without recourse to arguments that the government itself would have rejected eighteen months ago. The winter fuel payment decision. The two-child benefit cap. The specific texture of the communication around both, which has had the quality of someone explaining why the thing they said they wouldn’t do was actually necessary, which everyone was doing but which landed differently from this particular government in this particular moment.
What Has Been Right
The Employment Rights Bill is real and significant. The planning reform commitment, if it holds, addresses the housing crisis at the level of cause rather than symptom. The international positioning has been more coherent than the previous administration’s in ways that are difficult to quantify but easy to feel in the specific relief of opening the Guardian and not reading about another diplomatic incident. These are not nothing. They are something. I keep telling myself they are something on the days when they feel like insufficient counterweight to the other things.
The Islington dinner party debate, which is the most reliable barometer of where North London Labour sentiment is in any given month, has moved from cautious optimism to qualified concern to something that I would describe as ‘supportive but observant’ in the way that you are supportive but observant of a friend who is making decisions you are not entirely sure about and who you love but whose judgment you are reserving judgment on. It is not the same as the 2019 feeling. Nothing is the same as the 2019 feeling. But it is better than the feeling from 2010 to 2024, which was despair. For now, it is better than despair. More politics from me at The London Prat.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
