When 'winning' isn't the best outcome

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The ideal issue for a campaign by opposition politicians is one which affects lots of people, lasts a long time, provides plenty of good photo opportunities, and has little chance of success. One of the worst possible outcomes is when a campaign actually succeeds, especially if it’s just months before an election: suddenly, they have to step up to the mark and say what they will actually do. And that is precisely where Starmer and the Labour Party now seem to find themselves in relation to the issue of women’s pensions.

For almost a decade, for the entirety of which the Tories have been in government at UK level, the WASPI women have fought a strong and determined campaign to get a just settlement for the incompetent way in which the government announced and implemented the changes to the pension age for women. Conveniently ignoring the role of the last Labour government itself in the process of changing the pension age, a whole host of Labour politicians, including Starmer himself, have made statement after statement supporting the campaign, and demanding those vague and indefinable things called justice, a fair deal, and restitution. Last week, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman issued a formal finding that there had been maladministration and recommended that compensation should be paid. They haven’t recommended as much compensation as was being asked for, but it is, nevertheless, a significant victory. From the point of view of the WASPI campaigners at least.

From the point of view of Starmer and the Labour Party it looks to have been something of a disaster. After all their fine words, the time has come to deliver, and it looks as though it will be a Labour government which has to do the delivering. To call their reaction feeble would be an understatement. That thing for which they have been calling for almost a decade now has the force of an official ombudsman’s report and they are about to find themselves in a position where they can actually do something instead of demanding that someone else does it. And they’ve completely bottled it.

It’s an outcome which seems to have taken them completely by surprise. They seem to have given no thought at all to how they would respond to a recommendation for compensation, nor how they would fund any such compensation, despite having demanded it time and time again. Instead of a response welcoming the report and promising to act, they’ve come up with mealy-mouthed variations on the government’s own mealy-mouthed response, talking about the need to consider it carefully before coming to a conclusion. The Tories’ response has been no better. It’s not that anyone would have expected that it would be, although it’s at least a little surprising that they haven’t immediately leapt onto an opportunity to please what is for them a key voter demographic. We seem to have reached a point where neither wants to move first for fear that the other will accuse them of another ‘unfunded’ spending commitment. In other words, both of them regard their arbitrary and silly fiscal rules, and the opportunity to accuse the other of breaking them, as being more important than the millions of women who have lost out as a result of government incompetence.

It certainly sends us a clear message – but that message is about whether they are really committed to justice and fair play, or are just playing silly games about money. ‘Winning’ the campaign turns out not to be what they wanted at all.