Angela Rayner has a reputation for being forthright – and, according to the “readout” of the last cabinet meeting before the summer recess, she has had some punchy things to say to her colleagues about the state of the nation.
Reflecting on the riots that swept the country after the Southport tragedy almost a year ago, Ms Rayner is blunt about the government’s collective performance. The official summary, itself a bowlderised version of her remarks, records her comprehensive critique about the causes of the civil unrest: “Economic insecurity, the rapid pace of de-industrialisation, immigration and the impacts on local communities and public services, technological change and the amount of time people were spending alone online, and declining trust in institutions was having a profound impact on society.”
Those factors were certainly at play in the riots last July, and are still in evidence now, notably in Epping, the Essex market town where an asylum seeker has been charged with sexual assault. There have since been signs of trouble at another hotel requisitioned by the Home Office for migrant accommodation, in Diss in Norfolk.
As has been noted, these are the kind of “tinderbox” conditions that the authorities need to treat with great care, and which have already resulted, in the case of Epping, in agitators turning up, and in unjustified attacks on the police.
Ms Rayner is right to confront her colleagues, and indeed her own department, responsible as it is for “communities”, about the frustrations felt by the public and the widespread disaffection that will continue to build unless the government “delivers” some tangible evidence of the “change” in their lives promised by Labour at the last general election. This is most obviously so over immigration, though not confined to it, and the slow progress in “smashing the gangs”, ending the use of hotels to house migrants, and clearing the backlog of claims the government inherited.
Where Ms Rayner may be faulted is in making such concerns so public at such a sensitive time – in the context of a palpable sense of unrest and the threat of another round of summer rioting. That is the context of her words. Obviously, she has no intention of having her implicit warnings about more riots be in any way a self-fulfilling prophecy, let alone inciting non-peaceful protest, but that may well be their practical effect.
The timing of what she said is unfortunate and clumsy. At a moment when Nigel Farage – who is shameless about exploiting grievances – is stirring things up with overheated claims that “we’re actually facing, in many parts of the country, nothing short of societal collapse” – this is no time to be adding to the sense of unease.
With no sense of irony, given the tacit encouragement Mr Farage offers to the protesters, the Reform UK leader talks about “lawless Britain” where “criminals don’t particularly respect the police and they’re acting in many cases with total impunity”. The Essex police, faced as they are with an impossible job of controlling a mob and in enforcing the law impartially as it stands, will not have thanked Mr Farage for his words.
Still less will they welcome Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who intends to descend on Epping in the coming days, with all that entails. Ms Rayner ought not to be adding her voice to these sorts of tensions.
The other, wider criticism of Ms Rayner’s reported assessment is that she is long on analysis but short on solutions. She rightly says that Britain is a “successful, multi-ethnic, multi-faith country”, and that “the government had to show it had a plan to address people’s concerns and provide opportunities for everyone to flourish”. For her part, she is going to produce her own Plan for Neighbourhoods, but she must also take her share of the blame – there is no better word – for the government’s collective failure to create a sense that it has a cohesive plan or programme for government to solve the various challenges she identifies.
One year on, there is still a sense that the government lacks a “narrative” of what it is doing and why. People wish to see progress and understand how the sacrifices they make in paying higher taxes will prove worth it. The tangled web of “missions”, “tasks” and “priorities” that Sir Keir Starmer weaved as he entered government last year has not so much unravelled as been forgotten.
Irregular migration, stagnant living standards, the public finances and the NHS, again facing renewed and deeply damaging industrial action, are intractable challenges that successive governments have been defeated by, and they will inevitably take time and resources to improve. The public needs to be reassured about that. As Ms Rayner indicates: “It is incumbent on the government to acknowledge the real concerns people have and to deliver improvements to people’s lives and their communities.”
The good news for Sir Keir, Ms Rayner and their colleagues is that, riots or not, they still have three to four years to show that this Labour government works. If not, then they know how disastrous the consequences could be, because they were inflicted on the Conservatives not so long ago.
