Petty-Minded Penny-Pinching Politics

When representatives of the Imperial German army and the young Soviet republic met at Brest-Litovsk to talk peace, the junkers and the ambassadors treated the Bolsheviks to a banquet. Indeed, for about a week the revolutionaries were charmed and beguiled by expensive wine and garrulous company. Then Leon Trotsky arrived to take charge of the talks and immediately stopped the fraternisation. Offers of cosy chats over coffee and cigars were rebuffed and a much more hard-headed approach was adopted. Fast forward to 2023 and we see Labour has compiled an extensive and detailed report (volume one no less!) looking at spending by Tory ministers and how their departments make use of Government Procurement Cards. A return of the Trotskyist repressed as Starmer wages war on frippery while striking blows for seriousness?

Looking at some of the highlighted cases, we learn the Treasury spent over £3,000 for 11 ministers on a five star hotel for the G20 in Venice. The then National Security Advisor spent four quid shy of a thousand on yet more five star accommodation in Amman, Jordan, while he and two officials were on an official visit. Greg Hands, now in the news for other reasons, spent £636 on two nights at a plush hotel in Koenigswinter, Germany, while meeting with financial and industrial elites. The Foreign Office forked out over seven grand for a Liz Truss reception when she was foreign secretary, and the Department of Health spent £60k on stationary in March 2021 alone. There are many more in the dataset - enough to entertain and scandalise any number of "I'm a tax payer, me" bean counters.

It's not hard to see what Labour is trying to do. While the cost of living crisis bears down on Hard Working People, Tory ministers and civil servants have lived it large at the public's expense. The Tories demand sacrifices and hard choices of everyone but themselves, and they stand exposed as hypocrites as well as profligate spenders on sundries and unnecessaries. It's an effort to whip up a bit of populism and generate some real anti-Tory antipathy. They cannot be trusted with your money.

Labour's document is a thorough piece of work. The data is already in the public domain but compiling it was not a light undertaking in time and effort expended, but is it worth it? From a spending point of view, it's a few hundred million pounds over a couple of years. It's nothing compared to the scandal of PPE procurement, the ongoing tax breaks for fossil fuel interests, and how capital shakes the state down through guaranteed markets underwritten by state money (railways, pharmaceuticals, military spend, "R&D") and the "provision" of public services (new and outstanding PFIs). Concentrating on morsels while feasts of cash rush out of the door is, at best, a questionable priority.

Neither is it particularly sharp politics. To the charges made by Labour, the Tories have replied that spending of this character topped £1bn in 2009 - the last full year of Labour on government. Others have pointed to Angela Rayner, who fronted the wheeze for the media, and her not inconsiderable expenses claims. And what happens when Keir Starmer claims the keys to Downing Street? Are ministers packed off to European capitals expected to stay in travellers' hostels? Visitors to Arab states advised to pack a tent? Are they going to be directed to eat from street stalls or the local equivalents of a greasy spoon? And when they inevitably avoid self-denial and end up being as lavish as the Tories, what then?

This really is typical of "Starmerism". In as far as it has a politics, it's authoritarian and reform-minded. Except "reform" here is the technocratic modernisation of the state. While going populist on the "findings", the Labour document is a micro-management critique of comparatively small spending decisions, with the implicit suggestion that Starmer's "grown-ups" would never splash out on a staff Christmas party paid for by the department as a thank you. It's more process than politics.

Which brings us back to our old friend Trotsky. This period of austerity in the Soviet Union's diplomatic dealings did not last. With his fall from grace, the USSR assumed the same bourgeois niceties as the capitalist states in its treating with them. A symptom of degeneracy, perhaps, but a necessary one for building the soft power connections and informal ties with the diplomatic corps of states that a few years previously tried strangling the revolutionary republic in its cradle. Starmer is as far away from Trotsky's motivations as you can be, but what he criticises Tory ministers for now is standard practice. The image he wants to project of a thrusting, modernising UK will not be well served if foreign dignitaries have to go dutch on Foreign Office spreads, or if its staff are housed in AirBnBs. This is pitiful, petty-minded penny-pinching politics that can only blow back on Starmer and friends, and reveals that little bit more about what a nonsense his government will turn out to be.