‘Everything is broken because of 12 years of Tory government’ – why can’t Starmer just say it? | Zoe Williams

Ahead of party conference, the talk is of singing the national anthem. But that's Labour, always fighting yesterday's battles

There's no through line to this era of Conservatism. It unfolds randomly like prog rock, ear-bleeding thrash straight after a flute solo. First, their only agenda was to reduce the deficit, then they were all about levelling up, now they want to increase the deficit and stop levelling up, and what they say doesn't really matter, because it doesn't happen anyway. Very often they deliver the exact opposite, and you have to conclude that the real agenda was to sever the links between language and meaning, cause and effect, promise and outcome.

What they cannot escape, however, is the passage of time. Twelve years have now gone by, and it would be time-consuming and complicatedly disrespectful to recap how much hardship, how much lasting damage they have caused. They can and will start culture wars to plug the rhetorical gaps, but on the material realities facing most Britons, they have only one option: a narrative of impotence. The UK is poorer because the good times couldn't last for ever; energy is more expensive because of unavoidable exogenous shocks; inflation is high because of energy; interest rates are high because of inflation; look over there, Germany is having a right time of it too. We're in decline because so is the world. Any line other than this would require them to take some responsibility, which would interrupt their messaging that they got the big calls right".

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist