Labour in Power: “Things Can Only Get Better.” “Definitely Maybe” – or Maybe Not?

I think you need to qualify what "better" means. It is a term thrown around left right and centre without ever being defined. Labour have already made things better. They are now a government serving the public and running the services. This is in stark contrast to the Tories who served the rich and wealthy whilst playing lip service to running the services that everyone else depends on.
Their ministers have opened dialogue with those in the departments they manage and in short, are taking running the country seriously.
Sure, we are not going to all get richer over night, but that was never on the cards. If we are to compare today with 97, Tony Blair inherited an economy that was 5 or 6 years into recovery after the crashes of the early 90s. By contrast, an in fighting Tory party and frequent PM changes has caused havoc and uncertainty in our economy. Sunak only just managed to calm things down again and now we have yet another change into Labour. The road to "better" is probably 5+ years away.
What I can be pretty certain of is that had the Tories remained in power, continual infighting and a lack of party discipline would have severely limited any PMs ability to lead and implement policy. As we see the start of the Tory leadership election I note that they seem to be digging into appealing to an ever dwindling minority of right-wing support rather than attempting to appeal to a wider audience. I can't see the Tories coming back any time soon.

"I don't think you can cut the Winter Fuel Allowance and then receive hundreds of thousands of designer goods for your wife."
‘I’m picking up bad vibes’: voters unimpressed by Labour after three months in power
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/26/im-picking-up-bad-vibes-voters-unimpressed-by-labour-after-three-months-in-power
According to one poll, Sir Keir Starmer is now less popular than Rishi Sunak or, indeed, any other recent prime minister with the exception of Liz Truss.
Not exactly a promising start.
And, as if to reinforce my opening post, there are reports that university tuition fees are to rise to £10,500, albeit that the rise will be softened by a return of maintenance grants for 'poorer' students, while a report in The Financial Times thrusts into the open the true scale of what is needed to meet the costs of renewing 'the nation's crumbling infrastructure': £1.6 trillion between now and 2040. At less than 0.01% of that figure, it rather puts the row over Winter Fuel Allowance in the shade.
As someone ruefully put it: Labour's honeymoon is beginning to look like a wet weekend in Skegness!

Agreed. They've screwed up. But to put things in context. They have admitted that receiving stuff for free is bad and promised not to do it again. I can't see the Tories doing this. It is the nature of how they operate.
Kier isn't off to the best start but pretty much everything is against him. The press don't like him simply because he is a Labour PM and that is peculating into a wider sense he isn't doing that well. But the fuel allowance was the right thing to do. My mum in her 5 bed house does not need £300 a year just like most wealthy pensioners. Let us not forget that pensioners have do the best out of pretty much everyone thanks to the Tories generous triple lock this last 10 years. It can't go on forever when there are so many other things pulling at the economy.

Probably not but comparing them to the tories is a low bar. Equally, getting caught grafting (or near as damnit makes no difference) when you only just get back into power (and after screwing the population with tax hikes) is pretty poor form.
On the pensioner bit, agreed for 'wealthy' ones but the fact is its cut for everyone except the very very poorest and most pensioners aren't wealthy, or completely bankrupt either. It goes back to the issue of theyve paid taxes to the state all of their lives, arguably, they deserve to see some of that money benefit them, or at least not actively be harmed.

Are we about to see the first breach of Labour's election manifesto?
The manifesto stated:
"Labour will not increase taxes on working people, which is why we will not increase National Insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of Income Tax, or VAT.”
There are now strong indications that the Government intends to increase employers' National Insurance in the forthcoming Budget. If so, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out it would be a "straightforward breach” of their manifesto commitment, on the grounds that the manifesto did not explicitly distinguish between employer and employee NI.
According to the BBC," Economists who have carefully studied the indirect impact of employer NI judge that most of the impact, in the end, falls not on the employer company and its shareholders, but on workers in the form of:
Not only would such a move further undermine the Government's already tarnished reputation, it would further erode public confidence in and respect for politicians of all parties and in the democratic process in general.
It is not a question of whether increasing employers' NI is a good or bad idea. Nor is it credible for the Government to continue to pin the blame solely on the Conservatives. The scale of the UK's economic problems is vast and maintaining let alone improving its crumbling infrastructure and public services will take hundreds of billions of pounds, not just the paltry sums raised by adding VAT to private school fees or cutting the Winter Fuel Allowance.
Both the main political parties knew this well before the election and tried to hide it from the public for fear of losing. Now Labour is in power it has picked up the poisoned chalice. Things can only get better? Maybe not.

So we now have a Budget that raises taxes by £40 billion and the lion's share of this comes from increasing employers' National Insurance contributions.
Very few members of the public will be persuaded that this is not a clear breach of Labour's election manifesto.
During the election campaign, Sir Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and their colleagues played down any plans they might have had for tax increases, with one or two minor exceptions. The emphasis was on delivering economic growth. But there was little sign of that in this Budget:
Budget boost to UK economy forecast to fade after two years
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yge6knpzdo
'The government has pinned its reputation on delivering growth...But the OBR said in the short term the Budget would push up inflation and interest rates, with a knock-on effect on growth.
Overall that would leave the size of the economy "largely unchanged in five years" compared to its previous growth forecast, the OBR said.'
Perhaps the Government's strategy is go for a short-term cash injection into the public finances and the economy in the hope that it can call an early election in three years time on the back of a modest feel-good factor and then gain another five years in office?
Given the volatility of public opinion nowadays that would be a risky strategy indeed.

'The government has pinned its reputation on delivering growth...But the OBR said in the short term the Budget would push up inflation and interest rates, with a knock-on effect on growth. Overall that would leave the size of the economy "largely unchanged in five years" compared to its previous growth forecast, the OBR said.'
So much for Labour's strategy for growth.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwygw982e3xo
'The UK economy barely grew between July and September, with uncertainty about the Budget being blamed for the weak growth.
The economy slowed over the three-month period, growing by just 0.1%, and shrank during September itself.
Labour made boosting economic growth its top priority when it came into power but Chancellor Rachel Reeves said she was "not satisfied" with these latest figures which cover the first three months of the new government.
However, many businesses have criticised tax rises in the Budget which they say will lead to higher prices and fewer new jobs.'
Yes, of course these are early days. But already there have been a number of decisions that have raised question marks over the Government's competence and its ability to get to grips with the huge - some would say almost intractable - problems that the country now faces, after half a century of economic mismanagement.
Things can only get better? Not in the working lifetime of today's university students, and not with the policies we have seen from this Government so far.

I don't really understand the point you're trying to make here.
Why would you constrain your opinion on the budget to only the next five years? Most people care about the state of the economy over the next 5yrs but we'll beyond that too.
That the Budget alone will have little impact on growth over the next 5yrs is hardly surprising. Firstly, the actual current spending package is very small compared to the size of the actual economy (£50bn over 5yrs compared to £2.5tr per year). Secondly (and more importantly), a less restrictive fiscal stance will have little impact on real GDP because there's little spare capacity in the economy as potential output growth is dismal. This means that greater government spending is just largely offset by higher inflation and a stronger assumption for interest rates in response. One of the ways to lift potential output is greater capital spending, hence the extra £100bn in allocated to capex in the Budget. The growth benefits of greater capex won't be seen in the next 5yrs, but it's crucial for long-term growth.
Secondly, the BBC's economics reporting is woeful. It's laughable that they've just used an incredibly vague and misguided quote from the CBI (of all organisations.....) to try to pin September's modest fall in GDP on pre-budget uncertainty. The CBI isn't a very respected and rigorous economics firm, they're basically just corporate lobbyists). Even a brief glance at the data shows that September's decline was driven by an unusually weak outturn in the IT & Communication sector. Difficult to pin that on Budget uncertainty given it was the only sector to experience a notable decline. If business and household uncertainty about the budget was behind the disappointing data in September, it would be broad-based rather than only in one specific sector.

The point I am making is set out in my initial post in this thread. During the election campaign, both major parties engaged in a conspiracy of silence over the scale of the UK's problems. The Labour Party, in particular, was less than forthcoming about its intentions.
Many TSR users seemed, in my view, to be overly optimistic about the prospects for a better future under Labour. It therefore seems appropriate to keep track of the Party's record now it holds the reins of power.
It is quite right to point out that the pay off from increased capital expenditure can be only be evaluated in the longer term. But as The Resolution Foundation put it, " the reward is badly out of kilter with the electoral cycle."
https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/more-more-more/
Moreover, as it also says, the change in the fiscal rules (which was at least implicitly ruled out during the election campaign) to Public Sector Net Financial Liabilities does not come without problems: "Using this scope means debt is now set to rise by 4 per cent of national income from 2024-25, which obviously comes at some cost in terms of interest and exposure to financial conditions."
Your comment about the IT sector is a fair one. But the impression, nonetheless, is that the Government's electoral strategy of relying on economic growth to provide better public services during its 5 year term of office is not looking likely to materialise.

First, regarding the conspiracy of silence during the election campaign, I'm not really sure what you were expecting? It surely can't come as a surprise to you that politicians massage the truth for their own gain. I don't think this was the case any more for labour that it was for the conservatives, it's just the conservatives lost so we can't see their lies exposed in quite the same way.
That the reward from capital spending it out of kilter with the election cycle is precisely why it was so badly needed. The UK has had very lower public investment versus our peers for the past 40yrs, and then people wonder why our infrastructure is poor, our schools are made of dodgy concrete, and nothing seems to work. The thing about low capital spending is that it causes higher future current spending, so you can't escape, so better to just bite the bullet and have decent capital spending even if you won't be praised for it within this election cycle. To me, it's quite a positive development to have a government that made a good and expensive decision even though they won't get an electoral playoff for it.
I'm not entirely sure you understand the fiscal rules tbh. Changing the debt rule from PSND (ex BoE) to PSNFL doesn't increase the amount that debt will now rise by. It is simply a rule, sure PSNFL gives you more headroom, but that does not itself increase debt, it's the government's spending decisions in response to the additional headroom that increase debt. Moreover, people have this strange idea that changing fiscal rules is bad. Fiscal rules in their very essence are arbitrary and the previous fiscal rules had major issues and created very undesirable trade-offs, so I think the change was fine. The only point of fiscal rules is to signal to markets and your other ministers that there are limits on spending and you're trying to achieve debt sustainability - given markets were fine with the fiscal rules change and there were numerous reports that other ministers wanted more spending, I'd say the rule change worked fine.
I think the whole way that you frame the budget is misguided. Most of the spending was to fill in holes which had been neglected for years and that any future government would've had to pay for - it just happened to be labour. Every government would've had to come to some public sector pay deal, you can't just have them on 1% pay rises when inflation was so high without some restoration afterwards. The previous government delayed the payouts for the post-office and infected blood scandals. Prior to the election they'd spent the Treasury emergency buffer three times over on asylum seeker costs so that they wouldn't have to publicly give the home office more money. Now we can quibble about black holes but that whole debate is tiresome. But the point is, the budget was half about putting a bunch of plasters on neglected places, and half about boosting capital spending as it was on course to fall severely under the previous government's plans. Obviously Reeves will say her focus is on growth but this was really the framing going into the budget.
On your final para, again I think this is the wrong lens to be viewing the government's strategy through. In reality, there's actually very little a government can do to boost real potential output within a parliament. Therefore, to properly assess the government's performance, you just need to compare what they're doing to how you think the conservatives would've approached these problems. Only looking at the labour party without thinking about the potential counterfactual is just a bit simplistic.

I fear we may be at cross purposes here.
The focus of this thread is to examine Labour's performance in power in relation to the expectations that they raised during the election campaign. I couldn't agree more that politicians, as you put it, 'massage the truth for their own gain' and that the Conservatives were equally to blame for the conspiracy of silence. But Labour are now in power and must carry the can.
If you read some of the posts here on TSR that were submitted during the run up to the election it is obvious that many contributors were of the opinion that big improvements in public services and living standards were just around the corner. They may have been naive, but that's the essential purpose of this thread: to reflect upon such misplaced optimism.
You will also be no doubt be aware that, after only such a short time in office, the Government's popularity has plunged to an extent that is unusual at this stage in the political cycle. You may say that this was inevitable in the difficult circumstances in which ministers found themselves but, as many long-term Labour supporters have admitted, the Party leadership may have at least gained some enduring respect by being more open and honest about its intentions.
As for your comment about the potential consequences of the change to the fiscal rules, you need to take that up with the Resolution Foundation: it was their opinion, not mine!

Sure, but performance while in power is always in relation to the alternatives. You can't just separate them like you have said, given we live in a (largely) two party electoral system.
Unfortunately, I'm not telepathic, so I don't know all the posts you have read that led you to come to some conclusion about what lots of people on TSR think. Moreover, the degree of misplaced optimism doesn't just reflect what government's do, but also an individual's actual understanding of events. You could have a situation where lots get let down because of their own unrealistic expectations, but this doesn't really say anything about actual government performance. Therefore, I personally wouldn't take some people's comments on TSR as some robust and reliable sample of the general consciousness on an issue. But that's just me, you're welcome to make that leap if you wish.
I was generally under the idea that the bulk of prime ministers fall in the popularity ratings after elections. Difficult to know how many issues of the day can be blamed on a group only in power for a few months, but right/wrongly they're now the figure heads so cop the blame. Would be interested to see anything on whether the labour party is now much more unpopular after the election that previous GE winners were. Still, I know it's the media and political commentators jobs to overthink about polls and popularity ratings four months into a five year parliament, but I'm not sure whether it's a particularly useful thing for most people - I remember after GE2019 everyone thought Boris could be the next PM for a decade, so 5yrs is a long time.
On the fiscal rules, you brought it up.... What's the point in bringing it up in a debate and then when someone talks about it you actually say it was someone else's opinion and not yours? If you don't understand the topic properly, it's probably not sensible to blindly copy and paste someone else's view on it, otherwise it's just dogmatic.

You say that 'performance while in power is always in relation to the alternatives'.
I see no reason why we should not judge a government's performance on its own merits. But if we take your standpoint, we have a pretty good knowledge of the likely alternative, given that the Conservative Party had been in power for the last 14 years.
I'm puzzled by your comment on 'someone else's opinion'. Is it not standard practice in student essays and academic papers to cite the opinions of respected authorities on the subject under discussion? I chose The Resolution Foundation precisely because it is left-leaning and generally sympathetic to the Labour cause. Indeed, its former director, Torsten Bell, is now a Labour MP.
I could have cited other authorities that are somewhat more sceptical of the government's performance to date, particularly in regard to the Budget.

Maybe we're both right in a way. You can criticize a government in absolute terms, while also acknowledging whether or not the performance would likely be any better under an alternative administration.
The point I was trying to make was that in an essay or academic paper, you're not meant to just airdrop an opinion on a topic one doesn't know much about. Now I don't blame you for misunderstanding the fiscal rules, they're an incredibly dry bit of fiscal policy, which is itself a very dry topic. And the resolution foundation are a pretty good organisation, I know some people who work there. But again, just airdropping an opinion you can't assess properly into a niche topic you understandably don't know a much about, and then try to use that to make a point, you can't blame me if I pick out the errors in the conclusions you made after that quote.