Common People dismayed by Rishi Sunak's tax cuts for rich should take hope: Things Can Only Get Better – Susan Dalgety

The 1990s music that heralded a new Labour government after years of Tory rule is as relevant today as it was then

Tomorrow night, I and a few thousand hardy souls in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens, no doubt soaked to the skin by the relentless rain, will sing along to Pulp’s Common People. A surprise Christmas gift means I will ring in the bells with Jarvis Cocker, instead of my usual Hogmanay routine of lying in bed, half asleep, half listening to yet another podcast.

I will be croaking along to such lines as: “You will never understand, how it feels to live your life, with no meaning or control, and with nowhere left to go.” As Barbara Ellen wrote in the Guardian nearly a decade ago, Cocker’s singalong anthem is “part poem, part manifesto”, a searing indictment of the class system that still defines Britain.

Common People is nearly 30 years old, released in May 1995, two years before Tony Blair and New Labour’s 1997 election landslide, but its universal truth rings as true today as it did in the heyday of Britpop. Rich people will never watch their life slide out of view. Or if they do, there will be a safety net to catch them. A trust fund. A legacy from granny. The bank of Mum and Dad. “If you called your dad, he could stop it all,” as Cocker will sing tomorrow night.

Pulp's song Common People was part pop song, part political manifesto (Picture: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images)

Five out-of-touch Tory PMs

The rest of us have to cope how best we can, and the last 15 years or so have pushed most of us to our limit. The fall-out from the Great Crash of 2008, the division of the 2014 independence referendum, the shock of Brexit, the existential fear of a global pandemic, and now a cost-of-living crisis and housing emergency, with public services – our safety net – in chaos.

And during all this, the most chaotic period in our post-war history, we have been at the mercy of five Tory prime ministers, none of whom could be said to have anything in common with the people of Britain, or their daily concerns.

From Old Etonian David Cameron to multi-millionaire Rishi Sunak, the parade of hapless Tory leaders has been more interested in keeping their friends in the VIP lane happy than rebuilding Britain. Each shock was met, not with rolled-up sleeves and a plan to get the country working again, but with a series of cunning wheezes to enrich their mates.

Fancy making a few bob supplying the NHS with dodgy PPE from China? Simple, just phone this number. Looking to increase your investment pot? Easy, a hedge fund manager – and Tory donor – says betting against government bonds is “the gift that keeps on giving”. Your kid is failing at school or granny needs her cataracts fixed? Don’t worry, that’s what the private sector does best.

Every one of them – Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak – has put their personal brand of free market economics to the test and failed the people of Britain. Even now, as a general election looms and food banks can’t cope with demand, it seems Sunak is hoping that one last bribe to the richest in our country will save his party.

His team has been busy over the Christmas break briefing friendly journalists that the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, will slash inheritance tax in the Budget on March 6. Never mind that you must leave at least £325,000 before your estate becomes liable for tax, and that less than 4 per cent of estates in 2021 met that limit – and that is probably only because they didn’t get advice from a tax accountant. Looking after their own is what today’s Tory party does best, as the common people slide out of view.

Starmer’s empathy and understanding

Does Keir Starmer and the UK Labour Party have what it takes to fix our struggling economy, mend our broken public services, restore hope to a population grown weary and cynical of any and all political parties? His rhetoric suggests he at least understands the challenges people face in their everyday lives.

There was a section in his October conference speech where he talked about the impact of the cost-of-living crisis intruding on the little things people love. “Days out, meals out, holidays, the first things people cut back on. Picking up a treat in the supermarket just to put it back on the shelf… we have to be a government that takes care of the big questions so that working people have the freedom to enjoy what they love. More time, more energy, more possibility, more life.”

Not quite Barack Obama at his hopeful best, but with more empathy and understanding of the reality of people’s lives than any of the five Tory prime ministers we have endured since 2010. And Starmer knows exactly what big questions he and his largely untested team will face if they win the election in a few months’ time.

He has argued consistently that he faces a much bigger challenge than Blair did in 1997, because as well as fixing public services in decline, he must follow Harold Wilson’s 1964 ambition to modernise the economy in an era of change, and rebuild the country “out of the trauma of collective sacrifice” as Clem Attlee did after the Second World War. “In 2024, it will have to be all three,” he said in his October speech.

Meanwhile, Sunak promises tax cuts to the comfortably off. And last Christmas, 16,493 children in Scotland were homeless.

As the bells ring out at midnight tomorrow and another difficult year slides out of view, we at least face the prospect of a fresh start in the new year, with a Prime Minister who puts the people of Britain first before his mates. And on the walk home I may well sing Things Can Only Get Better – a refrain I thought we might never hear again.