Starmer’s social contract with the unions won’t work 

There may be a few warnings about pay, and the inevitable references to the ‘black hole’ that has mysteriously appeared in the government’s finances since Labour won the election in July. And yet despite that, the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will deliver the most positive speech a Labour leader has delivered to the Trades Union Congress in more than half a century later today. ‘I call now, as before the election, for the politics of partnership. With us in government, with business, and most importantly of all, with working people… the mood is for partnership,’ he will tell the comrades. ‘And not just on pay – on everything.’ In effect, Starmer is pledging a revival of the Social Contract of the 1970s. There are just a couple of snags. The world has changed dramatically since then, and it didn’t work anyway.

The Social Contract may be little remembered now, but it was the high-water mark of the corporatist approach to political management.