by There is no doubt that the reform overtaking the Tories according to one opinion poll is a high point in British politics. But Nigel Farage’s suggestion that “a vote for the Conservatives is now a vote for Labour” is not quite right. Because Reform does not have the numbers to replace the Tories; but to destroy them, without any clear idea of what would follow. When the red mist clears, what we will be left with is a future far worse than the wettest Conservatives could muster.
A YouGov voting intention poll puts Reform up two percentage points on 19 per cent and the Tories on 18 per cent. But just as important is the effect all this seems to be having on Labour’s vote share – down one percentage point to 37 per cent.
The country now faces the prospect of a Labor “majority” win with less than 40 per cent of the vote and a likely low turnout as well. It looks like over half of the electorate will be supporting parties other than Sir Keir Starmer’s on July 4th – and yet, somewhat as MPs insisted in the 52/48 referendum result – “Hard Labor will ” we without the mandate.
Compare this to the 80 seat majority won by Boris Johnson in 2019 with 44 per cent of the vote, the highest percentage of any party since the 1979 general election. Labor now looks set to win by a bigger landslide than before which he won in 1997 – with far less support than Tony Blair’s 43 per cent. Churchill’s reference to democracy being the worst form of government rather than the others comes to mind.
It’s doubly worrying when you think about what we know – or don’t know – about what Labor intends to do in power. His manifesto was revealed in Manchester to the much misplaced author on Thursday. Starmer is devoid of charisma, a leader so lacking in self-awareness that he didn’t realize he was the tool traitor, not his late father, appearing in at least 33 “presidential” images. However, there’s nothing remotely statesmanlike about a man who can’t decide whether a woman has a penis, let alone explain why he willingly endorsed Jeremy Corbyn for four years after he “didn’t think I hope he wins”.
Having achieved the impossible feat of being more robotic than Theresa May, Mogadon’s political impersonation is already uninspired and has failed to even rank in No. 10. We have at least four years and maybe ten years. of this snoozefest of forced sincerity, folks. Buckle up and enjoy the slide.
Worse still, Labor is being given this huge amount of power on the back of a manifesto that raises more questions than it answers. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) pointed out, “this is not a manifesto for those looking for big numbers.” Costings are only provided for the final year of the next parliament, rather than every year, with “no sign of a plan for where the money would come from”.
Meanwhile, what the IFS describes as a “damaging” number of “reviews” and “strategies” are proposed to address some of the challenges facing the country. I’m sure we’re all eagerly awaiting the announcement of a host of new “tsars” to fix Britain – because, of course, that approach has always worked. Will any of these schemes be led by anyone of the right mind, given Labour’s very vague support for “diversity and inclusion”? I wouldn’t hold your breath.
As historian David Starkey has pointed out, Starmer intended to devolve greater powers not just to Scotland and Wales, but to people like him – that is, lawyers and judges. Describing the proposals as a way of “eradicating our traditions of parliamentary government”, Starkey highlighted how the manifesto reflects the self-confessed socialist’s long-standing desire to cement the worst aspects of the Blair and Brown years: devolution ; conservation ; the nanny state; the Human Rights Act and the Supreme Court – so that they are irreversible.
It looks like devolved nations, arm’s length companies and civil servants will be given more powers at the expense of our parliamentary democracy. But the difficulty with giving control of the state machinery to unelected technocrats is that they are completely unaccountable to the people they are supposed to serve, and often act in their own interests. As Tory candidate Miriam Cates said, if you thought “the will of the people” was already frustrating lawyers like Starmer – just wait until he’s in charge.
At a more basic level, this smoke and mirrors manifesto tells us which taxes Labor won’t pay – income tax, national insurance and VAT – but not which ones it will. The promise of no higher taxes for “working people” is as vague as it is enticing. Who are the “working people”, exactly? Some of the wealthiest men and women in the country are “working people”. Is Starmer getting rid of tax rises for them? And if not, how can he credibly claim that Labour’s top priority is “wealth creation”? Meanwhile, are we really supposed to believe that Labor is the “party of business” when shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves cites Joan Robinson as one of her economic inspirations – an eccentric Cambridge professor who was once a staunch defender of China’s tyranny and mass murder. Mao Tse-Tung? It should be noted that successive Labor frontbenches refused to rule out raising capital gains tax (CGT), although deputy leader Angela Rayner could not even deny herself that Labor could Work to apply it to the sale of family homes during the leaders on Thursday. debate.
Other questions remain unanswered. Labor may have scaled back its unaffordable “green prosperity plan”, but we don’t know how it will decarbonise the power grid by 2030, how much it will cost, or what is likely to happen it won’t work. .
The party has a good game for improving people’s skills and has finally started mentioning “British jobs for British people” but they can’t confirm how it will reduce migration in the short term, or by how much. Asked what it will do about illegal migrants arriving in their thousands through barely inflatable Channel dinghies, Labor offers no real solutions beyond some rhetoric about “breaking the gangs” and scrapping the Rwandan plan.
And what is his transgender plan, really? The manifesto proposes to “modernize, simplify and reform the intrusive and outdated gender identification law into a new process” without specifying what that process will be other than “the need for a gender dysphoria diagnosis by a specialist doctor”. Will it be a face-to-face appointment or gender self-identification via Zoom?
Now so close to entering government, it is unlikely Starmer or his shadow cabinet will tell us. But fully mindful of the idea of absolute power corrupting, I think at this stage it is wise to expect the worst.
