This Government is the most devious and dishonest in Britain's history

Telegraph

5 hours ago

I thought this Government of Gaslighters had reached its apogee of untruth with Darren Jones's suggestion that most of the illegal migrants crossing the Channel were ' women, children and babies '.
When it was pointed out to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury that the Home Office's own figures showed the crossings since January 2025 comprised 81 per cent adult men, he later conceded he 'could have been clearer'.
'I was telling a story about a visit I had to the border security command where I was shown a number of dinghies which did have women, babies and children in them', he insisted, prompting understandable cries of 'liar' on social media.
But he's not the only Labourite who has been taking the public for fools. They're all at it.
This week, Leader of the Commons Lucy Powell told the chamber, with a straight face: 'We never ruled out returning to the issue of a national inquiry [on grooming gangs].' Yes, that's the same Lucy Powell who accused Tim Montgomerie, the founder of the ConservativeHome website, of peddling 'dog whistle' politics on Radio 4's Any Questions, merely for asking whether she had seen a recent Channel 4 documentary on the scandal. 'Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now do we', she sneered. 'Let's get that dog whistle out shall we'.
Powell's fib came after Home Secretary Yvette Cooper performed a politically expedient u-turn and announced there would, in fact, be a judge-led national inquiry into the rape gangs scandal – having spent the previous year saying we didn't need one.
Had the Government admitted it had got it wrong, and changed its mind, it would have been fine. But instead a succession of MPs insisted that they had always wanted a judge-led statutory inquiry and that it was all Kemi Badenoch's fault that the Conservatives hadn't already held one – even though Sir Keir Starmer had suggested that she would be 'jumping on a far-Right bandwagon' for doing so. Such is the utter hypocrisy of Labour's position that Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, of 'Tory scum' fame, called for the issue to be depoliticised, yet when asked by Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp if she would apologise for the Prime Minister's 'far-Right' slur, attacked the opposition for its inaction.
Natalie Fleet, the Labour MP for Bolsover, herself a sexual abuse survivor, then took to the airwaves to attack the Conservatives for failing to do enough, while completely failing to mention all the Labour councillors and MPs who covered it up for fear of inflaming 'community relations'.
When Telford MP Shaun Davies was the town's council leader, he opposed a local grooming gang inquiry. In 2016, he wrote to the home secretary and prime minister along with nine other local authority figures, saying: 'We do not feel at this time that a further inquiry is necessary.'
Yet in a statement to The Telegraph this week, his spokesman insisted: 'To suggest Shaun Davies attempted to obstruct a local inquiry would be completely incorrect.' Do these people think we are as stupid as they are? And they wonder why trust in politics is at an all time low.
Jess Phillips is the kind of self-righteous political narcissist who insists that anyone who disagrees with her is a gaslighter. Yet she too has taken this form of psychological manipulation to new heights with the claim, on Newsnight, that she had 'never turned a blind eye' to what was going on. The Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, who nearly lost her Birmingham Yardley seat to a pro-Palestinian Workers Party opponent at the last general election, rejected Oldham Council's request for national support for the inquiry. She repeatedly refused to acknowledge the racially motivated nature of the crimes and criticised the Conservative MP Katie Lam for raising the ethnicity of the perpetrators and yet told the BBC: 'I would never shy away from calling a problem what it is'. (She also once compared the Cologne sex attacks to 'a typical night out in Birmingham').
These were precisely the politicians who would regularly accuse Boris Johnson of being a liar. Maybe he was economically with the truth. But this Labour government has reached plumbed new depths of dishonesty that make Partygate look like, well, a piece of cake.
I've checked the Labour Party Manifesto 2024 (preferable to sleeping pills if you're struggling to bed down in this heat), and there is no mention in there of either assisted dying or changing the abortion laws.
Yet both have been ramraided through Parliament without the public even being consulted. So much for Starmer's pledge, on the steps of Downing Street almost a year ago, that: 'My government will serve you.'
When he promised a 'return of politics to public service,' I don't think anyone thought it would mean bunging his union buddies huge payrises while the private sector, which employs 83 per cent of the total workforce, is shafted by Rachel Reeves's Budget.
That was the biggest deceit of them all, that Labour wouldn't tax 'working people'. In fact, the £25 billion increase to employers' National Insurance contributions has done exactly that.
When Rishi Sunak tried to do the same in 2021, the Chancellor personally lambasted the plan as a 'jobs tax'. She's another Labour politician who thinks we haven't kept the receipts. It's as insulting to the electorate as her continual claim that rising inflation and unemployment, combined with record business closures and a millionaires' exodus is absolutely nothing to do with her and all down to Donald Trump. This is weapons' grade gaslighting.
Similarly, we are all supposed to believe that she reversed the cuts to the winter fuel allowance because 'the economy is doing better', even though we learnt this week that the UK has suffered the second highest fall in wealth of any major economy. Growth is down, retail sales are down, hirings are down – and despite what they say, it's all of Labour's making.
Need we even get started on Starmer's hollow claim that he is 'standing up for Britain's interests' when he can't even seem to decide whether the murderous mullahs of Iran should have nuclear weapons that could wipe out western civilization?
Yet again, he's being egged on by his bestie Lord Hermer, who gaslit the electorate by insisting it was a good deal that we paid £30 billion to give away the Chagos Islands to China-backed Mauritius. We're supposed to believe he's a cuddly respecter of human rights…who likens Tories and Reform to Nazis.
And these inadequates seriously expect us to believe they are capable of running the country? That's the biggest con of them all.