The awful truth about Labour? They're just continuity Sunak

Telegraph

17-07-2025

At Prime Minister's Questions this week, Keir Starmer told us 'Mr Speaker, we're only just getting started'. I fear so. It's time to cower under the beds. For if this first year of Labour government is anything to go by, we have a grim prospect ahead.
Let's review the record. GDP per head is at the same level as mid-2022. It flatlined in Labour's first six months, grew in the first quarter of this year only by pulling activity forward to avoid the April tax increases, and will no doubt shrink in the second. Nobody is getting better off – or if they are, it's at someone else's expense.
In parallel, and not coincidentally, Rachel Reeves pushed up the tax burden by around 1.5 per cent of GDP, driving it to the highest levels for over 70 years – and yet managed to increase rather than reduce the deficit too. Labour's backbenches won't allow any spending cuts or even restraint. It is not surprising, then, that the OBR said this month that 'UK public finances [are] in a relatively vulnerable position and facing mounting risks.'
So Reeves is now in a vicious circle: tax increases cause slower growth, receipts then fall, tax goes up further, and the real economy starts to collapse. Accordingly, wealth creators are fleeing, employment is falling and unemployment is growing, and inflation is well over target. The once outlandish idea of a wealth tax – rejected even by the 1970s Labour government – now seems a real prospect. We are well into a downward spiral.
All this is made worse by the deranged doubling down on net zero, a policy which is based on simple untruths about the cost of wind and solar power. Indeed the so-called renewables industry is not a business in any meaningful sense of the word: it only exists because of subsidy and government regulation and therefore destroys value for the country rather than creates it. Its results are that Britain pays some of the highest electricity prices in the Western world, energy-intensive industry flees the country, and the government's 'industrial strategy' robs Peter to pay Paul to subsidise energy costs for their favoured clients.
Meanwhile, Reeves denounces the burden of regulation but does nothing about it. The new Employment Bill will disastrously weaken Britain's labour market. The Renters' Rights Bill will push up housing costs further. Bridget Phillipson's Schools Bill is destroying one of the successes of recent years. Even football has got its new regulator. The planning system is not being deregulated, just worked harder, and housebuilding is still falling, disastrously so in London.
The country's social contract feels dangerously close to fraying. Non-European legal net migration in 2024 was over half a million, 544,000 to be precise. The overall figure was only lower, at 431,000, because more Brits and EU citizens left than arrived – and who can blame them?
Illegal immigration on small boats is at its highest level ever, and there is now a growing culture of suspicion and confrontation, not surprisingly, between communities and illegal arrivals dumped in hotels. Dissent is repressed and awkward facts are covered up. That's why, as shadow minister Alex Burghart put it on Thursday, the potential for civil unrest is 'underpriced'.
And finally, Starmer points to his trade deals with India and the US, yet can't bring himself to admit that neither would be possible if we were still in the EU. And he has just agreed a deal with the EU itself that allows Brussels to set our food and agriculture rules and our carbon prices, without any say in them, makes us pay for the privilege, and gives away our fishing grounds for another 12 years too: a joke negotiation with a dangerous result.
Truly, Britain has not had such a dreadful and incompetent government for many years, a government that not only doesn't govern in the interests of the people but doesn't even seem to like them very much, a government that feels more like an imposed colonial regime than one with any genuine popular consent.
Yet one thing must be acknowledged. Yes, things are getting worse fast. But the direction of travel hasn't changed, only the pace. High taxes and spending; net zero; high immigration; the destruction of the rental market; the football regulator; the smoking ban: all these were the projects of the last years of the Conservative government. In many ways, the premiership of Starmer is a mere continuation of Rishi Sunak's 20 months in office.
Labour has doubled down on them, and added madnesses of their own, but they are on a well-travelled path which the Conservative Party has not yet convincingly disowned – as its poll ratings show. Kemi Badenoch claims that the Tory party is 'under new management': well, maybe, but there isn't yet a new plan. One is needed soon.
British voters' consent for the current ways of doing things is now fragile. Yet much of our insouciant political class seems simply indifferent to this reality.
A prospectus for radical change is needed if there is to be an effective opposition and if we are, as a country, to dig ourselves out of this mess. Who can pick up the baton and get us onto a new track? Perhaps we will find out this autumn.