Britain has just 24 hours to teach Starmer a lesson he won't forget

Telegraph

30-04-2025

We are only ten months into the Starmerite era, but this Government is already ready for the scrapheap. Rarely has a political project unravelled so rapidly, so comprehensively and with so little hope of redemption. Labour will stagger on, of course, for what feels like an eternity, inflicting yet more misery on our poor country, but the voters it has betrayed will never forgive it.
Those who can must reward the Labour Party with the mother of all political shellackings at the English local elections on Thursday: this is the most over-rated Government of modern times, a noxious mix of incompetence, nastiness and untrustworthiness. Its second-rate apparatchiks are exacerbating every one of our pathologies, and vandalising the little that still works in Broken Britain: the Government's reverse Midas touch is something to behold.
Sir Keir Starmer, it turns out, didn't have a plan. He is failing on almost every metric that matters, from the national debt to illegal immigration. He will dilute Brexit and ruin state education, two great legacies of the Tory years. He is wrong about almost everything, and right about close to nothing.
His Government is soulless, obsessed with process, procedure and legalisms, congenitally unable to give the public the change it so craves. It lacks any kind of vision, other than reflexive cod-egalitarianism, progressivism and big statism, and is unable to comprehend the needs and desires of the aspirational working class and petite bourgeoisie.
It is neither a Government of dreamers, nor of doers, and it cannot execute, lead or enthuse. It can break, but not build; it can redistribute, but not grow; it can regulate, but not liberate. It is cowardly, picking on defenceless private school children, while sucking up to its powerful union paymasters. Oozing negativity, it hides its fundamental vacuousness behind a veil of chipiness, class war and socialistic policies that are accelerating this country's ruination.
Labour's social engineers don't understand that they exist to serve the people, and to help them improve their lives, not to endlessly constrain, challenge, impoverish, bully or brainwash them. The result is a toxic anti-consumerism, an inability to take immigration control seriously, an unserious approach to 'petty crime', an obsession with 'resetting' ties with the EU by selling out UK fisheries and regulatory independence, and a scandalous lack of interest in how only the free market can deliver rising living standards.
The Government has already been knocked sideways by the vibe shift on trans issues and women's rights. Many of its MPs are furious, and cling to a doomed woke ideology. They may soon face further discombobulation over net zero, which is pushing the country towards blackouts and requires urgent moderation, and our membership of the European Convention of Human Rights, which prevents us from controlling our borders. Labour's electoral coalition is fraying, with its Left flank departing for the Greens or pro-Gaza Independents, its working class electorate to Reform and 'centrists' to the Lib Dems.
Yet it is the fury of the apolitical wing of Middle England that should most terrify Starmer. Labour portrayed itself as reassuringly technocratic at the general election, but this was a false prospectus: it stands for the tax-consuming producer class, not for taxpayers and users of public services.
It doesn't have the first idea how to deliver prosperity or growth, loathes and distrusts capitalism and is presiding over the greatest exodus of wealth creators since the brain drain of the 1970s.
It will prove powerless to reform the public sector, to crack down on crime or to solve the housing crisis. Ministers' lack of managerial experience have ensured that the Blob has retained control. They are rightly scrapping NHS England, but the rest of that bureaucratic behemoth remains untouched. Throwing yet more non-existent billions at it won't fix waiting lists or endemic malpractice. The Home Office remains a disaster zone.
Housebuilding and infrastructure may eventually tick up, but not by enough to compensate for extreme levels of immigration or to substantially rectify our deficit of roads, power plants, prisons or water reservoirs.
Like socialists always do, this Labour government is running out of other people's money. Our public finances feel dangerously Latin American. The budget deficit rose to £151.9 billion in 2024-2025, the kind of shortfall that might be acceptable in wartime or in a pandemic but that is shockingly irresponsible today. Rachel Reeves has failed to tell the public the truth: we cannot afford such large annual increases in spending on benefits and the NHS when the economy is barely growing in per capita terms.
What will happen if the world tips into a real recession, perhaps caused by Trumpian tariff idiocy, or if the UK suddenly needs to spend a lot more on the military? Would Labour need to call in the IMF, as in the 1970s? Taxes are already heading to a record high: what will Reeves target next?
Will she freeze income tax thresholds again, dragging yet more people into higher tax bands? Will she eventually feel obliged to impose a catastrophic wealth tax, chasing away the last billionaires, entrepreneurs and former non-doms?
Arthur Laffer, author of the eponymous curve, was right: above certain levels, higher tax can reduce receipts. It normally takes longer for Left-wing parties to rediscover this eternal truth, so perhaps we should be thankful that Reeves's gambit unravelled so quickly. She now appears to realise that energy costs inflated by net zero are accelerating the deindustrialisation of Britain, but remains in denial about her job-destroying National Insurance raid and addiction to cheap foreign labour.
There is, of course, the odd policy that Labour has got right, including on Ukraine. To placate Donald Trump, Starmer is increasing defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP, paying for it by cutting foreign aid back to 0.3 per cent of GDP, a modest step in the right direction.