Keir Starmer is turning Britain into South Africa

Telegraph

03-04-2025

Ask which country Britain should model its economy on, and you'll get a range of answers. Some would opt for the United States and its turbocharged national prosperity. Others, a more dirigiste European model, or perhaps the authoritarian state-managed capitalism of China.
Almost nobody is going to name South Africa. After almost two decades of miserable stagnation, the rainbow nation is poorer today than it was in 2007. Rolling blackouts blight the lives of citizens and businesses, infrastructure is visibly crumbling and new land seizure laws have stepped up the government's war on farmers, frightening off investors with predictable consequences. It's unfortunate, then, that Sir Keir Starmer and his comrades seem to see this as the ideal path for the UK to follow.
The rush to decarbonise the grid, seemingly driven less by practicality than ideology, is opening Britain up to a future of 'demand flexibility' as intermittent generation fails to provide enough power to meet requirements. The state of the roads is a subject of perennial complaint. And now the Government is inching towards expropriation of land and property.
Nestled in the Planning Bill currently making its way through Parliament is a nasty clause giving the state the right to seize your home and land for less than its market value. This already exists, to a certain degree: the last government decided that councils could issue compulsory purchase orders for property without including what's known as 'hope value' – the value added on top of the current use value of a property by the possibility of future planning permission.
The Planning Bill would strip back the safeguards to this clause, allowing local authorities to issue these orders without the consent of central government in order to build social or affordable housing.
It doesn't take a great deal of thought to see how badly this could work out. The 'hope' value of housing or land will be partly reflected in the price paid for that asset. Disregarding it entirely raises the prospect of people being forced to sell for less than that price, leaving them out of pocket. For farmers already facing the prospect of being forced into sales by changes to inheritance tax, this could be another brutal blow. It could also prove a blow to urban households, too; these laws cover family homes with every bit as much force as they cover vacant brownfield sites.
Proponents of the law argue that it is all but inconceivable that it could ever be misused. Critics with a more realistic view of the long, sordid history of local authorities behaving in corrupt or grotesquely stupid ways might beg to differ. Put a mechanism for the cheap expropriation of land and property in front of cash-strapped councils looking to balance soaring statutory obligations for spending with stagnant income, and it seems far from impossible that they'll attempt to find a way of turning a discount on land into a source of funds, or successfully lobby for changes to the law to allow them to do so.
It's not an appealing prospect. And it's a prospect that's not confined to local Government, either. 'Wealth tax' might be the most dangerous two-word phrase in fiscal policy, but that hasn't deterred central Government from creeping in that direction. Increased surveillance of land values, raising inheritance taxation by pulling pensions and other assets into the scope of the tax, and a constant drumbeat of more or less explicit proposals for taxing people's savings and capital appear to suggest that the Left is once again debating the most damaging tax it can.
It's notable that no firm proposal need ever see the light of day for some of the damage to be felt. As with speculation over changes to the taxation of pensions or capital gains, a mere suggestion that such a tax could be in the offing would result in people changing their behaviour in economically costly ways.
This, in turn, is why chancellors have shied away from the policy in the past. People save and invest in Britain under the assumption that they will be able to reap the fruits of their decisions, and with the knowledge, too, that future governments will be highly tempted to expropriate them.
Present day governments can offer no cast-iron guarantees that this won't happen. Promises and laws made and passed today can be reneged on or repealed tomorrow. All they can do is point to their track record of behaviour, and the point that despite tremendous temptation, Britain has eschewed this policy. With the tax burden already soaring, and no sign of falling demands for spending in sight, however, the temptation to meet today's fiscal demands by burning tomorrow's prosperity is growing. Setting up the infrastructure for expropriation today could lead to South Africanisation tomorrow.