It will take decades to unpick Starmer's ludicrous ‘deals'
As soon as Labour got in I could see the writing was on the wall. Desperate to curry favour with the unions, Starmer sent his ministers out to solve the unrest in the public sector. He sanctioned Wes Streeting to hand over a 22 per cent pay rise to the junior doctors. Labour boasted that they'd fixed the problem in the NHS and everything would now flourish. This week those same doctors will go out on strike because the government can't give them any more.
Next came the train drivers. After paralysing the country for months they accepted 15 per cent to return to a normal timetable. The Secretary of State for Transport Louise Haigh, who later had to resign over a fraud conviction, paid the money with no conditions. As a result the train drivers continue to milk the system, work four days a week and enjoy hopelessly arcane practices.
Then we come to the international negotiations. Sadly Starmer has fared no better than his Cabinet. Let's consider the Chagos Islands. When Labour got into power it wasn't entirely clear whether Mauritius actually wanted them. And with much huffing and puffing from Nigel Farage - who was covertly suggesting that he would get Donald Trump to veto any deal - it looked for all the world that the fire sale would never happen.
But thanks to Tony Blair's diplomat in chief Jonathan Powell and the Attorney General Lord Hermer a deal was struck. The bad news is that we are face paying the thick end of around £56 billion over the next several years. Hardly a bargain.
As I said at the time on my show, it's like paying someone £25,000 to take away your 35 year old banger that needs lots of work and an MOT.
Next up it was the French. Before the rather ludicrous summit this month in London where Starmer got into full love-in mode with Emanuel Macron, he had already sold off our fishing rights to the French in return for a completely nebulous promise that the gendarmerie of Normandy might try a bit harder to stop illegal migrants from clambering onto some small boats.
£771 million pounds later, they're still coming. And now they're being handed free life jackets too. Quite a ridiculously low return for our investment.
Since the summit Starmer's negotiations skills have gone into overdrive. Thanks to his interventions it now looks like we will be paying vast sums into the coffers of the European Union in order to harmonise our food standards and to equalise our carbon markets.
And we haven't even got to our trade deals yet. The one with Europe certainly looks like one way traffic with the UK as the supplicant in the relationship. We pay, they play seems to be the mantra for the Foreign Office.
India meanwhile appears to be the beneficiary of a spectacular deal to open businesses in the UK which will be given special treatment when it comes to levels of income tax and national insurance. Indian citizens will be enabled to come to Britain and work on a temporary basis and be better off than their British counterparts. And it isn't clear, as with most deals with this Labour government, exactly what we are getting in return.
Then we turn to the USA. Forget the cringeworthy moment of Starmer producing a letter from King Charles in the Oval Office out of his breast pocket, and instead focus on what has actually happened since the deal was done - much more recently than Labour would have you believe.
We have bought around £1 billion of military jets from America, but we are still subject to tariffs on steel, on cars and on a host of other exports that didn't used to pay them. It's a no win situation for the UK because walking into a room with a begging bowl isn't going to impress Donald Trump.
He's taken the Prime Minister for a very long and costly ride.
This week an increasingly irrelevant and nervous looking PM entertained the leaders of Germany and the Czech Republic. He signed the Kensington Treaty with the former and a memorandum of understanding with the latter. All nonsense of course.
If you were a betting man, or woman, in a casino you'd always bet against Two Tier Keir. He loses at the tables every time.
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