Whatever happens, the Labour Party is going to drag this country down. Whether Sir Keir Starmer stays a day or a week or a month, we are heading for inevitable disaster.
It doesn’t really matter whether Andy Burnham or Angela Rayner or Ed Miliband succeeds our floundering Prime Minister, who is clinging so desperately and gracelessly to office, generating the kind of political instability he promised to end. The outcome will be the same.
Even Wes Streeting, though relatively sane, would be a prisoner of the tax-and-spend policies ingrained into the soul of the modern Labour Party if he were surprisingly chosen by the rank and file.
Should Starmer by some miracle survive, he will find himself increasingly doing the Left’s bidding. To a large degree, he and Rachel Reeves have been doing precisely that, with their reckless hikes in public expenditure and huge tax increases.
Look where they have taken us. The economy is stuttering towards recession and the bond markets are charging record high interest rates as our national debt climbs ever higher.
Where is the growth which Starmer declared would be the ‘core mission’ of this Government – an aspiration repeated a thousand times by him and the Chancellor? Nowhere. It hasn’t happened. The economy is likely to contract.
They have tried everything in the well-thumbed Labour handbook – raising taxes, throwing extra billions at the NHS and at welfare – and predictably it hasn’t worked. Starmer’s latest fruitless gambit is to put Britain at ‘the heart of Europe’. God save us.
Should Keir Starmer by some miracle survive, he will find himself increasingly doing the Left’s bidding, writes Stephen Glover
How will getting closer to the sclerotic, bureaucratic, low-growth EU (Poland and a couple of other countries excepted) conceivably help? Starmer doesn’t say. Nor does he mention that every time we take a step closer to Brussels, we have to pay for it, and dip into our empty pockets.
Why can’t Labour understand the simple truth that countries which don’t tax their citizens and companies to death, and manage to control public spending, are the ones that prosper?
There is evidence in our recent past. Margaret Thatcher inherited an economy impoverished by Labour (sounds familiar) and succeeded in turning it around, after many battles with rapacious trade unions.
Public spending fell as a proportion of GDP from 45.1 per cent in 1979 to 39.2 per cent in 1989-90. These weren’t the draconian cuts of Labour mythology. They were prudent housekeeping.
At the same time, taxes were progressively reduced. The top rate of income tax on earned income fell from 83 per cent in 1979 to 40 per cent a decade later. The basic rate of income tax fell from 33 per cent to 25 per cent in the Thatcher years.
These and other measures led to a rate of economic growth that had not been seen since the 1950s. Between 1983 and 1988 the economy expanded by an average of more than 4 per cent a year.
Labour, by the way, largely continued Thatcherite economic policies under Tony Blair, and until 2008 achieved a creditable annual growth rate. The Tony Blair Institute has called for lower taxes and reduced welfare spending but no one in the modern Leftist Labour Party is listening.
Rachel Reeves is fixated on growth. She tries this, she tries that, all to no effect. Things only get worse. The solution is staring her in the face but she cannot, will not, see it.
Is it because she and the PM are so steeped in Labour ideology that they can’t grasp that lower taxes and controlled public expenditure enable growth? Or is she constrained by an increasingly Left-wing party that is economically illiterate? Both, I’d say.
What is certain is that whoever succeeds Reeves and Starmer will be even worse. Andy Burnham is in favour of a wealth tax and higher inheritance taxes. Driving wealthy people out of the country will diminish investment and reduce tax revenue.
As for Angela Rayner, in her 1,000-word tirade delivered on Sunday afternoon she championed a further slew of workers’ rights, more taxes for the better off and redistribution. Needless to say, there wasn’t a single word about cutting public expenditure.
It doesn’t really matter whether Andy Burnham or Angela Rayner, pictured, succeeds our floundering Prime Minister. The outcome will be the same
Even Wes Streeting , though relatively sane, would be a prisoner of the tax-and-spend policies ingrained into the soul of the modern Labour Party
Rayner and Burnham evidently believe – like most of the Labour Party – that economic growth can be achieved by ‘soaking the rich’. This is a delusion. The rich will flee abroad or squirrel away their money beyond Andy’s and Angela’s reach.
Welfare must be cut. Spending on welfare, including pensions, is expected to be £333 billion this year, and to rise by more than £50 billion by the end of the decade, though I daresay we will have gone bust long before then.
But it’s not just welfare. The Tories estimate that £8 billion a year could be saved by cutting the number of civil servants to 2016 levels, when the country seemed to function at least as well as it does now.
Most households, except the very poorest, could trim their budgets by 5 per cent a year and survive. Why can’t the Government, which is kept afloat by the bond markets, make across-the-board cuts to its burgeoning £1,370 billion annual budget? A 5 per cent cut would save £68 billion a year.
Why not? Because that’s not the Labour way. It’s not Starmer’s or Reeves’s way, and it certainly won’t be Rayner’s or Burnham’s or Miliband’s way when the Prime Minister’s tenacious fingers are eventually prised from the seals of office.
Miliband, of course, has an additional scheme of his own to hobble the economy with a Net Zero energy policy that is delivering very nearly the most expensive electricity in the world.
According to Labour, the Tories ‘cut services to the bone’. Hence this Government’s splurge of public spending (which has unfortunately excluded defence). Yet anyone who has dealings with any organ of the state can see that there is wastage and inefficiency almost everywhere.
Streeting, who as I say is fairly sane and therefore probably unelectable, recently suggested that welfare should be cut to fund extra defence expenditure. Not a bad idea, but a better one would be to reduce all spending except on defence and criminal justice, both of which sorely need extra funding.
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Why a hard-Left government by Burnham and Rayner would be an economic nightmare: STEPHEN GLOVER
How this will end no one, not even Starmer, can be certain. It is richly ironic that a Prime Minister who was hailed as the epitome of stability by his media cheerleaders in July 2024 should now be generating chaos.
The Left-wing Guardian chirruped then that ‘the grown-ups are back in Westminster’. Journalist and broadcaster Andrew Marr forecast that Britain under Labour would appear to the rest of the world as ‘a little haven of peace and stability’.
Another Leftie broadcaster, Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, comforted himself with the thought that there was ‘no likelihood of massive instability anytime soon’.
Massive instability is exactly what we’ve got after 22 months. It will get worse. Labour is tearing itself apart. Assuming Starmer is sooner or later carted off, he will be succeeded by someone even more doctrinaire and rigid – a true representative of the Hard Left.
There’ll be no growth, only higher taxes and general misery as Labour pursues its misguided policies. One thing is certain. Whoever succeeds Sir Keir Starmer will end up being hated even more than him.
