According to one poll, reforms that overtake the Tories will undoubtedly mark a turning point in British politics. But Nigel Farage’s suggestion that “a vote for the Conservatives is now a vote for Labour” is not quite right. Because Reform simply doesn’t have the numbers to replace the Tories; only to destroy them, with no clear idea of what would follow. When the red mist clears, we will be left with a future far worse than even the wettest Conservatives could muster.
According to YouGov’s voting intentions poll, reform is up two percentage points at 19 percent and the Tories at 18 percent. But of equal importance is the effect all this appears to be having on Labour’s vote share – down one percentage point to 37 per cent.
The country now faces the prospect of a Labor “supermajority” won thanks to less than 40 percent of the vote and likely low turnout as well. More than half the electorate appears likely to support parties other than Sir Keir Starmer’s on July 4 – and yet, somewhat as the Remainers argued in the 52/48 referendum result, we will end up with “hard Labour” without the mandate.
Compare this to the 80-seat majority that Boris Johnson won in 2019 with 44 percent of the vote, the highest percentage for any party since the 1979 general election. It appears that Labor is now in for a bigger landslide than in 1997 – with significantly less support than Tony Blair’s 43 percent. Churchill’s quote that democracy is the worst form of government apart from the others comes to mind.
It is doubly worrying when you consider what we know – or rather don’t know – about what Labor plans to do once in power. The manifesto was unveiled on Thursday amid much misplaced fanfare in Manchester. The charisma-free Starmer, a leader so lacking in self-awareness that he failed to understand that the toolmaker joke was aimed at him, not his late father, features in no fewer than 33 ‘presidential’ images. Yet there is nothing even remotely statesmanlike about a man who cannot decide whether a woman has a penis, let alone explain why he willingly supported Jeremy Corbyn for four years of “I didn’t think he would win”.
Having achieved the impossible feat of appearing even more robotic than Theresa May, this uninspiring personification of political Mogadon is already starting to bore everyone and hasn’t even set foot in tenth place yet. We still have at least four years and possibly a decade. from this snoozefest of forced sincerity, folks. Fasten your seat belt and enjoy the slide.
Even more worrying is that Labor will gain this massive amount of power on the basis of a manifesto that raises more questions than it answers. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has noted: “This was not a manifesto for people looking for big numbers.” The costs will only be provided for the final year of the next parliament, rather than every year, with “no indication that there is a plan for where the money would come from”.
Meanwhile, what the IFS describes as a “staggering” number of “assessments” and “strategies” are being proposed to address some of the challenges facing the country. I’m sure we’re all eagerly awaiting the announcement of dozens of new ‘tsars’ to fix Britain – because of course that approach has always proven successful. Will any of these programs be led by anyone remotely right-leaning, in the interests of Labour’s much-vaunted support for “diversity and inclusivity”? I wouldn’t hold your breath.
As the historian David Starkey has noted, Starmer plans to delegate ever-increasing powers not just to Scotland and Wales, but also to people like him – that is, lawyers and judges. Starkey described the proposals as a means to “wipe out our traditions of parliamentary government” and highlighted how the manifesto reflects the self-described socialist’s long-held desire to entrench the worst aspects of the Blair and Brown years: devolution; welfareism; the nanny state; the Human Rights Act and the Supreme Court – to make them irreversible.
It seems that the devolved nations, arm’s length bodies and civil servants will all be given more powers at the expense of our parliamentary democracy. But the problem with handing over control of the state apparatus to unelected technocrats is that they are completely unaccountable to the people they are supposed to serve, and often act in their own interests. As Tory candidate Miriam Cates has pointed out, if you thought lawyers like Starmer have already frustrated “the will of the people”, just wait until he is in charge.
At a more fundamental level, this smoke-and-mirrors manifesto tells us which taxes Labor will not raise – income tax, national insurance and VAT – but not which it will. The promise of no higher taxes on “working people” is as vague as it is disingenuous. Who exactly are ‘working people’? Some of the richest men and women in the country are “working people.” Does Starmer rule out tax increases for them? And if he isn’t, how can he credibly claim that Labour’s top priority is wealth creation? Meanwhile, are we seriously supposed to believe that Labor is the ‘party of business’ when Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves cites Joan Robinson as one of her economic inspirations – an eccentric Cambridge professor who was once a staunch defender of the Chinese tyrant and mass murderer? Mao Tse-Tung? It should be noted that successive Labor front benchers have refused to rule out introducing capital gains tax (CGT), while deputy leader Angela Rayner couldn’t even bring herself to deny that Labor could apply it to the sale of single-family homes during the leaders’ conference from Thursday. debate.
Other questions remain unanswered. Labor may have watered down its unaffordable ‘green prosperity plan’, but we still don’t know how it will decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030, how much it will cost, or what will happen in the likely event that it doesn’t work. .
The party talks a good game about improving people’s skills and has finally started calling it “British jobs for British people”, but cannot confirm how it will reduce migration in the short term, nor by how much. When asked what it will do about the illegal migrants arriving in the thousands by barely inflatable Channel boats, Labor offers no real solutions other than some rhetoric about “crushing the gangs” and scrapping the Rwanda plan.
And what exactly is the transgender plan? The manifesto proposes to “modernise, simplify and reform the intrusive and outdated Gender Recognition Act into a new process” without specifying what that process will entail beyond “the need for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria by a specialist doctor”. Will that be a face-to-face appointment or gender self-identification via Zoom?
Now that he’s so close to ending up in government, Starmer or his shadow cabinet are unlikely to tell us. But bearing in mind the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely, I think it’s probably wise to expect the worst at this stage.