Oh, it’s a disaster, they say. To be frank, I have averted my eyes from the full horror of the local election results as they have dribbled in over the day, but we all know the gist.
The Labour government has taken a well-deserved knee in the groin. But the Tories – oh me, oh my, look at the Tories! The BBC swing-wallahs are so gleeful you would think Thursday was the equivalent of the dinosaur-ending asteroid explosion in the Yucatán Peninsula.
Can it possibly be true? Is the Conservative party facing an extinction moment? Are we Blues going the way of the dodo, the typewriter and the landline telephone, superseded by that ragtag and bobtail third party that only three and a bit years ago, in a now distant-seeming halcyon age, was polling zero per cent?
The answer is of course not. This is no earthquake. In fact, I would say that on the basis of these results, the Tories under Kemi Badenoch have a good and growing chance of winning the next election. That is because the results reveal the first and most important condition for a Tory victory – the extreme vulnerability of the Labour government.
Labour has been in power now for ten months – and voters have noticed the problem with Starmer. He has entirely the wrong instincts for the time, and that means he is constantly marching us all – left, left, left, woke, woke, woke – in a direction most people just don’t want to go.
They can see the mess he has made, above all, with the economy. He came in and immediately announced cash paybacks for the unions, with massive above inflation public sector pay increases, coupled with a huge expansion in the quangocracy, with a total of 27 new pointless public bodies so far.
Why do we need a Fair Work Agency? What is the point of an Ethics and Integrity Commission if the Prime Minister cannot see that it is wrong to accept freebie suits and spectacles from a Labour donor?
Labour has been creating thousands more public sector fat cats, at the very time, post Covid, when the size of the state needs to plummet. He and Rachel ‘Theeves’ tried to pay for all this with large and wholly unnecessary tax rises.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage celebrates with colleagues after the party’s victory in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election
They unexpectedly walloped business with an increase in National Insurance Contributions – an instant deterrent to the creation of new jobs and investment. They hammered the rural economy with a vicious new inheritance tax on farms. They clobbered private education, so that schools have had to close.
In fact, they launched such a general jihad on the private sector, and wealth creation, that talented people are actually fleeing this country – in huge numbers – for the first time since the 1970s. Go to Dubai and you will find it is already the 19th biggest British city in the world.
Labour seems to have no strategy for growth, no vision for the future, no ambition for the country and, perhaps even worse, the party under Starmer is so balls-achingly woke that they cannot do what the public desperately wants them to do. They can’t tackle illegal immigration, and they can’t stop the small boats – because their whole instinct on the subject is wrong.
They don’t blame the criminal gangs for bringing these people to our shores because in their hearts they blame ‘global injustice’, or climate change, or the legacy of the war in Iraq.
It’s nonsense, enfeebling nonsense. But that’s why Labour is hopeless at stemming the tide and that’s why the numbers continue to grow.
When the shopkeepers of Britain complain about the disgusting epidemic of shoplifting, the Labour instinct is to blame ‘poverty’ rather than coming down hard on the criminals.
When he sees a national asset such as the Chagos Islands, the Starmer instinct is to get rid of that asset, as an embarrassing legacy of Britain’s colonial past, no matter how strategically disastrous and expensive that decision might be.
When told by his Left-wing supporters that biological men must now be able to identify as women, Starmer’s instinct is to agree – before he has considered the impact of this Monty Python proposition on women themselves. The result is that he looks a complete mug, in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment, and is now belatedly trying to align his Islingtonian thinking with common sense.
The results reveal the first and most important condition for a Tory victory – the extreme vulnerability of the Labour government, writes BORIS JOHNSON
That is why there was such a massive swing against the government in the Runcorn by-election. That is why I am increasingly optimistic about Tory chances next time. This Labour government is so bad, so misguided, so fundamentally out of tune with what the public want, that in 2028, or whenever we have the next election, I think there is a real chance of a tipping point. I mean a 1979 moment, when the public decide with a great roar that they have had enough of Labour tax and spend, and the unions, and wokery in general, because they can see the damage it is doing.
Why do I think the voters will want to come back to us, the Tories, rather than go elsewhere? First, Kemi Badenoch is increasingly interesting and impressive. She has the most original mind of all the current party leaders, and as an instinctive Conservative she flayed Starmer – quite rightly – over his gender tergiversations*.
I don’t think the public will hand power to the newish third party (the one that was on zero when I was PM – what was it again, they keep changing the name: Refund? Relaunch? Regurgitate?) and history teaches us that such ventures – no matter how temporarily exciting – do not last long in UK politics.
They already seem to be squabbling among themselves, even though they have only a tiny handful in parliament. I felt rather sorry for that chap Rupert Lowe who ended up with an icepick in his bonce for offending the leadership.
No, when it comes to the choice in 2028, the electorate will know that there is only one party that will be not just willing but actually able to fix illegal immigration, by leaving the ECHR and bringing back the Rwanda scheme.
There is only one party that can get back to levelling up the whole country, rather than concreting over the South East. There is only one party that will invest in the skills of people in this country rather than go for what is now obviously Starmer’s solution to our skills shortage – to return to the fool’s gold of uncontrolled mass immigration from the EU. There is only one party that will be willing and able to cut taxes, sack quangocrats and boost growth and productivity by dropping the crazed doctrinaire Miliband approach to climate change and offering consumers and industry what they really need – the cheapest electricity in the Western world.
It is only the Tories who have both the instinct to take this country back in the right direction again, and the chance to do it, because in 2028 the brute facts of electoral maths and the first-past-the-post system will mean there will be only one way to expel this useless Labour government – and that is to vote Conservative.
Dictionary Corner
*Tergiversations: the act of making statements that are different from each other, so that they cannot both be true
