So that’s it. Pffft! With a long sibilant farting efflatus as if from a punctured balloon the last of Keir Starmer’s authority has vanished to the four winds.
He can’t control his backbenchers. He can’t deliver on his election promises. His flagship welfare reform Bill – once hailed as the superdreadnought of the Labour fleet – has run up the white flag at the first whiff of gunfire and vanished back to port.
Let us be in no doubt about the sheer protoplasmic amoeboid invertebracy of the Labour Prime Minister, and why his cowardice matters to us all.
Starmer knows that current increases in UK welfare spending are unsustainable. He knows that payments for disability benefit alone have increased from £36billion in 2020 to about £56billion today – and that this extraordinary splurge is unmatched by any other Western country.
The Treasury has been clear: that if spending continues to grow at this rate – and that growth shows no sign of slowing down – then by 2028 payments on disability benefit alone will have doubled to two per cent of UK GDP.
That is not 2 per cent of UK government spending, but 2 per cent of GDP; on one particular type of benefit among a panoply of protections.
We are talking staggering sums, and with the caseload rising faster than in any other comparable country. Now Keir Starmer’s advisers know full well – and are telling him – that the bill for welfare must be at least addressed. The bond markets know it. The world knows it.
The British public knows it in their bones, because many of them are utterly fed up with paying more and more in their taxes, while so many of their neighbours seem to be having a laugh, as they say, and at the taxpayer’s expense. They also know that incentives are being skewed.
Keir Starmer knows that current increases in UK welfare spending are unsustainable. He knows that payments for disability benefit alone have increased from £36billion in 2020 to about £56billion today – and that this extraordinary splurge is unmatched by any other Western country, writes Boris Johnson
They may have much sympathy for the disabled, and for everyone who claims some sort of benefit – but they can’t help thinking that the budget is due for some serious pruning. Even Starmer knows it, and until this week, he had been vowing to do it.
So, what the hell has gone wrong? He has a majority of more than 150. The Labour PM has an absolute moral duty to make use of that majority, in the interests of the nation.
We have taxes at or near an all-time high. We have debt running already at about 100 per cent of GDP, and likely to hit 106 per cent next year. We can’t go on like this.
Surely to goodness, you might think, the Government should be able to persuade its backbenchers to cut a fraction of a percentage point of UK GDP from planned government spending; and remember– the proposed reforms would not actually cut the welfare bill. No, no, my friends: all the proposed reforms would have done is slightly slow the tempo of the rapid and ineluctable increase.
Why has Starmer wimped out? Why has he welched on his promise? Starmer bottled it because his premiership increasingly resembles a terrified bespectacled supply teacher who has lost control of a class of 12-year-old girls.
He should be leading his party, setting the agenda. Instead, he is cowering behind his desk, and offering them a half day’s holiday, if only they will stop pelting him with their gender-neutral text books on Marx. It would be comic if it were not tragic.
It is now almost exactly a year since Starmer won his loveless landslide – achieving an astonishing 411 seats, admittedly on a very small share of the vote. What exactly have Labour done with that mandate?
What is the point of this Government? They have abandoned any pretence at reforming the NHS or integrating health and social care. They have given up reforming welfare and forgotten the need to make work pay. They have no vision for stimulating enterprise and investment, no interest in levelling up or making the UK more productive or dynamic.
Where Blair had an easy charm and plausibility and was able to wriggle through scandal as though coated with Vaseline, there is something both brittle and arrogant about Starmer, writes Boris Johnson
Apart from some ill-thought-out Bills on abortion and assisted dying – neither of which were in the Labour manifesto, and neither of which have had anywhere near enough public discussion – the Labour Government under Keir Starmer has done nothing very much except to imitate Michael Foot’s famous one-legged army identified by Michael Heseltine, marching left, left, left!
Starmer’s basic problem is that he is instinctively the most Left-wing prime minister since the 1970s, when what Britain needs – socially, culturally and economically – is the exact opposite.
The last 12 months have been a process of gradual but gathering disappointment, as the British middle classes have realised that Starmer may be another north London lawyer. He may look calm, Blairite, reasonable, centrist – but in truth he is nothing like Tony Blair.
Where Blair had an easy charm and plausibility and was able to wriggle through scandal as though coated with Vaseline, there is something both brittle and arrogant about Starmer.
When it emerged that he had accepted a very expensive pair of spectacles from Lord Alli, as well as some flash suits, people were amazed. How could that possibly be right?
How could the PM be wearing a pair of spectacles paid for by a Labour donor, when that donor had been granted access to Downing Street? How could the Government offer passes for glasses? For his part Starmer was indignant.
He puffed and spluttered, and though he eventually wrote a cheque for a lot of the goodies he still wears those free glasses – as though literally blind to how they make him look.
As the year has dragged on, people have realised that he is still a teenage socialist at heart – full of chippiness, and all too ready to wage class war. There can be no other explanation for example, for his attack on farms and farming, imposing inheritance taxes where Blair never dared.
Together with his Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Starmer has become a kind of ‘reverse Arthur Laffer’ – because he has demonstrated that if you are sufficiently stupid and vicious in the taxes you increase, you will be forced to raise more taxes to pay for your mistakes, writes Boris Johnson
That is the only possible explanation for his wanton attack on fee-paying schools – a spiteful act which makes this country an outlier in the Western world, in applying a tax to education, and which has already cost the government about £650million, to pay for the pupils who have now left for the maintained sector. It was the famous American economist Arthur Laffer who showed that by judiciously cutting the right taxes you could increase tax revenue overall.
Together with his Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Starmer has become a kind of ‘reverse Arthur Laffer’ – because he has demonstrated that if you are sufficiently stupid and vicious in the taxes you increase, you will be forced to raise more taxes to pay for your mistakes.
So it has proved in the case of Reeves first budget in October last year. This hammered every business in the country with her £25billion increase in National Insurance Contributions. Which in turn so depressed business confidence and investment and of course tax yields, that Reeves will now be forced to raise tax again to pay for the shortfall, in the vicious circle or doom loop that is typical of 1970s socialism.
Again, there is no logical explanation for the attacks on non-doms and other wealth creators – only pure class hatred and chippiness.
There are more wealth creators now fleeing this country than from communist China.
They are leaving in their thousands, and they are going to countries that have not always been thought of as havens for the wealthy: not just Dubai, but Italy, Portugal, even Belgium.
Belgium is in many ways a lovely place, and I have spent happy years there. But never did I imagine that we would have a government in London so fiscally disastrous that it would make Belgium look relatively attractive.
Starmer and Reeves have the non-Midas touch: they turn everything to dross. I saw that a Norwegian shipping billionaire called Fredriksen has joined the crowds rushing for the exit, remarking: ‘Britain has gone to hell.’
Of course, one bristles slightly, when people say that sort of thing. We love Britain. We don’t enjoy hearing foreigners say that it has gone to hell. But you can see why he says it, and when the billionaires start to leave London then – whether we like it or not – the flywheel of the whole economy visibly starts to slow down.
But it’s not just the tax that is sending them abroad.
We British used to be famous for our robust sense of humour – well, not any more. We have a Prime Minister whose instinct is to become a high priest of woke, not just ‘taking the knee’, and refusing – for years – to say what he meant by a woman. Starmer is now leading a country where you can be jailed for a single tasteless and rapidly deleted tweet.
What happened to good old British common sense? What about our famously phlegmatic disposition?
People looking at Starmer’s Britain see a two-tier system – hysterical persecution of anyone who makes a vaguely off-colour remark while serious sexual and violent offenders are being let out of prison early. It looks mad. It is mad.
For people who worry about crime in London – which has risen, under the Labour mayor – it looks worrying. It is not cost-free, this Government fetish for Leftish wokery; and on the international stage it is an utter disaster. Starmer follows the surrenderist and essentially anti-British ideology of his Attorney General, Lord Hermer. The pair of them have become the economic salvation of Mauritius – not only handing over the Chagos islands but giving the Mauritians so much of our dosh (£30billion)that they have reportedly been able to afford the tax cuts that are denied the British people.
Starmer has abandoned British leadership in helping Ukraine, and in so far as he has produced ‘boots on the ground’ anywhere it is to allow the polished black boots of Spanish officials in the previously sovereign UK territory of Gibraltar.
Why was the Government so insane as to abandon the Rwanda policy – the only credible way of introducing offshore processing of illegal immigrants, and stopping the cross-Channel gangs? Why have we been so hesitant in supporting the Israel-US attempt to stop Iran getting a nuclear bomb?
Why have we sold out to the EU, so that we are now rule takers from Brussels, a vassal state, a capon?
It’s because Starmer follows a doctrine of hermaphroditic Hermerism – the belief that you can somehow impress other countries by failing to stick up for your national interests.
But of course they aren’t impressed. They are laughing at us. If you want a sign of Starmer’s glorious irrelevance on the world stage it was his deathless remark, after the G7 summit, that he had sat next to Trump, and had no reason to think he was going to bomb Iran.
Genius!
The last year has been an annus moronicus (as the Romans didn’t say), in which our government has made one unforced error after another; and still it goes on.
At a time when unemployment is rising, especially youth unemployment, Starmer is now introducing a truly awful employment bill that will reverse much of the reforms of the 1980s and make our labour markets even less flexible than they are.
So why do it? Because he is a Lefty. I wish I could say that there was an easy way of removing him before the next election, or of accelerating that election.
What we can say with certainty is that this Government is not loved, and that many of those who voted for Starmer now view him with impatience and frustration bordering on delirium; and that when the time comes, we can confide in the sublime wisdom of the British people – and they will kick him into orbit.
