Reform overtaking the Tories according to one poll is undoubtedly a watershed moment in British politics. But Nigel Farage’s suggestion that “a vote for the Conservatives is now a vote for Labour” isn’t 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, what we’re going to be left with is a future far worse than even the wettest of Conservatives could muster.
The YouGov voting intention poll puts Reform up two percentage points on 19 per cent and the Tories on 18 per cent. But of equal significance is the effect all this appears to be having on Labour’s vote share – down one percentage point to 37 per cent.
The country is now facing the prospect of a Labour “supermajority” won off the back of less than 40 per cent of the vote and probably a low turnout, too. Well over half the electorate looks set to back parties other than Sir Keir Starmer’s on July 4 – and yet, a little like the Remainers argued of the 52/48 referendum result – we will end up with “hard Labour” without the mandate.
Compare this with the 80-seat majority won by Boris Johnson in 2019 with 44 per cent of the vote, the highest percentage for any party since the 1979 general election. Labour now looks set to win a bigger landslide than it did in 1997 – with considerably less support than Tony Blair’s 43 per cent. Churchill’s quote about democracy being the worst form of government apart from the others springs to mind.
It is doubly concerning when you consider what we know – or rather don’t know – about what Labour plans to do in power. Its manifesto was unveiled in Manchester to much misplaced fanfare on Thursday. Charisma-free Starmer, a leader so lacking in self-awareness that he didn’t get that the toolmaker joke was on him, not his late father, features in no fewer than 33 “presidential” images. Yet, there is nothing remotely statesmanlike about a man who cannot decide whether a woman has a penis, let alone explain why he willingly propped up Jeremy Corbyn for four years beyond “I didn’t think he would win”.
Having achieved the impossible feat of seeming even more robotic than Theresa May, this uninspiring personification of political Mogadon is already beginning to bore everyone and he hasn’t even stepped foot in No 10. We’ve got at least four years and possibly a decade of this snoozefest of forced sincerity, folks. Buckle up and enjoy the slide.
Even more disturbingly, Labour is going to be handed this gargantuan amount of power on the back of a manifesto which raises more questions than it answers. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has pointed out, “this was not a manifesto for those looking for big numbers.” Costings are only 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 “dizzying” number of “reviews” and “strategies” are proposed to tackle some of the challenges facing the country. I am sure we are all eagerly awaiting the announcement of dozens of new “tsars” to fix Britain – because, of course, that approach has always proved successful. Will any of these schemes be led by anyone remotely Right-leaning, in the interest of Labour’s much vaunted support for “diversity and inclusion”? I wouldn’t hold your breath.
As the historian David Starkey has pointed out, Starmer is intent on devolving ever greater powers not just to Scotland and Wales, but to people like him – that is, to say, lawyers and judges. Describing the proposals as a means of “eradicating our traditions of parliamentary government”, Starkey highlighted how the manifesto reflects the self-confessed socialist’s long-held desire to entrench the worst aspects of the Blair and Brown years: devolution; welfarism; the nanny state; the Human Rights Act and the Supreme Court – so as to make them irreversible.
The devolved nations, arms-length bodies and civil servants all look set to be given more powers at the expense of our parliamentary democracy. Yet the trouble with handing control of the machinery of state 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 the Tory candidate Miriam Cates has pointed out, if you thought lawyers like Starmer have already been frustrating “the will of the people” – just you wait until he’s in charge.
On a more basic level, this smoke and mirrors manifesto tells us which taxes Labour won’t put up – income tax, national insurance and VAT – but not the ones it will. The promise of no higher taxes for “working people” is as nebulous as it is disingenuous. Who are “working people”, exactly? Some of the country’s richest men and women are “working people”. Is Starmer ruling out tax rises 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 Labour 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 keen defender of the Chinese tyrant and mass-murderer Mao Tse-Tung? It should be noted that successive Labour front benchers have refused to rule out putting up capital gains tax (CGT), while deputy leader Angela Rayner could not even bring herself to deny that Labour might apply it to the sale of family homes during Thursday’s leaders’ debate.
Other questions remain unanswered. Labour may have watered down its unaffordable “green prosperity plan”, but we are no closer to knowing how it will decarbonise the power 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 on improving people’s skills and has finally started mentioning “British jobs for British people” yet cannot confirm how it will cut migration in the short term, nor by how much. Asked what it will do with illegal migrants arriving in their thousands by barely inflatable Channel dinghy, Labour offers no real solutions beyond some rhetoric about “smashing the gangs” and scrapping the Rwanda plan.
And what is its transgender plan, really? The manifesto proposes to “modernise, simplify and reform the intrusive and outdated gender recognition law to a new process” without specifying what that process will be beyond “the need for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from a specialist doctor”. Will that be a face-to-face appointment or gender self-identification via Zoom?
Now so close to entering government, it’s unlikely that Starmer or his shadow Cabinet are going to tell us. But mindful of the idea of absolute power corrupting absolutely, at this stage I think it’s probably prudent to expect the worst.
