DOMINIC LAWSON: Starmer’s Britain is now authorities OF the general public sector, BY the general public sector and FOR the general public sector

As tomorrow is the day of perhaps the most momentous election in modern American history, it’s time to recall the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.’

But how does that match up to our own recent electoral process, which concluded with an overwhelming victory, in parliamentary terms, for the Labour Party?

We now know the answer. Sir Keir Starmer‘s administration is a government of the public sector, by the public sector, for the public sector.

Actually, we discovered this at the start, when they awarded stonking pay increases to public sector workers, without a single efficiency condition, while funding that (in part) by removing the winter fuel payment from all old people except those on pension credit.

Sir Keir Starmer has used the phrase ‘hard choices’ only to justify his own voluntary decisions

But it was last week’s Budget which drove home the point to anyone not paying attention.

Rachel Reeves’ £40 billion tax increases were directed with ruthless precision onto businesses in the private sector (already hit by Angela Rayner’s labour ‘reforms’, which, even on the Government’s own impact assessment, will ‘disproportionately’ affect small firms).

The sharp hike in National Insurance for employers (and applying it to millions more lower-paid) is purely directed at the private sector – in the sense that the Exchequer will reimburse the NHS for any of the increase applied to it as an employer. But such privately-owned health providers as GP practices or care homes, and charities such as hospices will face the full brunt.

Thus, the project my wife founded, Team Domenica, which works to get young adults with learning disabilities into employment, will face a £35,000 increase in its National Insurance bill. For a small charity, and countless others like it, this will truly lead to ‘hard choices’ (to use the phrase beloved of Starmer and Reeves, but only to justify their own voluntary decisions).

Originally, Reeves had intended a raid on pension contributions, by reducing the 40 per cent level of relief for those whose marginal tax rate is in the upper bracket. It was only when Treasury officials pointed out to the Chancellor that this would affect many more thousands of public sector workers, who, thanks to her largesse, were now higher-rate payers, that Reeves retreated.

Nowhere was it mentioned that the same would have applied to millions of private sector employees who might have been affected. That wouldn’t have mattered, apparently.

Labour MPs cheered all her Budget measures in the Commons. They actually laughed when Rishi Sunak accused the Chancellor of breaking the promises on which they had been elected (not to raise more taxes, except on so-called ‘non-doms’ and private schools).

Rachel Reeves’ £40billion tax increases were directed with ruthless precision onto businesses in the private sector

It’s worth going back to that first televised election debate between Sunak and Starmer, on ITV. The then Conservative leader warned over and again that Labour would increase taxes, on a significant scale – which Starmer denounced as ‘absolute garbage’ and ‘nonsense’. Yet it was the absolute truth. And the Office for Budget Responsibility resolutely refused last week to accept Reeves’ claim that it was all the fault of an unexpected ‘£22billion black hole’ left by the Tories.

Something else from that ITV debate on June 4 resonates now. It was when Starmer declared he would never pay for private health provision, even if it enabled an ill family member stuck on the NHS waiting list a chance of much-needed treatment.

It was a profoundly ideological admission; just as it is visceral dislike of the private educational sector that motivates this administration to impose VAT on their fees.

It is something Tony Blair or Gordon Brown never considered: it was, however, the policy of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, when Starmer was campaigning for the holy innocent idiot of Islington to become PM.

Now, I can do no better than quote the gleeful claim of the ‘staunch socialist’ Labour MP for Southport, Patrick Hurley, a few months ago: ‘Starmer says he considers himself a socialist, and that’s good enough for me. It’s certainly what I consider to be the most socialist-friendly government of my lifetime.’

Had Starmer and Reeves campaigned on that basis during the election, we could have no complaint. But he, instead, publicly identified with what he described as Margaret Thatcher’s achievement of having ‘set loose our natural entrepreneurialism’; while she promised: ‘If I become Chancellor, the next Labour government will be the most pro-business government this country has ever seen.’

As Abraham Lincoln didn’t say: ‘You can’t fool all of the people all of the time’ – which Labour will find out.

Truss shows her genius for farce

Like many readers, I have been entertained by the serialisation of Liz Truss’s political testament, Ten Years To Save The West.

In yesterday’s chunk, the former PM of 49 days laid the blame for the degeneration of the Conservative Party on David Cameron and the ‘modernisers’.

This is hilarious: Truss owes her career to Cameron, in precisely that sense.

Not only was she a beneficiary of his ‘A list’, designed to push younger women into the safest parliamentary seats; but when, shortly after she became the candidate for South West Norfolk and the so-called ‘Turnip Taliban’ attempted to de-select her on discovering that she had been having an affair with another (married) Tory MP, David Cameron personally rang up the leader of those ‘old-fashioned’ Tories to tell them to stick with Truss.

And in Saturday’s extract, Truss bewailed the loss from Parliament of ‘friends and allies … who were resolutely for controlling immigration’, while attacking Rishi Sunak for ‘reflecting the Treasury stance of being pro-immigration’. 

As one of her former colleagues reminded me: ‘The real reason Suella Braverman fell out with Truss, and was forced to leave her government, was because she furiously objected to Liz’s plans, co-ordinated with the Treasury, for liberalising immigration rules to boost her ‘growth’ agenda.’

Truss, unlike Sunak or Braverman, had been a ‘Remainer’ in the Brexit referendum. Later, a recording was leaked of her (when Chief Secretary to the Treasury, even after the vote to Leave) declaring: ‘We say it’s all Europe that’s causing all these problems…it’s all, it’s migrants that’s causing these problems. But actually what needs to happen, is, you know, a bit more graft.’

Truth is, the former Lib-Dem student leader Liz Truss is not a Conservative at all, but a libertarian.

Perhaps she should exploit her well-known popular appeal and start such a Party. Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives would somehow have to find a way of managing without her.