With Rayner flexing her muscle tissues, I concern it is a style of what is to come back

For a glimpse of how a Labour government will function in practice, the events of the past few days have been instructive.

Sir Keir Starmer‘s manoeuvring to ensure Diane Abbott would not be able to stand for the party in the seat she has held for almost four decades was, in an instant, made to look devious by the direct intervention of Angela Rayner.

In an interview for ITV, she declared: ‘I don’t see any reason why Diane Abbott can’t stand as a Labour MP going forward. I am saying that as Deputy Leader of the Labour party.’

Starmer immediately rowed in behind her — even though, since Abbott had been the Labour MP closest to Jeremy Corbyn, her de-selection was intrinsic to his campaign to show this was a ‘changed Labour party’.

It was not just that Rayner reminded us she is elected Deputy Leader, not chosen by Starmer: her power base is the trade union movement — and its representatives on the party’s National Executive Committee shared her view that the defenestration of Abbott must be thwarted.

The point is that Rayner and those allies (the most significant donors to party funds) will be profoundly influential on Labour’s policies in government. She and they are determined that what Rayner calls ‘Labour’s new deal for working people’ is a real shift in power away from business owners and back to the unions — a reversal of the reforms under Margaret Thatcher which had galvanised enterprise and wealth creation.

This will not just involve revoking laws which had made it more difficult to organise strikes at short notice, but abolishing zero-hours contracts which Labour regards as ‘exploitative’ and giving new employees the same rights in terms of protection from dismissal as the longest-serving. 

Exactly what form these will take is not clear: what is clear is that Rayner is determined to ensure they are not watered down.

Other than the fact that she has her own power base (which enabled her to humiliate Starmer when he attempted to clip her wings after Labour’s loss in the May 2021 Hartlepool by-election), Rayner is loved within the Labour movement in a way Starmer never will be. She also has charisma, in sharp contrast to Sir Keir, the painstaking lawyer.

Although Rayner is described as a 2020s version of John Prescott in the Blair governments, this is only superficially true. Then, the leader (Blair) had all the charisma, and the trade unionist Prescott would never openly challenge him.

So Blair never reversed a single one of the Thatcher trade union reforms — and followed Peter Mandelson’s dictum of being ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. When Starmer was asked by the Times last week if he shared this attitude, he replied: ‘I’m not just relaxed, I’m relaxed as well as being doggedly determined . . . We should nourish and encourage that. Not just individuals but businesses.’ The paper’s front-page headline was: ‘Starmer: I’ll create wealth’.

There are just two problems with this. First, how would Labour’s plans to increase the regulatory burden on business further the creation of new enterprises and therefore wealth creation? Second, what are Labour’s plans to tax the wealth Starmer is now sworn to ‘create’?

The party has pledged not to increase the rates of income tax, national insurance, VAT and corporation tax. Lovely. But it also promises a whole load of additional expenditure, such as ‘two million more NHS appointments’, a ‘Green prosperity plan’ costing an extra £5 billion a year, and ‘6,500 more teachers’. 

This last one, the party says will be funded by slapping VAT on private school fees — one Corbyn policy Starmer is standing by.

Labour’s claim that the funds for all those additional teachers will be met in this way rests on the extraordinary notion that an extra 20 per cent charge will lead to no significant ‘migration’ of pupils from the private to the public sector. 

And is it actually credible that Starmer/Rayner will hold the line on public sector pay demands, in the way Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have done?

My forecast: Labour will raise the money by introducing some sort of new ‘wealth tax’. This measure may well be highly popular. But the idea that such a government will ‘create wealth’ or even the conditions best suited to ‘growing the economy’? It’s a fairy tale — and unlikely to be one with a happy ending.

Political din should be banned too

Which noise would you find more disturbing: the jingles of an ice cream van or the amplified booming of Steve Bray, the ‘Stop Brexit‘ attention-seeker who still plagues the environs of Westminster?

I ask this, in partial defence of John Barton, proprietor of Harrison’s Ices, now being pursued by East Lindsey District Council (ELDC), after a resident of the Lincolnshire town of Louth complained about the noise of the jingle emanating from his ice cream van.

ELDC told Mr Barton that it was investigating a complaint from a resident, and that ‘this is part of our statutory duty under the environmental protection act’.

Mr Barton is not happy: ‘These people won’t ever come out to the ice cream van, they will hate seeing children happy, hate the sound of something joyful and happy.’

Actually, the ice cream van business is more favoured than retailers in general. If you look at any local authority’s regulations for street traders you will see the following standard paragraph: ‘a licence holder shall not use a megaphone or amplification equipment or a loud voice to shout out the prices of goods etc, in order to attract customers.’

Yet nothing of the sort applies to political demonstrators, a fact exploited for many years by Steve Bray, who uses amplifiers to reach an estimated 90 decibels — a level which in the workplace would require hearing protection for employees, under health and safety regulations.

Thus it was that no member of the police in the vicinity of Downing Street did anything to stop Bray disrupting the Prime Minister’s statement when Mr Sunak stood in the pouring rain two weeks ago to announce that he was calling a General Election.

Bray turned his amplifiers up to the max, playing Labour’s theme song of the 1997 General Election, Things Can Only Get Better. Afterwards, he gloated on X: ‘We had a good run but amplifiers got soaked and blown. They lasted for the moment that mattered.’

In and around Westminster, the din from Bray (and indeed the continuous pro-Palestinian demonstrations) is no joy for the local tourism-related businesses and their customers.

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it (quietly): why should the noise regulations for commercial messages not apply to those hawking political ones?