As I listened to Sir Keir Starmer’s speech yesterday, I asked myself how long it will take the country to hate Labour as much as it now hates the Tories.
That assumes that Labour will win a handsome majority on July 4, as the polls suggest it will.
How long will it take? Two years? Three? Of course one can’t be sure when disillusion will creep in. One can only be certain that it will.
The Labour manifesto unveiled by Sir Keir promises a break with the Tory past of ‘chaos’, and an exciting future, while providing scant details about how this wonderful state of affairs is going to be reached.
Someone holds the Labour Party election manifesto booklet during its launch… but it remains firmly closed
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (centre) poses with his manifesto with fellow members of the Shadow Cabinet
Starmer and deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner are all smiles at the launch in Manchester
In particular, the manifesto is billed as a programme for wealth creation. Yet it doesn’t offer any policies that might convince reasonable people that new wealth will be created.
One plausible policy would have been to reduce taxes, since developed countries with lower tax rates tend to have higher economic growth. We are more highly taxed than at any time since World War II, which helps to explain why the economy is sclerotic.
Earlier this week, the Tories announced an annual £17 billion tax cut — a significant amount — which will be largely paid for by trimming ballooning welfare spending on working-age people.
But Labour aren’t proposing any tax cuts — and it certainly doesn’t envisage reductions in spending. The party is openly planning tax increases, though only modest ones, raising £8.5 billion over five years, a minuscule proportion of overall tax revenue.
Yet at the same time the manifesto makes a long list of commitments, which include 40,000 extra NHS appointments a week, 6,500 new ‘expert’ teachers, 8,500 new mental health staff, over 3,000 new nurseries, and so on and so forth.
Labour claims all these policies are costed, but it’s highly likely that many will turn out to be more expensive. For example, the 3,000-plus new nurseries are estimated to cost only £35 million, which works out at £11,166 per nursery. How is that possible?
Mental health support for every school in England (there are about 24,000 of them) is estimated at a mere £175 million, while ‘delivering work experience and career advice for all [my italics] young people’ will supposedly set back the Exchequer just £85 million.
The manifesto offers a huge array of new projects at costs that smack of fantasy economics. And they mock Liz Truss! Either a Labour government won’t provide these services or, more likely, it will look for extra tax revenue.
In addition, there are bound to be demands for more money for which Labour hasn’t budgeted. It hasn’t committed to match the Tories’ pledge to increase defence expenditure to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030. Either Sir Keir Starmer will leave Britain perilously undefended at a time of international crisis — or a lot more money will have to be found.
Labour’s solution to this bind is higher economic growth — Sir Keir preposterously claimed that his is ‘the party of wealth creation’ — but the manifesto’s suggestions as to how this growth will be achieved are almost comically threadbare.
They include relaxing planning regulations (not easy to do) and vague promises about ‘a new partnership with business to boost growth everywhere’. Oh, and there will be ‘a new deal for working people’.
The vacuity of the party’s thinking was illuminated in an interview with its campaign coordinator, Pat McFadden, on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday morning. He asserted that higher growth was achievable because the last Labour government had managed to deliver it.
But so did other advanced economies at that time. Since the 2008 financial crash, most European countries have also been plagued by low growth and, like Britain, have increased their tax burdens, not least to pay off debts incurred during Covid.
Labour is saying that because it oversaw respectable growth between 1997 and 2008, it can produce it again. But why? The world has changed. Invoking the past is not a credible plan for achieving growth in the future.
On the basis of the policies outlined in its manifesto, a Labour government wouldn’t improve Britain’s economic performance, and so would be driven to raising new taxes to pay for its ambitious plans. In fact, I’d say this outcome is certain.
I suppose we should believe the assurances of Sir Keir and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves that they won’t raise income tax, national insurance or VAT. Such, at least, is their intention. Remember, though, that under Tory plans, which Labour won’t change, income tax will go up over the next few years because thresholds are frozen until 2027/28.
When asked about capital gains tax or property taxes, neither Sir Keir nor Ms Reeves ever take
the opportunity to deny that they will go up. Of course they will. Anyone who doubts this is being fatally naive.
The overall tax burden is certain to climb to record levels under Labour. That will be an antidote to the economic growth which
Sir Keir Starmer absurdly claims to champion.
Maybe his administration will be forced to cut public expenditure to avoid panic in the bond markets. Otherwise I expect we will just bob along, rather as we have in the past few years, though it will almost certainly be worse. We face a dismal future — if Labour wins.
Sir Keir claims to be selling wealth creation and economic growth but he is in fact selling decline. If he were in business, he’d be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act.
That’s why I believe disillusion will soon set in. It’s not just the economy, of course. Sir Keir’s proposals to control immigration, legal and illegal, are laughably vague. Anyone who believes that the boats coming across the Channel will disappear on his watch is being credulous.
Widespread disillusion wouldn’t inevitably mean a one-term Labour government, though. Sir Keir must hope that giving votes to 16 and 17-year-olds — a sinister, self-serving manifesto pledge — will keep him in power. The fractious Tories will have to get their act together to dislodge even a failed Labour government.
This is a hollow, dispiriting manifesto. Despite Sir Keir’s rhetoric, it only offers more decline. The British people must hate the Conservatives a great deal if they are prepared to be taken in by such vacuities.
There’s still time, of course. Twenty days. We can only pray that, at the 11th hour, voters will decide to forgive the Tories for their errors, and finally come to their senses.