We are about to get an Ed Miliband government, regardless of who notionally leads it.
Even if Sir Keir Starmer clings on as Prime Minister for a while, we shall end up with all the things we voted against in 2015: even higher taxes, even harsher decarbonisation, even more indulgence of Islamists and ever more cosying up to Brussels.
Everything that the hapless Prime Minister does is now dictated by those Labour MPs who believe, incredibly, that the highest tax level in 70 years is still not enough, and who imagine that they are somehow ‘fighting austerity’.
Oddly, these MPs are referred to by broadcasters as ‘soft-Left’, though they are soft only in the Northern sense of ‘dim’ or ‘naive’.
In reality, they are ideologues who have spent their lives in the public or charitable sectors and for whom public spending is an answer in search of a question, a measure of personal decency.
Starmer lost control of his MPs last summer when they blocked his feeble attempt to slow the growth in welfare spending. Note: ‘slow’ the growth, not ‘cut’. Labour ended up accelerating the increase in sickness benefits and then went on to lift the cap on child benefit.
The Labour leader, both hammy and ham-fisted, tried to make a virtue of having lost and boasted of having a moral mission to end child poverty – when, in fact, he had taken the whip away from seven MPs for backing the increase at a time when he was still pretending to care about the national debt.
Since then, Starmer has been a puppet of his wastrel Left, lashed to the helm of a ship he no longer steers. Last week, the final pretences were dropped and Starmer – while still keeping the name of captain – was moved from the helm to the brig.
While Sir Keir Starmer has managed to keep the title of ‘captain’ for now, after last week the beleaguered PM was moved from the helm to the brig, our columnist says
As Kemi Badenoch pointed out yesterday, we unprecedentedly have a No 10 where there is no chief of staff, no director of communications and no Cabinet Secretary, all at the same time. Starmer barely even pretends to be in charge any more.
Desperate to keep his job in the aftermath of the Mandelson disaster, the PM has been offering to give his internal critics anything they want. More spending, more wokery, more Europe.
The irony is that it almost certainly won’t be enough. The reason Starmer is still in office is that no one particularly wants to take over just in time to lose the Scottish, Welsh and local elections in May.
Unless Labour miraculously improves its position between now and then, Starmer will be out by the summer. All his undignified crawling will do him no good. The Milibandist majority on his backbenches will tire of ruling through him as a proxy, and will replace him with one of their own.
In the meantime, huge damage will be done, as the PM scrabbles about to buy off his critics. Every spending demand will be sympathetically received, every bit of pork-barrel constituency expenditure approved.
I wouldn’t be the least surprised if Rachel Reeves, who has already practically abandoned her fiscal rules, formally drops them.
At the same time, Britain will sign up to the various EU policies which Labour promised, at the election, to keep out of. We will agree to dynamic alignment, promising to follow all EU rules in certain areas unilaterally and unconditionally, and hand over our fishing rights.
Worst of all, despite official denials, there will almost certainly be an attempt to take us into the EU customs union, an arrangement that even the Swiss and Norwegian governments regard as unacceptable.
Joining the customs union would mean giving up all our trade deals without the compensating removal of checks on our exports to the EU.
‘We have a Miliband government,’ writes Dan Hannan. ‘Brexit was an opportunity to escape some of the EU’s more expensive and needless Net Zero targets’, which Labour has failed to do
Why are these MPs agitating to join the customs union (for which there is no serious argument) rather than the single market (for which there is a respectable case)? I can only assume – and I wish I were joking – that they like the word ‘union’ and dislike the word ‘market’. Meanwhile, there will be an acceleration of the single policy that has done the most to make us poorer – decarbonisation. Brexit was an opportunity to escape some of the EU’s more expensive and needless Net Zero targets. Instead, we are using our Brexit freedoms to adopt even more expensive policies. As I say, we have a Miliband government.
How much more damage can Starmer do in his remaining three or four months? You’d be surprised. An awful lot of what is being proposed is designed to bind the hands of a future administration.
The contracts the Government is using to encourage renewable energy, rather than cheaper fossil fuels, typically last for 15 to 20 years, making it much harder for a future government to cut costs.
There are constitutional changes, too, ranging from the removal of the hereditary peers, which will strengthen Labour’s position in Parliament, to the outrageous idea of votes at 16. In every other context, Labour considers 16-year-olds to be children. Its MPs have voted to raise the age of consent to 18 for buying a knife, smoking cigarettes, getting a tattoo, applying for a mortgage, leaving full-time education or training, receiving Botox treatment. Yet, when it comes to votes, it again sees a way to lock in its advantage past the next election.
Starmer looks like he’s using his remaining months in office to make irreversible changes to how we are governed. We shall be locked in to policies that make us poorer, colder, smaller and less sovereign.
Then again, should we be surprised? As political journalist Tim Shipman revealed in a Spectator cover story this week, senior Labour figures remain baffled by the PM’s lack of a philosophical hinterland, a coherent programme for government and by his bizarre fixation with trivialities such as dress codes for meetings – which has seen Starmer and his controversial Attorney General Lord Hermer ‘decked out in a lot of Paul Smith, jackets with a polo shirt’.
It is a legacy of a kind, I suppose. But, my word, how future generations will curse his name.
- Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is a Conservative peer and president of the Institute for Free Trade.