No glorious honeymoon just a loveless marriage that will gradually get worse
The prospects for Keir Starmer's administration are very poor but deep divisions on the Right may delay any sense of an acute crisis engulfing his premiership
ALMOST the whole of Tony Blair’s first term in office was a honeymoon period.
Only the few days of the fuel dispute in the autumn of the year 2000 shifted the polls against Labour and in favour of William Hague’s Tories. Once that was over they settled back down to a familiar pattern of commanding Labour leads and the Tories being marooned on around 30 per cent vote shares (these were the days when such a score was regarded as unthinkably low).
We were bathed in Cool Britannia vibes, the economy doing well with rising living standards and public spending restrained for the first two years until a feelgood splurge in “investment” in the NHS and other public services in the second half of the parliament.
There was the odd eye-catching scandal here and there – usually involving Peter Mandelson – and several protracted bouts of the “TBGBs” (the name given by government insiders to feuding between supporters of Blair and Gordon Brown).
But the fundamentals never moved against Labour and it was no surprise when Blair won a second landslide majority with a 41 per cent vote share and 412 seats – one more than Keir Starmer won earlier this month on a 34 per cent vote share.
After England’s failure to win a major football tournament yesterday, we must ask ourselves whether Starmer’s honeymoon with the electorate, such as it was, is already over. Certainly his media honeymoon continues apace, especially with so-called “mainstream” broadcast channels whose correspondents largely fail to conceal their delight at seeing a liberal-left regime in office.
But multiple sources of looming public anger against Starmer and Labour can already be discerned. For starters there is the policy on illegal immigration via dinghy, with a new spate of deaths in the English Channel and the boats continuing unabated. It is obvious to most people that setting up a new “Border Security Command” will not “smash the gangs”, as Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has promised. Some more gold braid and epaulettes are no substitute for a deterrent against illegal immigration and the scrapping of the Rwanda scheme means no such deterrent is anywhere on the horizon.
Labour also takes people for fools by indulging in the lie that says illegal immigrants are mere victims of evil traffickers and implies they have no agency themselves in the sordid business of gatecrashing into our country. In fact, the vast majority are willing and eager to the tune of paying £3,000 or so for a place in a dinghy. They do so in the firm expectation of qualifying for a lifetime’s access to the British social wage – healthcare, help with housing costs, taxpayer-funded schools for offspring they will later bring in legally, monetary benefits and plenty else besides. All in all a million pound lifetime package in return for a downpayment of a few thousand quid.
The profit margins are so large – for the migrants as well as the “traffickers” – that if any gangs are smashed then new ones will quickly take their place.
Next up is Labour’s early release scheme for ruthless criminals locked up for prolific or serious law-breaking. It is even worse than the Tory one that was already in operation, seeing prisoners freed after serving just 40 per cent of their sentences. It is quite fair for Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood to blame the Tories for leaving the prisons estate in a shocking condition. But why is there no innovative attempt to find extra capacity quickly – for instance by using former MoD sites to set up secure camps until permanent new prison places come on stream?
The appointment by Starmer of James Timpson as prisons minister gives us a clue: Timpson is a radical reformer who believes that only a third of current inmates really belong in jail. So letting out tens of thousands of criminals is to be a deliberate long-term ideological choice merely instigated on the pretext of the overcrowding crisis bequeathed by the Tories. When the alternative “community punishments” – presumably so-called because they punish the community – are seen to fail then the British public will rightly be furious with the Government.
Then there is the wild look in the eye of Energy and Climate Secretary Ed Miliband, who has already banned new North Sea oil and gas fields. That man is clearly going to cost all of us a lot of money as he pursues a disproportionate and wildly expensive mission to rid Britain of its tiny remaining net carbon emissions in double-quick time.
And neither will pretending the so-called “culture war” was a deliberate Tory invention suffice when it comes to honouring Britain’s heritage and history or preventing the onward march of unpopular and militant identity politics. Mark my words, anything with Anneliese Dodds in charge is not going to pass a common-sense test for long.
Given that the general election result showed that pollsters routinely overstate Labour’s rating by about five points, one can expect Labour’s initial poll ratings to be
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