After a shaky first couple of months punctured by race riots, censorship and cronyism, Sir Keir Starmer took to the hallowed Number 10 pedestal, setting out a typically uninspiring vision for Britain. Keir warned that the October budget would be “painful”, hinting, very unsubtly, at future tax rises.
Using the airy language of metaphor, so favoured by politicians when they’re distorting brute economic realities, Sir Keir argued that those with the broadest shoulders should bear the heaviest burden. To translate: It’s time for your local billionaire to book that flight to the Cayman Islands. Labour is going to tax the rich.
Following a string of grave economic pronouncements from senior Labour figures, Starmer claimed that his team had unearthed a whopping £22 billion “black hole” in the public finances. As a result, Labour will now have to re-adjust its plans to clean up the mess of its feckless, self-serving predecessors.
In Starmer’s defence, his “black hole” allegations aren’t total rubbish. The Conservatives did spend far too much money. And he’s right to hold them accountable for their shoddy economic management. It’s disgraceful that this supposedly free-market party sat idly by as public spending skyrocketed and the U.K. tax burden ballooned to its highest level since 1950.
However, Starmer’s announcement wilfully (and almost impressively) misrepresents economic reality. With Machiavellian flair, he constructed another “there’s no money left” moment, craftily using the Rose Garden, so evocative of 2010, to hammer home his claim that the Tories left the
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yeah….??? They AGreed with every single tyrannical policy of teh toires all teh way throughout the lockdowns 2020-2023 & wanted MORE!! So how are they absolved of Ecconomical destruction excatly?
Speech of doom and gloom without substance.
is it right for any leader to give a speech like this without a vision? With still more than 2 months until budget day?
What mystifies me, is that apparently no-one in government, can see the solution to overspending as a problem to be solved with ‘spend a bit less’. I feel sure that we could pretty easily find £22bn of cuts elsewhere in the £1,000bn we now spend every year to balance the books.
Cuts?
What are you? Some sort of far-Right b**st**d?
Fire 50% of the civil service would be a start and nobody would notice.
And they wouldn’t even have to leave the office as they are not there anyway.
So the economy is really going gang-busters and everything else was fine too! So the (Not Very) Conservatives didn’t deserve to lose.
I’m reminded of Spike Milligan’s joke headline….. ‘Arch Duke Ferdinand still alive… World War I a mistake!’
People could have voted Reform.
It seems to be a common technique favoured by the Left across the western world to create an entirely false narrative which will be used as the baseline to judge their performance, and to blank out anything that make their lives inconvenient.
I would happily take the tax rises on the chin if it meant that it turned a cash-strapped general public vehemently against net zero. But I fear that for every pound they tax us more, they’ll squander £1.50 to the false god of net zero.
Every western economy is worse than ever because they all (perhaps the odd minor exception) have more debt than ever.
You take a person who every year is in a bigger hole of debt than the previous year and tell me whether that person is in a better or worse financial position each year.
But, we seem to live in a world where nobody seems to think public debt matters, so…
Until the chickens come home to roost. Which they will.
Agree with the comments so far. Anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that the economy is in dire straits and that the cookoos in charge are determined to feather their nests and destroy our once proud country, which wasn’t perfect but worked (did stuff not sit at home waiting for someone to do something).
But for how long can he blame the Tories for the lack of money? It’s an excuse that won’t wash forever. Once he’s had his hands deep into our pockets and taken everything he can, what’s he going to say then – or rather, who is he going to blame? If he is blaming the Tories still after a few years (God forbid he’s still there) that would then indicate Labour fiscal incompetence. Anyway, you can’t tax a country back to riches. As Margaret Thatcher said, the trouble with socialism is you eventually run out of other people’s money.
I think she said something more along the lines of “Socialism is a wonderful idea until you run out of other people’s money.”
And since we have had 14 years of a socialist government it is no surprise that there is no spare money left for Labour to waste. A conservative government would have brought growth and raised income.
The profoundly stupid response to a common cold coronavirus cost this country at least £400bn.
Had Starmer been running the country at that time, the actions that he recommended would have cost even more.
This country appears to have a bottomless reservoir of utterly useless, spineless, apparently aimless politicians.
We need national (including border) security, deregulation, lower taxes and a much smaller public sector, many fewer politicians.
That is what ‘winning from the centre ground’ really means.
How can this be so difficult?
It’s difficult because it’s not what most people seem to want – there was a party with reasonable electoral chances standing on something like that platform you describe and I think they were supported by just 14% of the people who chose to vote. Most people are addicted to having a big state taking away freedom bit by bit, and I am convinced this addiction is incurable. The patient will have to die and be reborn before anything changes. Most rich world countries are going in the same direction, regardless of whether a nominally right or left wing government is in power – and this has been the case for decades.
“and this has been the case for decades”…..Has definitely been accelerated since the Covid PsyOp.
I rather think that convid helped a lot of people see what was already there
That too!
You are entitled to your opinion.
It is not one that I share.
14% was a good effort for a new political party.
They have a lot of policy work to do.
Much may also depend on who wins in the U.S. in November.
We will then get some more clues in May next year in the local elections.
It certainly appears that Rodney is setting new standards in how to alienate the electorate.
Is that really so? We will have to wait another eight months or so to find out.
The voters had their chance and made their choice. If those supposedly on the political right didn’t desert the Tories this time after the utter shitshow they were then it’s not going to happen.
As for the US I will be chuffed if Trump wins as the other lot are a disaster for the human race, but Trump doesn’t represent the fundamental shift I think we need.
I see no grounds for optimism
Democracy: the least worst system of government.
In fact Rodney got a 33% vote share representing about 12% of the population.
The Conservatives got about 23% of the vote.
These are relatively small numbers of people out of a seventy million population.
Against that, a 14% vote share looks quite decent.
It will be interesting to see just how alienating the ‘Rodney effect’ really is…….
I’m not sure we have a properly functioning democracy not least because such a thing requires the vigorous involvement of the people.
86% voted for the Uniparty despite the worst swindle in history- convid.
No hope.
…seventy million population.
2022 population was about 67m according to mortality.org. Of those about 14m are under age and not eligible to vote. Which leaves about 53m of an age to vote.
However, only 48,208,507 people were registered to vote in the 2024 GE.
53m – 48m = 5m. About 5m of the age-eligible population were not registered to vote. Some of these may be foreign nationals, prisoners, lords or loonies or vagrants (not sure about the prisoners).
It’s not relevant why 5m people are not registered to vote – they don’t care and/or they don’t count.
The sad fact is that only 28,924,725 votes were cast, and 116,063 of those were ‘spoiled ballots’. Who knows whether that was deliberate or stupid – either way does not matter.
19,283,782 votes (40%) were never cast. Two out of every 5 voters didn’t bother or were too disgusted to vote (a very few may have died or had unexpected problems getting to the polling station). Again, they made themselves irrelevant to the process and outcome.
I expect that many voted Labour because ‘we’ve always voted Labour’, and because ‘I’m not voting Tory’ – and had no idea what was in the manifestos.… Read more »
With Kennedy there, he should steer Trump in the right direction. Just imagen if Kennedy was in Trumps team in 2020. I don’t think the malign influence if the likes of Fauci & Bearx would get a foot past the door.
Possibly. Trump has dropped a fair bit in the polls since Harris became the candidate
Even the New York Times has just been slagging Harris off. Perhaps they decided we don’t want to appear too partisan!
I’m sure they will endorse her when the time comes
Would these be polls conducted by the Far Left media in the US?
Various polls, this collates most of them: Presidential General & Primary Elections | Latest Polls | RealClearPolling
For a long time before the debate with Biden, Trump was consistently ahead in most swing states – enough to get the win. After the debate he went even further ahead. Once Harris got in, she nosed in front. Make of that what you will.
But you see if you are going to freeze pensioners to death and double everyone’s energy bills by pretending to save the planet then you need a plausible excuse.—–So you blame the Tories. This still works for people over 50 who cannot forget they still hate Thatcher. But unless the Tories get moving with their leadership stuff or Reform suddenly surge in the polls and win seats, then we are going to be stuck with this shower of eco parasites who will probably STOP THE BOATS, but the bad news is they will START THE SHIPS.
The whole “worse than we imagined” schick is obviously bollocks, since they’ve been thoroughly briefed by the Treasury, BoE and OBR for months.
Unless of course, the Treasury, BoE and OBR didn’t give them accurate information ….. in which case the whole lot should be sacked for incompetence.
Get on with the sackings Two-Tier ….. unless, of course, it’s a load of old bollocks.
A good, balanced first article for the DS – well done.
Yes, Labour are gearing up to exceed even the most pessimistic of doom forecasts on how they will further destroy our economy.