Finally a date has been set – 29 January 2025 – for the government to debate points posed by the now infamous ‘Call a General Election’ petition. ‘I would like there to be another General Election,’ reads the blurb on the website. ‘I believe the current Labour government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election.’ Many of the nearly three million who signed – unless they’re fantasists – will have done it more in agreement with the second statement than hope of the first. But how did we get here in under five months? Will Keir Starmer, at his announced ‘reset’ this Thursday, acknowledge the sheer speed of voter-disillusionment with Labour under his leadership?
It’s worth remembering the gap between Starmer’s gushing presentation of his party and what, without pausing to blush, they’ve actually given us
It’s worth remembering the gap between Starmer’s gushing presentation of his party and what, without pausing to blush, they’ve actually given us. Starmer in 2021 praised the ‘small businesses of this country’ as ‘the next generation wealth creators,’ a year later describing a Britain under Labour where ‘Business has the certainty to invest.’
Now those small business are clobbered by a triple-whammy of raised National Insurance contributions, an increased minimum wage and massively ramped up employees’ rights. Larger businesses like Tesco, M&S and B&Q have written to the Chancellor that job losses are ‘inevitable’ due to the ‘sheer scale’ of the new costs on business (Sainsbury’s predicts it will have to shell out an extra £140 million on NI charges alone), while recruiters warn of tens of thousands of British jobs simply being moved abroad.
As for the hospitality industry (already facing new laws that will turn its managers into ‘banter police’ or punish them for failure), the Night Time Industries Association, representing bars and clubs, have warned that four in ten of its members may have to close within six months. Starmer spoke of introducing ‘tough new protections for renters,’ and making ‘sure homes are safe for people to live in.’ Now it’s predicted rentals are to rise by up to £200 a month as landlords, faced with new legislation, simply dump their houses on the market and scram for cover.
Starmer emoted in 2022 about ‘pensioners, the poorest in our society still facing the coldest winter of their lives.’ He’s since deprived up to four out of five of their full winter heating allowance, with 500 new ‘warm banks’ opening since October. He also guaranteed to give ‘our young people the start in life they deserve,’ and before being elected leader said he would ‘support the abolition of [university] tuition fees.’ This November, students had them raised for the first time since 2017.
Environment Secretary Steve Reed promised to farmers in December last year that there would be no changes to inheritance tax, including Agricultural Property Relief (APR). Now, in the wake of changes announced in Rachel Reeves’ budget informing them that inheritance tax will be charged on assets of over £1 million, there are widespread fears that land will have to be sold off and that their children will inherit farms decimated by debt.
‘What does it say about Britain,’ an on-the-attack Starmer asked more generally in 2022, ‘when families worry like this about their children’s future? It says an unwritten contract is broken.’ The following year, he spoke of ‘the careful bond between this generation and the next.’ Instead, the government’s actions lend more credence to the words of former Blair aide John McTernan. Saying the quiet part out loud, he declared in a recent interview that Britain ‘doesn’t need small farmers’ and that ‘we can do to them what Margaret Thatcher did to the miners.’
Meanwhile, over at the public sector, there’s boundless generosity. Some train drivers could see their salaries rise, over three years, to a whopping £81,278 per year for a four-day-week, while junior doctors will receive an average 22.3 per cent pay rise over two years.
If a government can expose themselves so abysmally in less than five months, what can they do in a period a dozen times that length?
Starmer has spoken mystically of his debt to ‘working people’ (the phrase appears, deadeningly, no fewer than 75 times in his conference speeches as leader), though it’s clear from his definitions that it doesn’t apply to savers, small business owners, those who work from home or the middle classes. It’s a bitter irony that the Left, which has banged on about ‘inclusion’ for at least the past 15 years, has chosen to exclude so many from its plans.
‘We are the masters now!’ Labour attorney-general Hartley Shawcross crowed in 1946, after Clement Attlee’s landslide win a year before. Starmer’s government likewise seems actively out to humiliate and destabilise those unlikely to vote for them. One remembers too the 2009 statement from Tony Blair’s speechwriter Andrew Neather, who told us New Labour’s immigration plans were designed to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity.’ Now nose-rubbing appears to be a central plank in Starmer’s entire project, suggesting, as journalist James Bartholomew wrote, ‘that a significant part of the Left is more driven by hatred of the rich than by love and concern for the poor.’ In an echo of Theresa May’s 2002 warning to her Conservatives – that they were widely perceived as ‘nasty’ – Labour Peer Baroness Mallalieu recently remarked that Labour were ‘becoming the cruel party.’ It’s a far cry from Starmer’s declaration, a year ago, that ‘People are looking to us because they want our wounds to heal. And we are the healers.’ Or his promise, on being elected in July this year, to form a government that would ‘tread more lightly’ on people’s lives.
All of which brings us to that notorious petition, and the 2.9 million who signed it, most of whom surely knew that this was little more than a protest and that, on balance, nothing could be more ill-advised or less helpful than another election at this time. Having five years of opposition was a necessity for the clapped-out Conservatives, and Kemi Badenoch’s stated desire to work out first principles before policy will take every bit of that.
But there’s something more important at stake here too. If a government can expose themselves so abysmally in less than five months, what can they do in a period a dozen times that length? Voters who were taken in by Starmer’s lofty words and glittering abstract nouns – ‘fairness’, ‘compassion’, ‘respect’, ‘love’, ‘dignity’; ‘a country where aspiration is rewarded;’ ‘new beacons of fairness that light up the islands we share;’ – will have ample chance to see the grim reality that lies behind the blather. Nothing is more dangerous than a lesson half learned. Nothing could be more catastrophic than to prevent a generation’s being fully vaccinated and immunised against making the same mistake again.
Thatcher, in 1979, was helped not just by five years in opposition – with all the slow consultation and policy-making that involved – but by factors like the IMF crisis of ’76, the galloping double-digit inflation, the top-level income tax at 83 per cent, and finally the Winter of Discontent. All these ensured Labour stayed out of power for 18 years and that, when they returned, it was in a vastly more voter-friendly form.
Though a desert seems to separate us from 2029, it will come round soon enough. There will be bigger petitions to sign then. The electorate once more will be the masters. Let the nose-rubbing commence.
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