I don’t want to come over all Shawshank Redemption, but 412 days have passed since Labour were elected last year. A lot can happen in that time. I’m informed by Google’s inbuilt AI system that one could theoretically have run 366 marathons. A child could have been conceived with some months left over to start raising the thing. You could even have mastered intermediate-level Spanish. Yet what Labour have managed to achieve in their first year and a bit in Government eclipses even these admirable pursuits. In just over a year, Keir Starmer’s regime has reached levels of unpopularity that it took the Tories all of 14 years to attain.
Recent YouGov polling shows that a mere 13% of the British public approve of the Government’s performance so far. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the New Statesman reports that things are about to get worse. According to Ipsos data seen exclusively by the magazine, Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Jezbollah’ outfit is on the warpath. One in three of those who voted Labour in 2024 would now consider voting for the Commie upstarts. When 2024 Labour voters were asked whether they’d entertain voting for an alliance between the Sultana-Corbyn and the Green Party, this figure rose to 46%.
Despite my fundamentally petty nature, I do not revel in all of this. While I couldn’t have brought myself to cross their box on ballot day, I, like so many disenchanted working-age suckers, felt a pang of excitement on Labour’s victory. This was going to be the party to start building houses. Wes Streeting was going to streamline the NHS so it saved people instead of letting them die on waiting lists. Yvette Cooper was going to ensure that our borders were actually policed. Rachel Reeves was poised to become the Iron Chancellor who broke with her party’s past to give businesses the freedom to grow, hire and innovate.
What tripe the naive will delude themselves into believing. From its inception, this Government has been a case study in taking one step forwards before sprinting 15 backwards, with this week being case in point.
Over the last couple of days, some decent news has emerged from the Treasury. Labour are apparently considering abolishing stamp duty on owner-occupied homes. A rare moment of good sense from Britain’s economic mandarins. Stamp duty is one of our most pernicious levies. Stamp duty is paid when you buy either a freehold property, a new or pre-existing leasehold, a property through a shared ownership scheme or take on a mortgage or buy a share in a house. For a £310,000 property, you will likely pay £5,500 in stamp duty. It punishes buyers by forcing them to put aside cash for an additional transaction fee on top of the amount one would already have to save for moving house. The sooner it is axed the better.
All is well in the world, until it isn’t. Accompanying this sensible manoeuvre was a number of decidedly less positive headlines. The Times reported yesterday evening that Reeves is drawing up plans to smack the owners of supposedly ‘high-value’ homes with capital gains tax when they decide to sell up. This, as with so many of Labour’s hare-brained schemes, is to fill the £40 billion black hole in the public finances. As my colleague Robert Colvile pointed out on X, going ahead with this would be absurd. Our home ownership rate is 65% – towards the bottom of the European league table. The aspiration to own property is not a uniquely British quirk, hence why hardly any other countries impose such a charge on selling a family home, and those that have tried it before, like France, came to regret it.
This Government’s appetite for expensive class war is by no means confined to Britain’s mansions, Bridget Phillipson’s crusade against private schools has also made headlines this week. Figures released on Tuesday had the number of private schools which fell into administration between January and July at 12 – double the number in the same period last year. A number of experts have attributed this to the Government’s imposition of VAT on private school fees, which came into effect in January. And according to other recent reports, some struggling private schools are being sold to the Chinese to avoid going under. Figures within the Department of Education are said to be ‘concerned’ by the development. A reasonable response given the Chinese Communist Party’s proven aptitude at infiltrating British universities and instituting programmes of soft indoctrination. A former teacher at Harrow Beijing suggests Chinese investors have taken notice of Labour’s VAT raid and are attracted to the growing availability of selective British schools.
With depressing and unceasing predictability, Labour demonstrate both their deep ideological incoherence and political incompetence. With its approval ratings in the gutter, Reform UK surging ahead in the polls and ‘Jezbollah’ hot on its heels, the Government is relying on one of two outcomes come 2029.
The first possibility is that Labour have read the room and feel that they are destined to have presided over a single term in government. In which case, we will have a few more years of kamikaze piloting as Starmer desperately tries to appeal to all of his party’s contradictory instincts – growth in one corner and ‘eat the rich’ in another – until he’s voted out. The other option, of course, is that the Government is counting on being viewed as the least incompetent of the bunch. This is reliant on Nigel Farage’s tall poppy syndrome repelling all talented candidates from his party, the Conservatives repeating the pattern of regicide and internal disorder until they lose all credibility and Sultana and Corbyn presumably having a ‘Life of Brian’-style fallout. This is without even mentioning the Liberal Democrats or Greens.
As I write this, we are 1,456 days away from the latest possible date for the next election. We have already seen the destruction Labour are capable of in a fraction of that time. One can only imagine what our economy and politics will look like in four more years. Regardless of which of the above strategies Morgan McSweeney is flirting with, we will all continue to suffer as a result. Let’s just hope that as things get worse, Labour’s hand will be forced and, instead of trying to be all things to all men, Reeves and Starmer will focus on boosting British prosperity.
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