It’s the start of the new year, but while my instinct is always to be positive, it’s hard to feel optimistic under our current political regime. I’m far from alone, a recent You Gov poll found that most voters saw Labour as “incompetent” “dishonest” and thought Starmer will fail at all six of the latest milestones he has set for his government (no, I can’t remember what they were either, or the ones he didn’t meet before that).
Even worse is watching the country having to deal with the fall-out from Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ wrecking-ball budget that is harming business, lowering employment levels and driving entrepreneurs to the wall, not to mention decimating the British farming industry.
When every major financial institution including the Bank of England says in a public statement that the budget is hurting the British economy surely it’s time to come to our senses and realise that it’s been an unmitigated disaster fraught with unintended consequences and the only sensible option is a re-think. But no, she’s doubling down. And to save her pride we’ll all just have to soldier on while she squeezes hard working people until the pips come out, or they lose their jobs because it’s now so much more expensive to employ people, whichever comes first.
Despite Reeves’ endless proclamations of her budget being on the side of the workers, the independent Office for Budget Responsibility has said that 80 per cent of her employer NI rises will be paid for by the workers, through lower wages and reduced employment levels.
But don’t rely on all those wicked top band taxpayers to pay for us all, thanks to her scaremongering about black holes in the economy and potential wealth taxes, they’ve all left.
When Elon Musk tweeted this week that “very few companies will be willing to invest in the UK with the current administration” it was hard not to see his point
Worst of all is the sight of farmers in total despair that inheritance tax rises will destroy their family farms, and the knowledge that this destructive tax will decimate the British industry and force us towards mass produced factory farmed US-imported food. Then we hear that Labour burned through a considerable amount of political capital for a policy that will raise just £500m a year. But don’t get excited about that drop in the ocean (for a sense of scale, bear in mind our welfare budget is £303 billion) – as luck would have it we’re also committed to that exact number for foreign farmers in aid. You couldn’t make it up!
It’s not just farmers, talk to any small business owner and they’ll tell you they are battling for survival, with hospitality, the lifeblood of London, the hardest hit. More than 34 pubs are closing in Britain each month, with London losing the largest number. Anyone who runs a small business will tell you that it’s never been so tough out there, while they struggle with inflation, the cost of living, desperately trying to repay covid loans and bravely rebuilding their businesses after the nuclear war of the pandemic.
Meanwhile Angela Rayner and our Partridge-esque Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds are trying to tie them up on workers rights where people will be able to refuse to come to the office and be able to take their boss to a tribunal for unfair dismissal from day one. The best bit was when Amazon ordered its staff back to the office Reynolds claimed they were wrong to do so because it contravened research he had read saying allowing staff to WFH was always a good thing, as if our business secretary who, incidentally hilariously (or is it?) has never had a job in business, thinks he knows more about running a business than Jeff Bezos. What a laugh.
When Elon Musk tweeted this week that “very few companies will be willing to invest in the UK with the current administration” it was hard not to see his point.
The VAT fiasco on private schools is another botched job. Of course people were happy to sock it to the toffs, but the fall-out has hit so many more – including SEND kids who don’t have a notoriously-difficult-to-get Education, Health, and Care plan, as well as military families. Bursaries for disadvantaged kids are now being slashed and shared facilities lost, not to mention the schools that have had to close entirely, and the many more that will have to. This has felt like the politics of spite and even worse ill-researched with no plan and entirely incompetently implemented, not helped no doubt by Bridget Phillipson’s refusal throughout the process to meet anyone in the independent sector to discuss the policy.
The angry petulant letter Phillipson wrote in the Telegraph at the weekend where she complained of people “scaremongering” while wilfully failing to address any of the genuine flaws in the policy struck entirely the wrong note. Implementing it this week, mid-school year when young people are halfway through their exam curriculums and can’t find other school places, felt especially unkind, as did the fact that no due diligence was done about the provision for kids to join the state sector, with Surrey issuing a blanket statement saying they had no more room in their schools. Then we learn of councils having to pay tens of thousands of pounds to displaced students on taxis to neighbouring counties as there are no school places in their own.
Worse still, her sums don’t add up either. The National Foundation for Educational Research estimates that it will cost £5 billion, not the £1.7 billion Labour have predicted the VAT rise will raise by 29/30 to employ the 6,500 teachers that were promised in exchange for the rise.
All of Labour’s priorities seem to exist in an alternative reality
Next we hear that in all her wisdom she has axed Latin lessons half way through the year saving a paltry £4 million. Presumably more outlandish decisions are on the horizon after a submission to Phillipson’s review of the curriculum suggested school outings to graffiti workshops instead of museums.
It’s not just the terrible and inappropriate decision-making, alienating the electorate one demographic at a time, it’s also the utter administrative dysfunction of the state that’s so worrying.
New figures highlighted by the MP Rupert Lowe reveal that that £159.2 million in state pensions and pension credit has been paid to deceased recipients in the financial year 2023/24.
In Fraser Nelson’s excoriating Channel 4 programme about the benefits epidemic in Britain there were people trying to ring the authorities to say they no longer needed their benefits, but even years later, had never heard back.
Civil servants are threatening to sue if they have to go to the office more than three days a week. And – more good news – Labour has set up a new quango every week since getting into power.
The most frustrating thing is that there is so much work needed to improve the country, so many things the general public really care about, and want sorted out, yet all of Labour’s priorities seem to exist in an alternative reality.
The Chagos islands and the £800 million a year it will apparently cost us to relinquish them are a good example.
While pensioners freeze, Ed Miliband, the politician the country thought they had roundly rejected, is back like a demented mal-functioning Wallace and Gromit character threatening to spend billions of our hard earned cash to cover the whole country in wind farms solar panels and pylons that no one ever asked for. Of course, we want to be as green as possible and do everything we can for the environment. But the sums required for this crusade feel tone deaf considering everything else that is going on.
Of course Labour inherited absolute chaos from the Tories but things had got so mad under them it was possible to imagine sunlit uplands where sensible people making normal decisions might quickly be able to restore normality. It has fast become apparent Labour are determined to make things even more barmy, and probably bankrupt us all in the process too.
Anna van Praagh is acting editor of the Standard
