Ruth Dudley Edwards: It’s been a bad start for Labour but let’s face it, we’re stuck with them and Starmer
I’ve never known a general election in the United Kingdom to have such a depressing effect on the public mood.
It’s not just the right who are filled with gloom. Most of us had long ago accepted that the Conservatives would justly have to pay a heavy price for being in office too long, changing prime ministers with unseemly haste, and generally seeming to be pretty well clapped-out.
“Fair’s fair,” we would say. “It’s a democracy. It’s Labour’s turn.”
The pessimists said Sir Keir Starmer was hard left. Did he not urge people to vote to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister? But the optimists said that maybe we should give him the benefit of doubt. After all, he got rid of Corbyn in short order when he got the chance.
And though the more pessimistic among us worried that Labour always mess up and we might have a return to the grim days of the 1970s and 80s when the trade unions ruled, the optimists said “Surely Starmer’s too sensible for that.”
And then Starmer came in and it didn’t take long for reality to dawn. He is very left wing and so far shows no signs of being sensible.
He keeps making decisions so dumb that even Labour supporters are scratching their head and asking why he makes such poor choices.
Caving in to the demands of grossly overpaid train drivers without exacting some concessions about their restrictive practices was mad.
Ernest Blythe, a Protestant unionist from Maghaberry who became a born-again IRA fighter, was the flinty minister for finance known by generations of southern Irish as “the b*****d who took a shilling off the old age pensioners in 1924”.
Obviously Starmer didn’t know about him when he made the decision he will never be forgiven for — to axe pensioners’ winter heating allowance.
It seemed OK to him, as did accepting large sums of money from a Labour peer for suits, spectacles and frocks for his wife. There were no rules against it and Starmer treats rule books like a devout Muslim worships the Koran.
That was why he got into so much trouble when he could not answer the question “What is a woman?” Or in the case of this budget, “What are ‘working people’?”
And he genuinely can’t see the truth in the accusation that he encourages the imposition of two-tier justice — harsher punishment for demonstrators regarded as on the right.
“Keir Starmer’s bafflingly bad start as the United Kingdom’s prime minister” was the headline in the New Yorker magazine.
The truth is he can’t do the job. His deputy, Angela Rayner, indiscreetly told his biographer that he was “the least political person I know in politics.”
Having no gift for politics is one hell of a handicap for a prime minister.
And what’s more, he’s dull, humourless and without any vision.
But though he got only 34% of the vote at the general election, we’re stuck with him unless there’s a palace revolution. There has been no honeymoon. Indeed Rishi Sunak is now more popular than the man who defeated him.
And the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, seems cut from the same socialist cloth.
She doesn’t seem to grasp that extending workers’ rights and increasing employers’ national insurance contributions will drive up unemployment and destroy jobs; that abolishing the tax benefits of non-dom status for UK residents whose permanent home is outside the UK will lead to a flight of billionaires; and that it is the private sector not public works that creates growth.
The public are already sounding wistful about the fun they had under Boris Johnson.