Well, Keir Starmer has been prime minister for a year. I wonder if he has the date circled on a calendar in his kitchen; whether last year, when he strode into Downing Street, he pencilled in that a year on he’d deliver a speech to adoring crowds. Celebrating the freedom, prosperity, and world peace his benevolent leadership has bestowed upon us. I’m pretty sure his calendar won’t have a handwritten note saying, “humiliating climb down”. I wonder if he even expects to be there next year.
Labour have lost control of councils across the country. And not just at the ballot box. In Tyneside alone, they’ve lost control of both Newcastle and South Tyneside without any elections. Long-serving Labour councillors are resigning. What was once newsworthy is now routine.
How did it go so badly in a year? Well, they were already struggling. Labour didn’t win last year, the Tories lost. Labour polled 9.7 million votes in 2024. Compare that with 10.3 million in 2019 and 12.9 million in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn.
They have two basic problems. First, dishonesty. Second, they don’t understand why people have no money.
Once you have divorced yourself from the truth, it’s hard to come back
No sooner had they taken office than Freebiegate broke. £5,000 dresses not declared for Mrs Starmer. £14,000 birthday parties for Bridget Phillipson. £107,145 worth of gifts for Starmer personally, despite him being a millionaire. Taylor Swift Tickets. Exec boxes at football. Donors given government jobs.
Labour spin doctors were incensed that their guys were getting the tabloid treatment, when the Tories had been at least as bad. That’s the problem in a nutshell. They have no genuine commitment to truth.
The signs were there. Does it matter that Rachel Reeves dishonestly plagiarised a book about women economists? In one sense, it’s trivial. But if she’s willing to be untruthful to get few brownie points for performative feminism, then she’ll ditch all commitment to truth when the pressure’s on.
If Starmer was willing to accept £2.5k designer glasses and £16 grand suits what does it say about his judgement? If you can run for Labour leader on ten pledges and then ditch them all, you have no problem ditching a manifesto promise to increase overseas aid to 0.7% of GDP, then cutting it to 0.3% instead.
Doublethink becomes a habit. Once you have divorced yourself from the truth, it is easy to justify anything. You cut corners. Tell white lies. And before you know it you are criminalising non-violent protest and selling arms for genocide. You make pointless mistakes chasing votes and giving the “Island of strangers” speech. Integrity is our psychological apparatus for sticking to inconvenient truths.
If you can’t stick to the truth, you end up believing what is convenient rather than what is real. The Winter Fuel Allowance cut was an obvious debacle from the start. The failure to carry out a full impact assessment could only have been the result of groupthink. How could they not notice that stripping 800,000+ disabled people of the means to wash, prepare food or manage medication would be a disaster? The only answer is that they do not use truth as a compass.
They haven’t got a clue on the economy
The second problem is they don’t understand where the money goes. The basic problem is this country is run in the interests of making rich investors richer. The top rate of capital gains tax is 24%. The top rate of income tax is 45%. We tax people almost double for working and generating wealth than we do for passive wealth.
I’m all for entrepreneurialism. Helping small business establish and grow. Helping established businesses thrive by developing useful products and providing good jobs. We created jobs by the thousand when I was Mayor.
Passive wealth is different. It is like gravity. Money flows towards it. Very, very rich people don’t have to invent anything, lead anything, or produce anything of value. They just park money in big tech, privatised utilities, property, finance, and care homes, while the rest of us do the work, pay the bills, and actually generate the profits. Until that’s fixed, we’ll be presented with false choice after false choice, blaming poor disabled people, poor immigrants, poor children.
So they end up with a false logic. First we will have growth. Then we will invest. It’s cause and effect backwards. Would a company say, first we’ll sell a load of widgets, then we’ll use the money from that to buy the machinery we need to make the widgets?
The path forward is simple
Let’s have a wealth tax. Not just to raise money, but to make sure our national wealth is invested in a safer, healthier population, rather than share buybacks or superyachts.
We must dispel this myth of the household budget. Public spending is not like private spending. If I stop spending, it doesn’t really affect my earnings. But in a whole economy, one person’s spending is another person’s income.
If we funded our public services properly there would be more money spent in the real economy. All the restaurants and painters and decorators and everyone else will have more money in their pockets, have more secure lives, and pay more tax.
When we look after people, they are happier, healthier and more productive. Demand on public services falls. We spend less on diseases of despair. Crime falls and educational attainment rises.
This feeds back to point one. Labour politicians have taken donations of £2.7m from donors linked to private health alone. £4m from a firm that invests in F-35 planes – and now Starmer has ordered a dozen from the US. As the saying goes, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.