Sir Keir has been Prime Minister for a year. I wonder if the date was circled on a calendar in his kitchen. July 5th 2025 – “Give big speech to adoring crowd about our achievements.” I’m pretty sure it didn’t have a handwritten note saying, “humiliating climb down.” I wonder if he even expects to be there next year.
They have done some things. Though not enough for anyone to notice. Pollsters More in Common asked what the government’s greatest achievement was. The overwhelming verdict: nothing. Even Labour’s own comms is a bit sketchy. They haven’t built 1.5 million homes, that’s still an aspiration. GB Energy’s own CEO admitted they will not lower energy bills.
They had a total wipeout in Durham. They’ve lost control of Newcastle and South Tyneside without any elections. Long-serving Labour councillors are resigning.
How did it go so badly in a year? Well, they were already struggling. Labour didn’t win last year, so much as 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, an ambivalence to truth. No sooner had they taken office than Freebiegate broke. £5,000 dresses for Mrs Starmer. £14,000 birthday party Bridget Phillipson. £107,145 worth of gifts for Sir Keir, despite 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 disingenuous to get few brownie points, what will she do when there’s a real incentive to lie?
If Sir Keir 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, it’s second nature to break your manifesto promise to increase overseas aid to 0.7% of GDP, and cut it to 0.3% instead.
Doublethink becomes a habit. Once you decide truth is optional, 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 stupid mistakes chasing votes with the “Island of strangers” speech. Integrity is our psychological apparatus for sticking to inconvenient truths.
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 was a triumph of convenience over evidence.
How could they not see that stripping 800,000+ disabled people of the means to wash, prepare food or manage medication would be a disaster? Academics insist on peer review. Politicians prefer the news cycle.
The second problem is they don’t understand where the money goes. This country is run in the interests of making rich investors richer.
I’m a champion of helping business establish and grow 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.
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. Until that’s fixed, we’ll be presented with false choice after false choice, blaming poor disabled people, poor immigrants, poor children. This government, or any government, will fail to fix Britain.
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.
We also need to do more than fund our public services properly. We need to stop private equity funds sucking money out of them. And out of our utilities.
This feeds back to point 1. Labour politicians have taken donations of £2.7 million from donors linked to private health alone. £4 million from the firm that invests in F-35 planes. Sir Keir 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.