SHAMELESS Starmer, as I predicted, is still Prime Minister. U-turn Andy has yet to win Makerfield. Wes Streeting is going nowhere. The Times commentator Fraser Nelson still has his head in the sand. And it’s still three years to the next General Election.
Burnham will take Labour further into state Soviet land – tax more (ever more punitive taxes on the country’s remnant wealth), spend more and lead the country deeper into its ever more acute debt crisis. Yet none of his Makerfield potholes-focused competitors really seem to get it. Neither Conservative, Reform nor Restore. No local councillor or MP has a chance of solving them, whatever promises they make, under a Burnham-led Labour Government. Or under any Labour Government. Local issues are of course a worry but this is a by-election which may choose the next Prime Minister. Burnham should not be let off the hook on anything – no more on his serious lapses over Manchester’s Muslim rape gang scandal than on his lies about Manchester’s miracle.
No wonder the prospect of Burnham’s lurch to the far left – promises of state control of housing, transport, energy and water – has spooked the markets (made just as his claims for Manchester’s growth boom turned out to be phoney). Sovietisation of the economy brought the country to its knees 50 years ago – a Labour ghost he shouldn’t be allowed to exorcise.
Yet commentators seem misty-eyed about this return to true Labour, the one that had Denis Healey calling in the IMF to secure a $3.9billion dollar bail-out in September 1976.
Faced with a £3trillion debt that he could no longer service if he steps into the leader’s shoes in September (no change to the quiff), what would be Andy’s ‘ask’ of the IMF? What would be demanded in exchange? He may well be confident that he won’t have to go cap in hand. Not because his punitive new tax raids – the latest is a £35billion land tax – will plug the gap. But because the IMF just doesn’t have the money. Second, the central banks will go into overtime running the money printing presses.
What does that illusory world mean for ordinary people? Lionel Shriver set out the pain in a brilliant article in the Spectator last week that is far from illusory. ‘Inflation – lots of it’. Soaring prices that are evidence of a rotting currency: ‘Wages lag inflation,’ she explained. Next, you get a wage-price spiral. The cost of (food) imports soars . . . When your government can’t cover its bills, you can’t cover yours. Think “affordability” is bad now? Just wait.’
The picture Shriver paints is bleak. Because Britain imports 44 per cent of its energy, one thing Brits can’t afford is heat. Elderly parents will freeze to death (my guess is children too). You will have to slip into your local library to charge your phone (if it hasn’t been closed). Few will be able to afford to drive, let alone travel. Savings become worthless. Pensions implode and cannot pay out. Mortgage rates are hiked. Your house is repossessed. Banks won’t loan to individuals or businesses. If you don’t own a house to lose, you can’t buy one either.
Shriver’s list goes on. Massive layoffs, not only in the private but also the public sector, so no one’s job is safe. A civil service cull so severe that it will also hit teachers, nurses and police officers. Healthcare funding cuts meaning even longer NHS queues; denial of access to expensive cancer drugs. Life expectancy (already down in lockdown) will fall again.
And bang go any hopes for Burnham’s big state-led reindustrialisation plans as infrastructure investment dries up. Britain’s pothole problem takes on a whole new meaning. Taxes rise even higher, businesses go belly-up, crime worsens.
So, writes Shriver: ‘Let’s quit the hankie-twisting over a climate we don’t control, nix Net Zero, and vote any party whose reps lecture the market to “get into line” permanently out of office.’
She is right. This is the reality check platform from which Burnham’s rivals and their party bosses – Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and Kemi Badenoch – should fight. Burnham’s about to be speeded-up death spiral, high taxation, money-printing model of the last two decades won’t fix potholes or improve local services. It will simply disappear into the same bottomless pit of ‘process government’ regulations and compliance to latest woke nonsense; of corrupting welfare dependency, huge immigrant handouts and an escalating pensions (benefits) scam that the ‘new right’ political leaders have yet to understand.
It will be an inflation-driven austerity far worse than any temporary austerity caused by targeted cuts, legislation repeal and ending massive and unjustifiable renewable energy subsidies.
As Shriver says, ‘let’s quit the hankie-twisting over a climate we don’t control’ for starters. And all the rest of the woke hankie-twisting, I would add.
My worry is that the splintered right is not yet up to the task. Do they fully get it?
Is Richard Inman, one of Tommy Robinson’s key allies and one of the organisers of the Unite the Kingdom rally, correct that only a new civil rights movement will change the country’s direction? That’s how he characterised the UTK rally in his ‘Did the Met set us up to fail?’ message on YouTube last week.
A whole new contract between governed and ‘rulers’? A latter-day Magna Carta? The principles at issue remain the same: no taxation without representation, a right to a fair trial, equal justice, and the right to declare war on whoever is ‘King’ should they not follow the charter’s provisions.
Above all there must be a rejection of the ‘process’ politics culture (of which Starmer is the living embodiment) that stymies us at every turn, that supports two-tier justice, that underlies the collapse in civic trust at the same time as crippling the economy. My question again is: do the Makerfield contenders get it?
Are they going to participate in the same old political game with promises of more or better that bear no relation to reality and can never be fulfilled under the current disposition? Or will they argue for a new political contract between the governed and government that this country so desperately needs? And for the state to pull back and focus on its prior duty of defending its borders, its citizens and its heritage?
