One handicap of our not having an Opposition – whatever possessed the Tory party to think it could do without a leader until November 2? – is that no one appears to be undertaking the essential job of exposing the Government’s daily failures and embarrassments. The past few days have seen a torrent, culminating in accusations by the odd still-functioning Tory MP that Labour ended the winter fuel allowance for pensioners so it could afford to bribe its friends in the unions. For the nostalgics among us it’s the 1970s all over again, though without the flared trousers.
Even bribing the train drivers – who now earn far more than many teachers or junior doctors – worked only briefly. Within hours Aslef drivers working for LNER said they would strike over weekends in the autumn. The moral was soon transmitted to other public sector workers. Border Force staff have promised to strike on August 31 pending a better deal, and, as The Telegraph has reported, GPs are expecting a bigger slice of the NHS cake. With the winter fuel allowance gone, what will go next to pay for all this? And, more to the point, which will be the next section of the electorate to be alienated?
More intelligent ministers – and this is a far from stupid cabinet, despite some appearances to the contrary – know, after just six weeks in office, that the confrontation with reality the Government is having proves that running a deeply divided country such as Britain is not so easy as some imagined.
Their profound irritation was unmasked last Thursday when something for which they were not responsible – a much higher economic growth rate in the past quarter than expected – prompted a preposterous attack by Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, on the policy of her predecessor. If it isn’t bad enough to find your job tougher than you feared, for it to turn out that the man you succeeded was actually better at it than you dare to admit is deeply upsetting.
Once she imposes her plans to tax wealth-creators as painfully as possible in order to find cash to lard on Labour’s client groups – most of whom create very little wealth – Miss Reeves will be able to blame herself, and not the Conservatives, for economic decline. Some have argued that the present rate of growth negates the need to fulfil her threat to raise taxes in her October budget, such as by raiding pension contributions and inheritances. However, even if true, Labour’s determination to splurge money on public sector pay as though it were 1975 might necessitate that sort of raid. We have seen it all before.
The list of failures – or, if you prefer, proof of the difficulty of governing – gets longer daily, and they are not purely economic. Having grandstanded about not sending illegal migrants to Rwanda, Sir Keir Starmer appears to have no other plan in its place. His Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, whose touch is so sure that she recently went on television to be interviewed by her husband, can’t even find somebody to run her “Border Command”, so impossible is the job without a serious strategy of mass deportation. The longer that remains the case the more strain is put on overloaded health and social services, schools and housing. And it’s no good saying the Conservatives were just as bad: they aren’t in power now.
No wonder when riots broke out Sir Keir and his colleagues appeared for a time paralysed by sheer panic. It was their former clientele in the white working class, who feel utterly abandoned by Labour, who were doing the rioting. Some were indeed fully-fledged neo-fascists; many, though, were just criminal morons unable to tell far-Right from far-Left, but who liked a punch-up with a chance of some lucrative looting. More worrying for Labour were the silent, decent millions of non-rioters who feel entirely ill-served by the lack of a migration control strategy. What is Sir Keir’s plan for them?
The police and courts were quite rightly galvanised to punish and deter rioting, but when will they be properly deployed to tackle the epidemic of other crime that still goes unchecked? Shoplifting, robbery, burglary and the drug culture that now routinely fuels them remain largely unpunished in contemporary Britain; and those serious criminals who, almost by accident, end up in jail now face early release because there aren’t enough prison places available. How does that all square with the boasts about being tough on law and order? And where does it leave the Government’s responsibility to enforce the rule of law, and to do so impartially? Ms Cooper says people have “lost respect for the police”. Does she think the radical ideology of identity politics to which so many in the Labour movement subscribe, and which Home Office officials have been instilling into senior police officers for years, might have anything to do with that?
On top of all that, private schools are closing down because of the imminent imposition of VAT on their fees, an act of pure class hatred that will slowly undermine the state education system as it struggles to absorb ex-private pupils. Waiting lists are still lengthening in the NHS. There is a threat to scale down investment in defence just when the world is at its most dangerous in most of our lifetimes, and neither Sir Keir nor his out-of-his-depth Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, appears to have much of a clue about how to use British diplomacy to soothe international tensions.
