The arrogant Left are triumphant – and think they have a mandate to destroy Britain.
The Left wrongly conflate public anger at the Tories with an ideological mandate for socialism
These are the best of days for Left-wing activists. Opinion polls are predicting a landslide victory for Sir Keir Starmer, giving him carte blanche to implement policies that socialist ideologues have only dreamt of for years.
There will be a tax raid on private schools, a war on the dreaded non-doms, more council homes, greater rights for workers and trade unions and a ban on new North Sea oil and gas plants. The hated Tories will be booted out of office, and the Brexit humiliation avenged. Britain will remain in the ECHR, the quangocrats and lawyers will be back in total control and the anti-woke skirmishes abandoned. The Blob and government will be united like never before, the progressive revolution accelerated and the last vestiges of conservative Britain consigned to the memory hole.
The official Labour Party is trying to retain its composure – Neil Kinnock’s premature victory dance in Sheffield in 1992 helped destroy his campaign – but on Twitter, in younger Left-wing London circles, in the Civil Service, the charity sector, some businesses and among the cultural elites, there is no such restraint. The mood is exuberant and triumphalism rife. Liberation is coming! In 12 months, 15 at the latest, Labour will be back in No 10.
As power drains from the Tory party, Whitehall mandarins are already winding down. Some Left-wing broadcasters aren’t bothering much with balance. CVs are being dusted off: there will be a revolving door between Left-wing organisations such as Oxfam or Extinction Rebellion and government departments. There is much excited talk of when we will start rejoining the EU (and lots of irritation at Starmer’s sensible refusal to countenance membership of the single market or customs union), of constitutional and voting reform, and of why Britain is on the cusp of a 1968-style shift towards a permanently more Left-wing culture.
Yet this is mostly delusional ideological over-reach, the stuff of over-excited minds who have misunderstood the causes of the Tory party’s demise and who believe their own propaganda. Yes, the Tories are hugely unpopular, but that doesn’t mean that the country has suddenly gone fully socialist and woke, or that it has fallen in love with Labour. Yes, Britain’s institutions, economy and public services are dysfunctional, but that doesn’t signify that Starmer’s crew have any real idea how to fix them.
What has happened is quite simple: the public is sick of the Tories, and is turning to His Majesty’s Opposition to sort out the mess. Labour is being hired unenthusiastically, on the equivalent of an extended trial period. Left-wing activists who are hearing something else are lying to themselves.
Starmer may end up with a majority that is almost as large as Tony Blair’s, but for very different reasons. Blair was mostly to the Right of the present Tories. His charisma, youthfulness and ability to ride the cultural zeitgeist made him, at first, extremely popular: he won the 1997 election just as much as the tired, sleazy Tories lost it. There was a genuine Blair fervour in sections of Middle England. He even won a plurality of pensioners. Many believed that this was a moment for ideological, cultural and social modernisation, and that “New Labour” was the ideal combination of Left and Right, of capitalism and higher public spending.
The current circumstances are diametrically different. The overriding public feeling is one of disgust at the Tories, who are widely seen as having broken numerous promises, failed to deliver and bequeathed a nation where nothing works. Leave voters thought that Brexit and Boris would bring about the change they hoped for, but in a staggering display of incompetence and cowardice, the Tories let them down. There is little ardour for Starmer. His victory will come by default, because “it’s time for a change and we might as well give him a go”, and because he has successfully purged the Corbynites.
Many Left-wing activists misinterpret all of this. They believe that Labour’s popularity is due to a massive ideological shift, while in fact the opposite is true. They misread polls demonstrating “Bregret” as signifying a genuine desire to rejoin the EU, as opposed to anger at the botched execution. They incorrectly believe that the public now wants a very liberal immigration policy (the truth is complex as a result of Ukraine and labour shortages, but most people still want fewer migrants).
They are convinced Middle England is comfortable with paying ever more taxes (they are not). They will interpret their victory as giving the elites free rein to socially engineer us, to control and command us. Yet much of the net zero agenda will turn out to be extremely unpopular, and Labour will get the blame. Only a small, extreme minority support intensifying the war on cars, for example, or a Dutch-style assault on farming, or reducing commercial airline flights, or blocking the construction of all new roads (as the Welsh Government has done). The real-world implementations of critical race theory and radical gender ideologies are equally unpopular.
Labour’s greatest problem is that the public wants Britain fixed, but Starmer has little to offer other than more of the same. He has no radical ideas to reform the broken NHS, or to fix the police, or to pay for social care, or to ensure energy security. His green transformation plan is unaffordable, and in any case spending billions on wind farms, insulating homes, building battery factories and accelerating Britain’s nuclear programme is little different to what the Tories will propose and won’t turbocharge growth. The jury remains open on his house building plans, but so far they don’t look truly radical.
Perhaps most ominously, Labour’s fiscal assumptions are nonsensical and could end up precipitating an early crisis. The tax increases announced will not pay for the spending promised, let alone the billions extra they will end up handing out to the welfare state. The public finances are already strained, and gilt yields at high levels. Labour will end up jacking up tax even further. Growth will be hit again as incentives are eroded and the brain drain intensifies.
Labour’s activists are mistaking a rejection of the Tories for an embrace of socialism, eco-zealotry and wokery. They have forgotten that hubris inevitably leads to nemesis. DT.
