In the wake of Britain’s Conservative Party haemorrhaging more than a thousand councillors in this month’s local elections, Keir Starmer’s Labour has become the largest party in local government for the first time in 20 years. Buoyed by the public’s rejection of Rishi Sunak, and his steady 10-12 point lead in the polls, Starmer is clearly preparing for government – albeit with psephologists predicting he will not have enough for an overall majority, and may need to enter a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
With more scrutiny on what precisely a Starmer government would look like, forces within the party took the decision to leak Labour’s blueprint for electoral success: an 86-page policy handbook to be debated by the NPF (National Policy Forum), before Labour’s crunch meeting in July where the final manifesto preparations will be made. The plans were summarised last week by the website labourlist.org, and make for disturbing reading.
Along with the headline-grabbing revelation that Starmer intends to give the vote to 3.4 million EU citizens resident in the UK and 16-year-olds, as well as an outright ban on smoking, there are further reasons for concern concealed within the party’s blueprint. Broadly speaking, the handbook follows the six NPF policy documents debated earlier this year: ‘A green and digital future’, ‘Better jobs and better work’, ‘Safe and secure communities’, ‘Public services that work from the start’, ‘A future where families come first’, and ‘Britain in the world’.
In terms of environmental commitments, Labour is resolutely focussed on making Britain far less competitive than its higher-polluting opposite numbers, aiming to ‘double onshore wind capacity, triple solar capacity and quadruple offshore wind capacity’. The party intends to cease the issuance of new licences for oil and gas exploration, establish a ‘clear roadmap for decarbonisation’, oppose and ban fracking in England, ‘establish a legal right to breathe clean air’, and ensure that 50% of all public sector food purchases are locally sourced.
Moving on to employment, Labour’s tack is evidently a dramatic increase in red tape and the incentivisation of strikes. Starmer’s Labour wants a job market that suits the employee rather than the employer: with the automatic right to work from home, a ban on zero-hours contracts, and the right to a regular contract for anyone working 12 hours or more per week.
They go further: demanding employers ‘tackle’ the non-existent gender pay-gap, with larger firms required to ‘develop and publish action plans’, alongside plans detailing how they will support employees with ‘menopausal symptoms’. Discrimination must be further stamped out, with the introduction of ethnicity and disability pay-gap reporting required for large employers. And it is to be made substantially easier for workers to strike.
While the report is keen to point out there will be ‘no return to freedom of movement’, it also states that a points-based immigration system must be promptly put in place to ensure ‘the economy has the skills it needs and that prolonged vacancies do not hold back growth in key sectors’ – which does not sound like a serious immigration policy.
Next to community, and Labour has not by any means exhausted its raft of pointless policies. In pride of place are bizarre pledges for tougher online regulation to ‘tackle websites selling knives’, the upgrade of misogyny to a ‘hate crime’, and the installation of youth workers into Accident and Emergency wards to reach ‘young people already involved in gangs’.
Having consistently opposed and raised concerns against sensible stop and search policies in opposition, Labour has no intention of changing its tune this close to an election. Rather than take a stand against knife crime and its causes, Labour will legalise a requirement for stop and search data to be recorded (presumably for discrimination purposes). And in an attempt to further distract police from actual policing, the party wants to make it a mandatory requirement for all police constabularies to implement the National Police Chiefs’ ‘Race Action Plan’.
With regards to public services, Labour starts sensibly for once with pledges to double medical school placements to 15,000 a year, and to train an extra 10,000 midwives and nurses each year. They then quickly revert to type, and promise to end ‘the Black maternal mortality gap’, despite the fact that evidence clearly suggests this has nothing to do with money (childbirth is deadlier for black families even when they’re rich).
With the fragrant scent of inequality once again in their nostrils, Labour promise to force the government and public sector to focus on the delivery of more equal outcomes (as opposed to just better ones), alongside ‘fully-funded free breakfast clubs in every primary school’ – even those where there is no need of them. And finally in a clear dig at Ofsted, Labour may promise to introduce a simple report card of how schools and colleges are performing. Of course, the death of Ruth Perry was a tragedy, and every year some children are left upset by SAT’s – that is no excuse to abandon rigorous examination nor the quest for excellence.
As for the family, Starmer is clearly targeting housing – but not homeowners obviously, as the Labour leader has already promised house prices will fall under a Labour government. So on to the aspirational then, Starmer has pledged to get national homeownership rates back up to 70 percent, with help for first-time buyers who cannot get onto the housing ladder whereby the state would step in as the mortgage guarantor; there is surely no way this could possibly backfire.
Housing policies will resonate with many voters across the board – the only slight problem I can see is that Labour never build any houses during office. The old joke used to be that New Labour built fewer houses during their entire administration than Mrs Thatcher managed in a single year, but it actually turns out to be true. Still not to worry, back on to specious talk of equality. Labour is evidently keen to introduce a ‘Race Equality Act’, to ‘ensure that equality is at the heart of all our policymaking, including by implementing better ethnicity data’. You feel reassured now, don’t you?
If you haven’t made your mind up to vote Labour yet, there’s one more section: Britain in the world. Starmer is likely to promise unequivocal long-tern support for Ukraine, to push for climate change as a fourth pillar at the United Nations, and to ‘increase cooperation’, ‘reduce trade barriers’, and ‘strengthen mutual recognition of professional standards’ with the EU – in other words, to cancel Brexit.
Finally on immigration, Starmer is keen to ‘reduce the asylum backlog…through a fair and transparent policy that does not discriminate’ and ‘redesign existing settlement schemes to provide a clearer process for refugees with family connections in the UK’ – i.e., open borders, in all but name.
Being unpopular with the public is not something that seems to bother Starmer, and even his headline policies are cutting no ice according to the polls. Giving the vote to 16-year-olds is supported by 37% but opposed by 50%, while allowing EU citizens to swing the election is a tadge closer, 39% in favour, 45% opposed.
Gerrymandering the vote is hardly new territory for the Labour Party, with Tony Blair inadvertently admitting millions of new Brits, mysteriously inclined to vote for him. But Starmer may have bitten off more than he or even Ed Miliband can chew by so thinly disguising his intention to rejoin the EU – having already admitted he would ‘revisit’ the Brexit deal to boost the economy.
No matter how refined the Labour Party Manifesto ends up, whatever combination of these woke, unaspiring, uncompetitive and self-serving policies results in the end product, it is one unlikely to resonate with the Red Wall. Which means, at the next general election, the British electorate’s choices are looking as thin as an anorexic’s diet sheet: trying to weigh up the lesser of two evils between Starmer’s left-wing Labour, and the right-wing socialists currently in government; alas, if only there were a conservative option…
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