Keir Starmer is now the least trustworthy man in British politics

 There is seemingly no issue the Labour leader can’t find a way to flip-flop on

Source - Daily Telegraph 19/08/23

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Most politicians U-turn from time to time. But it has begun to feel like Sir Keir Starmer has made U-turns the key plank of his campaign. Having first pledged to change the law to allow gender self-ID, Starmer rapidly backtracked after watching Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP implode into infighting and division after the practical consequences were made clear. 

He now appears to be engaging in the bizarre process of reversing his reverse ferret. At an event in Rutherglen last week, Sir Keir said that he would not have blocked Sturgeon’s proposals, accusing government ministers of misusing their powers under devolution. The millions of women who wanted to vote Labour but felt unable to do so because of his support for this noxious, morally offensive policy will once again be seething. 

They will not, however, be surprised. Starmer has accumulated more U-turns than a driving instructor. Just think about his promise to abolish tuition fees – clearly unfeasible and foolish, but still a pledge that appealed to Left-wing voters and pacified the left of his party. 

But Starmer’s “commitment to end the national scandal of spiralling student debt” suddenly died when he realised that Britain found itself “in a different financial situation”. He told the BBC that “we are likely to move on from that commitment”. Oh well. 

However, it’s hard to imagine precisely what financial situation Sir Keir imagined the country to be in when he made the pledge. The economic picture has been gloomy for years, particularly where public finances are concerned. Are we only meant to take pledges seriously when the government is flush with cash? Whatever the answer, it’s hardly confidence-inspiring. 

Many of his pledges, of course, were bad, and the U-turns welcome if not, indeed, inevitable. Take the party’s flagship “Green Prosperity Plan”. Starmer committed his future government to spending £28 billion a year – considerably more than the annual funding for the entire British police force – on his vision of making Britain a “clean energy superpower”. The greens in his party loved it; Britain was going to do its bit to protect against climate disaster – remember, the language used by such activists is always apocalyptic – and boost the economy into the bargain.

Except given that there’s precious little money to go around, and the NHS is practically falling apart, this would have been an obvious misuse of funds. And so Starmer’s crew have decided to push the plan back a few years. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, for her part, blamed the Conservatives, who “crashed our economy” and raised interest rates. But again, the plan seems to show a baffling lack of awareness of what the past 15 years of British economic life have looked like, quite aside from the fallout from the mini-budget. Inflation and interest rates were on the way up, anyway, and borrowing billions to spend on solar panels, wind farms and pylons to make the grid net zero by 2030 was not going to help under any circumstances. 

Nor, indeed, would the Left’s ever-present urge to take high earners down a notch or three. Starmer, of course, was all in favour of raising the highest tax rate, but that plan too seems to have been shelved. Presumably, the actual economic consequences of such an action have sunk in, and he now prefers, as he said in an interview with The Telegraph, to avoid “the lever of taxation” to effect his redistributive ends. 

Gone too is Starmer’s apparent wish to nationalise everything he can get his hands on. Starmer ran for the leadership endorsing the renationalisation of energy, water, post and rail, with the seeming intention of dragging Britain kicking and screaming back into the 1970s. That pledge went when Reeves noticed that it was essentially unaffordable. 

“Spending billions of pounds on nationalising things,” she told the BBC, “that just doesn’t stack up against our fiscal rules.” Fittingly, this U-turn was also partly undone, and the shadow rail minister later confirmed that rail nationalisation was still on the menu. Given the parlous, overpriced state of the network, this can’t be much worse than the status quo, but a little certainty would be welcome. 

The end result is that it’s not totally certain how we’re meant to read Starmer’s priorities. He may deeply wish to be a progressive Left-winger, keen to make us pay through the nose to fight the climate “disaster” and for national bragging rights about how clean our energy grid is. 

He may be ideologically committed to the rights of trans people to identify as they wish, even if that means everyone else must suspend their beliefs about what constitutes sex. He may want students to get their education for free, hanker for the days of the nationalised industries, and the punishing rates of top-tier income tax. Or he may just be willing to say whatever is necessary to keep the Left of his party onside. 

Whatever the case, he can’t do these things, and he knows it. The British public is too sensible and too weary, and the fantasy of a state with unlimited funds has faded into nonexistence. 

It’s become a regular game for my friends and I to ask whether there is anyone in politics – anyone at all – who we would like to see leading our country. Many thought for a time that Keir Starmer might fit the bill. After all, the dire straits of the Conservative Party’s performance since Boris’s fall from grace had left such a vacuum of plausible candidates that radical alternatives were feasible. 

Time has since made clear that Sir Keir is every bit as slippery as his opponent in Downing Street, if not more so. Our wait for someone reasonable, sane, consistent and competent goes on. It may do so for some time.