Labour cannot conceal the truth about its appalling plan for Britain

There is no ‘change’. It will continue transforming the UK into a big state, low-growth, low-energy nation

Source - Daily Telegraph 17/07/24

David Frost

Labour called its manifesto “Change”. It campaigned for “change”. Yet there was no change of direction in the King’s Speech. Quite the opposite. Insofar as it was a plan for anything, it was to continue transforming Britain into a big government, low-growth, low-energy corporatist state. 

That direction of travel has been set at least since the Gordon Brown years. Fourteen years of Tory-led government and Brexit may have given us the powers to get on to a different track, but they were not exercised. Instead, we have moved ever further towards more collectivism and more government control, and nothing we heard from the King or Sir Keir Starmer yesterday alters that. 

Indeed, as if to underline it, our new “change” Government has picked up several Bills from its Conservative predecessor, and all bad ones: to ban smoking (a flagship “Conservative” proposal, remember); to create a football regulator; to destroy property rights and wreck the rental market still further; and to put in place “Martyn’s law”, which will make every public space in the country waste time and money with pointless anti-terror risk assessments. 

To the extent that we can discern a common thread in the remaining plans, it’s about more regulation and more control.

Labour will control your speech, if you have conservative religious views, or even just reality-based ones, with the ban on conversion therapy. The Employment Rights Bill will roll back trade union reform and give workers even more rights from day one. Fine, unless you are an employer who has to find time and money for all these things. The result will be fewer jobs. 

The dreadful Race Equality Bill will load even more cost on to business and give further scope to the perpetually aggrieved. Then there’s the whole panoply of new corporatist bodies: the Industrial Strategy Council; Skills England; the new OBR with its stronger legal status and even stronger powers to put its dead hand on to any attempt to create economic dynamism through free markets. 

And there’s more devolution, giving local “leaders” an incentive to outcompete each other in demanding more money from the centre, and encouraging each other through new talking shops like the Council of Nations and Regions with their “local growth plans”. Someone has to pay for all this – and ultimately it will be you.

In other areas, Old Labour peeks through. Louise Haigh, perhaps Labour’s most throwback minister, is set on nationalising the railways without having a clue what to do next, and will just see the new Government blackmailed still further by the transport unions. 

The school system is also under threat – hardly surprisingly given the dependence of Labour on the teaching unions. There will be an expert review of the national curriculum (we know where that will lead) and the Children’s Wellbeing Bill – a euphemistic title if ever I heard one – will require all schools to teach it. At a stroke, one of the huge benefits of academy and free school status will be swept away. Labour is renationalising the school system by stealth. 

And of course we see the desperation to push on with the maniacal approach to net zero, led by Ed Miliband, perhaps Labour’s battiest minister. We will get Great British Energy, a company whose function no one can convincingly describe, but which certainly doesn’t include producing any energy. 

And we have the so-called National Wealth Fund, a plan to borrow money and spend it on dubious projects no one else will fund – sorry, I mean “transformative investments”. We can all play that game. Remortgage your house, spend the money on a holiday, and hey presto!, you have created your own sovereign wealth fund. 

Against this background, I suppose we should be grateful for the virtue-signalling proposals that don’t really do anything at all. There’s the Crime and Policing Bill that will make it a crime to assault a shopworker (isn’t it already?) and make stealing goods under £200 illegal (er … ditto). Or there is the Border Security and Asylum Bill that shuffles the bureaucratic deck of cards, talks tough on penalties even though people-traffickers already face life imprisonment, and does so while illegal Channel migrants reach the highest level ever.

The one possible exception to all this is the Planning Bill. As I wrote last week, we badly need to get more houses built where people want them. But the target is unambitious – 300,000 houses a year, the same as the last government’s, which is in reality far too low, especially since Labour has no intention of getting immigration down. Much depends on the detail.

After all, we had compulsory housing targets until 2022, so bringing them back won’t much help unless you sweep away all the grounds for thwarting building, too, and block legal challenges and judicial reviews, a tactic which Labour greeted with horror every time the last government tried it. I worry that the effect of this Bill will be to allow the Government to push through more pointless, indeed actively damaging, wind and solar projects, while making little difference to the housing problem. Let’s see.

Starmer called for us to be “patient”. He’s wise to do so, because there is no chance of most of these measures delivering anything good for the British economy any time soon. Meanwhile, nonsensical Blair-style verbiage will conceal the real direction of travel, which is less dynamism, more corporatism, and even bigger government. 

“This King’s Speech returns politics to serious government, returns government to service, and returns service to the interests of working people,” says Starmer. Does anyone have any idea what that actually means? 

So this all needs opposing. I can do this in good conscience myself because I have constantly criticised the collectivist direction of travel of the last government, too. 

The Conservative Party isn’t going to find it so easy. It is going to have to disavow its approach of the past few years, move on those responsible for it, and discover its conservative principles once again. For opposition isn’t only about complaining. It’s also about explaining. The next Tory leader needs to find the courage to explain why the path we are on is the wrong one, and then set out a better one. If the Conservative Party can’t do that, it is going to become irrelevant, and deserve to.