Starmer may soon go down as the most unpopular Prime Minister in living memory

After their ‘loveless landslide’ Labour have set about losing friends and alienating people at breakneck pace

25 November 2024 Daily Telegraph 

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After his first term, Tony Blair felt rueful about New Labour’s obsession with leading in the polls and resolved to push big reforms through faster even if they proved unpopular.

Nobody could accuse Keir Starmer of waking up each morning fixated on winning a daily popularity contest. After receiving a Blair-sized majority on the back of a ten-point lower vote share in a notably low turnout election – the so-called “loveless landslide” – Starmer and Labour have set about losing friends and alienating people at truly breakneck pace.

Their average poll rating has already declined from their already unimpressive 33.7 per cent election vote share to an average of 29 per cent now. Starmer’s personal chart tells an even starker story: he has plummeted from a net popularity rating of +11 in the immediate aftermath of the election to -38, according to the pollster More In Common.

As I write, a parliamentary petition protesting against the Government, launched a couple of days ago by a chap called Michael Westwood, is about to go through two million signatures.

The Westwood petition is being mocked by Left-leaning commentators because it calls for there to be a new general election when Labour is only a few months into a five-year term it was duly elected to serve.

And indeed, Mr Westwood will not get his way however many signatures his petition attracts. This does not, however, mean that it is empty or meaningless. Because Westwood has captured a big idea in the simple and straightforward wording of his plea.

“I would like there to be another General Election. I believe the current Labour Government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election,” he writes. And that’s it.

But it’s a bullseye. Because Labour did indeed get elected via a false prospectus. Hardly any of the key measures they have unveiled since coming to power were foreshadowed by them in the election campaign and many were actively discounted by senior Labour politicians.

This political sleight of hand has encompassed everything from taxation in general – Labour said its plans were fully costed, fully funded and required no tax increases – to expanding the use of hotels for illegal migrants in contravention of a promise to desist.

The winter fuel allowance has been withdrawn from 85 per cent of pensioners, student fees have been hiked, a new Tory law to guarantee free speech on campus scrapped and many thousands of prisoners released early, all without specific democratic cover.

Domestic energy bills were supposed to come down but have gone up. Farmers were led to expect no fundamental change to their tax treatment yet have just been dragged into a ruinous inheritance tax regime. Starmer was supposed to be a moderate, patriotic Prime Minister too.

Yet he’s paying Mauritius to take ownership of the Chagos Islands, while opening a “dialogue” about UK taxpayers funding reparations for slavery to various grifting Commonwealth regimes. And we still wait to learn what he knew about the Southport murders and by when and whether he has been straightforward about that.

The Budget itself meanwhile amounted to the biggest tax grab in living memory, partly justified by Rachel Reeves on grounds of her supposedly discovering a £22bn black hole in the public finances that the Office for Budget Responsibility has failed to locate during its own inspections of the books. Most voters will surely lean to the view that the likes of Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies were nearer the mark when they warned during the election that Labour would need to put up taxes.

What a bunch of fibbers then! At least when Blair got involved in a war on the back of a false prospectus it wasn’t a war against the British people

Some admirers of Starmer – and yes there are a few still out there – are seeking to make a virtue out of his plummeting ratings. They point out that he had already come out as an avowed admirer of the Thatcher approach to power of getting the tough stuff underway early and sticking with it – the total opposite to early Blair.

It is true that in her own early years, the Iron Lady endured intense unpopularity over her monetarist and pro-free enterprise economic policies and much else besides. She famously declared herself “not for turning” and by the time of the 1983 election her unyielding nature was perceived as her greatest strength.

Is it possible that Starmer will be similarly vindicated and turn into the political Iron Man? Well, only if his central economic strategy of trying to tax the country into prosperity works for the first time anywhere it has ever been deployed.

It is much more likely that the tail-spin will continue and culminate in a shuddering impact with what the late John Prescott once allegedly referred to as “terra cotta”.

Mr Westwood, a publican by trade, clearly has his finger on the popular pulse. He has made an artless but devastating emperor’s clothes-style intervention. Starmer is down to his last fig-leaf and we are not even six months in.