Labour's week from Hell

This is the week the Labour Party showed Britain its true face, argues Allister Heath, the Sunday Telegraph Editor. Angela Rayner’s saving of £40,000 in stamp duty on her seaside flat, first reported by The Telegraph, showed that while she speaks as a socialist, she acts as a Thatcherite. The Home Office won its victory to keep housing migrants in the Bell Hotel in Epping, but Allister argues this will prove a pyrrhic victory for a party driving itself towards electoral disaster.

Daily Telegraph 30/08/25

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Labour's true attitude to the British people lies exposed - and it spells electoral oblivion

Allister Heath -  Sunday Telegraph Editor

The Labour Party has just delivered its latest masterclass on how to lose friends and alienate voters. It was, once again, a brilliant exercise in self-subversion that could have been devised to persuade the electorate that the Government simply doesn’t care what it thinks.

First we had Angela Rayner, the Left’s great hope, saving £40,000 in stamp duty on her new seaside flat after telling tax authorities it was her main home; and now we have the Home Office winning its case to keep the Epping migrant hotel open, having effectively argued that asylum seekers’ rights are more important than the concerns of local people.

So much for Sir Keir Starmer’s looming reset and mini-reshuffle this week: almost nobody will notice, and the few who do will be left unmoved.

Epping and Rayner, by contrast, will have mass cut-through. These stories will further entrench the public’s perception that this is a “Do as I say, not as I do” government, which is probably the worst thing that can happen to any political party in a non-deferential society.

Labour believes in eye-wateringly high taxes for hoi polloi, but not for itself; it claims that it wants to end the use of hotels for illegal migrants, but is using taxpayer money in its legal fights to over-ride (otherwise sacrosanct) planning considerations to force its asylum hotels onto unwilling communities.

Both cases are linked by a common thread: hypocrisy, incompetence and an elitist, anti-popular attitude that will lead, in time, to electoral oblivion. Even before the judge delivered his ruling on Epping, a poll this week put Labour at just 18pc, compared with 34pc for Reform.

We should all support home ownership and aspiration, and nobody should pay more tax than they legally have to. But Rayner is Deputy Prime Minister in a Government that believes in taxing property ever more heavily and in waging war on second home owners.

The Government’s central philosophy appears to be that paying tax is an inherently moral act, the secular equivalent of doing God’s work, the foundation of justice, compassion and security. How then can we take seriously the fact that one of its central figures seems to prefer living the Thatcherite dream? Or that she is supposedly a socialist? It’s toxic.

The Epping “victory” will prove to be an even greater disaster for this Government. Whatever it may claim in its desperate quest to stem its collapse, Labour remains ideologically wedded to a maximalist, universalist conception of human rights that is fast losing support both in the UK and across Europe.

In its hearts of hearts, Labour – or at least the Starmer/Hermer dominant strand – believes that international law and global agreements trump everything else, that the “anywheres” (to use David Goodhart’s terminology) self-evidently possess the moral high ground and that the “somewheres” are irritating, whining reactionaries.

It believes that there should be no limit to the UK’s generosity or role as global welfare state of first resort; we are talking about “rights”, after all, not nice-to-haves. By definition, this means that the needs, interests and especially opinions of British citizens are less important than implementing the human rights orthodoxy.

All in all, a disastrous week for the Government.

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