Starmer's repressibe tendencies must be stopped

Daily Telegraph 06/12/25 There was a time when the Left was bad on economics but sensible on civil liberties. No longer. The contemporary Labour party is terrible on both, a sinister threat to what remains of our economic as well as our civic freedoms.

The Government wants to seize ever more of our property via confiscatory taxation, it wants to reduce parents’ educational freedom by curtailing choice and taxing private schools, it seeks to censor our language and control our thinking, it wants to drastically reduce trial by jury, a key bulwark against oppression, and it is waging war on privacy. We were told we were voting for a centre-Left, technocratic Government focused on delivery and competence; we have ended up with a deeply collectivist, authoritarian and undemocratic rabble. Labour embodies the anti-libertarian position on almost every issue. It is now heavily influenced by woke and other related ideologies inspired by critical thinking, including anti-Zionism, Third Worldism and radical environmentalism. Its New Labour era, during which it accepted a form of domesticated capitalism, is over. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour no longer believes in radical democracy, or in the nation state, or even in helping working people to progress and improve their lives. The result of this toxic ideological brew is our present, tragic descent into technocratic, do-gooding authoritarianism. Starmer embodies the fundamental pathology of the human rights lawyers: they don’t really care about freedom. They are not civil rights activists, even if they are sometimes missold as being advocates of liberty. They are supporters of an ever more powerful state that weaponises international law and agreements – the ECHR being a case in point – to reengineer society. They believe in “positive rights” – more handouts, the right not to be offended - and have no interest in “negative rights” – such as free speech or the right to own assets. They are a menace to genuine liberalism, real conservatism and to any meaningful concept of people power. The past few weeks have been grim. Starmer’s decision to delay by two years several mayoral elections he would have lost to Reform confirms his complete lack of shame, or even attachment to basic norms. The excuse is that these new mayoralties won’t be ready, but this isn’t acceptable. It shouldn’t take this long to push through this latest reorganisation of local government (in truth, I suspect that we don’t need most of this pseudo-devolution, but this is an argument for another time). The Government is also itching to overturn as much of the 2016 Brexit referendum as it can, making a mockery not just of the most important electoral event in modern British history but also of its manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU. David Lammy even wants to rejoin the customs union, an absurd position which would mean tearing up the US trade deal and every other such agreement struck with other countries since we left the EU. Lammy’s assault on trials by jury, a key right conferred by Magna Carta, is an abomination. Jury trials are imperfect, but they provide crucial protection against overreach by agents of the state. The Left used to love them: as American history amply demonstrates, jurors can engage in “jury nullification”, rejecting and disregarding bad laws passed by unjust politicians. Trials by jury are a key part of British identity, and have been exported all around the world. They are a core component of the soft power the Government likes to boast about. The delays and backlog currently plaguing the justice system are a disaster – justice delayed is justice withheld – but there are better ways of dealing with this. Courts could sit at the weekend or their hours could be extended. It would cost money, but tiny cuts to welfare would easily pay for it. Lammy must be defeated in his disastrous quest to make Britain even less free. The Government’s assault on privacy is another abhorrent political overreach that must be opposed by the largest possible cross-party coalition. It cannot be that cameras superpowered with facial recognition technology, connected to various databases, become the new normal. We cannot grant the state the right to continuously track us when we leave our homes, without permission and without reason. This would destroy privacy and effectively reverse the burden of proof. We would all be suspects, unless proactively identified as innocent. The tech will make hideous mistakes. The databases will be hacked. Busybodies will throw their weight around. There will be no meaningful oversight. It will be a calamity. Some dissidents – the kinds of people who say forthright things on X, or who read “Brexity books” – will end up being followed around. The miscarriages of justice will be many and egregious. Yes, the UK has a major crime issue. No, we don’t need to abolish privacy and embrace a total surveillance society to defeat wrongdoers or stamp out the shoplifting epidemic blighting our stores. We just need better traditional policing, a greater focus on real crimes, more prisons and longer sentences. We do not want the absurd digital IDs also being promoted by Starmer. These too will be open to Kafkaesque errors, and these too will be abused to put innocent citizens on the defensive, to grant endless officials the ability to harass us without reason. We used to joke about countries where employees of the state could demand vos papiers, s’il vous plaît, and point out that they were no better than us when it comes to illegal immigration or crime (just take a trip to France if you don’t believe me). Starmer’s repressive tendency needs urgent checking. A classically liberal state would protect our freedoms, not undermine them. This Government truly is the worst in living memory.