Labour is about to unleash total hell on Britain

Starmer won power on a deceptively moderate manifesto but paved the way for a full Left-wing takeover Daily Telegraph 13/05/26 Hurrah! Sir Keir Starmer is surely history, his catastrophic, incompetent premiership almost over, his catalogue of lies, obfuscations and untruths having finally caught up with him. There is still, it would seem, some justice in this world, some penalties for utter, abject failure.

And if he does trigger a leadership contest this week as expected, I will commend Wes Streeting for calling time on the Prime Minister. The Health Secretary might well have grasped that this was his one chance to take the top job before Andy Burnham could make a return to Westminster, but in a Cabinet of cowards, charlatans and narcissists, he will still have displayed an unusual amount of courage. Yet I doubt Streeting, a social democrat, will end up in No 10; when Starmer eventually goes, we are far more likely to be left with a proper socialist like Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband or Andy Burnham. The Labour Party is about to engage in a Leftist bidding war, a contest to see who is the most collectivist, a deranged purity spiral in which the candidates are encouraged to double down on every intellectual error blighting Britain. Starmer will soon be gone, but he Yet the Health Secretary promised to reform the NHS, but has only succeeded in rearranging the deckchairs. He rightly says the Government has no growth strategy, but doesn’t have one himself. He has turned viciously against Israel. He wants to betray Brexit even more comprehensively, wanting to rejoin the customs union, an imbecilic policy that would make it impossible to sign any trade deals. Despite all of that, he is, laughably, too Right-wing for most of his party. “Lots done, lots to do” resonated among millions in 2011, when it was adopted as a Blairite re-election campaign slogan; it won’t work this time for Streeting, who appears to have made the catchphrase his, if only because few MPs believe that this Government has achieved much. What of the other “centrists”? John Healey, the Defence Secretary, would make an interesting choice. Ditto Al Carns, elected in 2024 and immediately made a defence minister. A former Colonel in the Royal Marines with a distinguished combat record, he is more accomplished than any of the leading candidates for the Labour leadership, as is immediately obvious when meeting him. But his mini-manifesto in The New Statesman, where he calls on the Government to focus on security, is hardly groundbreaking. For now, Streeting is the non-socialist to beat. His problem is that the “soft” Left (who in reality are even harder than Starmer) and the trade unions cannot risk somebody they wrongly see as a Blairite (if only) taking over from Starmer. They will back their own candidate; together with the hard Left, they surely have a majority of MPs. The strategy will be either to seek to delay a contest until Burnham is back, which might be tricky, or to coalesce around Miliband (who will never give up on net zero), Rayner (who is so bad she risks triggering a run on the pound) or someone like Lucy Powell.will be remembered as the Left’s Trojan Horse: he won power on a deceptively moderate manifesto, conned the electorate, broke all his promises, governed like a 1970s socialist and paved the way for an even more Left-wing and Rejoinist Labour PM. He claimed taxes would rise by only £8.5bn, but whacked them up by £68bn. His Chancellor promised not to introduce a wealth or mansion tax, before U-turning; he promised not to reverse Brexit, but is racing to do so. Starmer expanded the Overton window, normalised mad policies and prepared the ground for an even more Left-wing candidate, one who would never have been elected in a general election. Apart from a few dissenters, Labour MPs, whether they want to appeal more to Green or Reform voters, buy into the same myths: that the Government doesn’t spend enough (on the NHS or anything else), that the state doesn’t command and control sufficiently, that Britain is too pro-capitalist, too soft on the “rich”, too pro-American and pro-Israel, insufficiently interventionist and not pro-EU enough. The detachment from reality, the lack of recognition that we have already killed private sector growth and are living grossly beyond our means, is terrifying. The least bad of the frontrunners would be Streeting. He is far more charismatic than Starmer in person, much better at politics and far less of a fanatical Leftist, especially on human rights matters. He often says the right thing on public sector reform and fiscal responsibility, has rightly attacked striking doctors and would presumably stick to the present Home Secretary’s policies on immigration, though this would count against him during a leadership contest, as would his perceived links to Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. All “soft Left” options would be catastrophic: if you want to know what their agenda would look like, consider the policy reports published in Labourland in recent days. They make for nightmarish reading. The Tribune group proposes a dilution of the fiscal rules to borrow more, higher capital gains taxes, new property and land taxes (replacing stamp duty) that would expropriate many homeowners, and “preventative investment” – spending that supposedly “reduces future fiscal pressures” while “improving long-term growth” (in their dreams). It wants a free minimum energy guarantee and free bus fares for under-25s and universal credit recipients. Rayner, in her own garbled statement, called for the abolition of “freehold” property (she meant leasehold) but that is actually what these wealth taxes would achieve. They would turn the state into landlords, charging a massive annual fee on “homeowners” for the right to retain their property. An Honest Day from the Labour Growth Group isn’t all bad, but it also demands another crippling increase in capital gains tax and inheritance tax to “align the effective taxation of gains with work”. It’s the usual nonsense: more “fairness” by closing “death and exit loopholes” while “genuine investment and risk‐taking are protected”. Its attempt at conceptualising “fake market capitalism”, “captive essential markets” and its discussion of “value extraction” have merit, but instead of figuring out how to inject greater competition, creative destruction, incentive alignment and the discipline of profit and loss into these areas, it retrenches into Leftist nostrums. Ever greater swathes of the economy are deemed inimical to capitalism, including, in this latest report, dentistry, and are turned into ultra-regulated utilities, stifling choice, productivity and growth. We are now in a moment of maximum danger for Britain, and not just because the markets are anxious at the risk of even greater fiscal incontinence. Is Labour about to unleash total hell on the country? Starmer or no Starmer, oblivion, here we come.