You've Been Warned Starmer

Regimes that treat their people with contempt end badly. Labour are on course to learn this the hard way.

This government got off to a rocky start. At the time their poor performance in their first hundred days was ascribed to growth pains. Forty two days later it’s becoming clear that their preferred modus operandi is confrontation and that their policies are founded in dogma not evidence. Starmtroopers see the Chancellor’s economy with the actualité in her LinkedIn profile as a good thing.

The consequences of her trainwreck budget are increasingly obvious. Inflation is up, hiring is down, government spending is up and tax revenue will fall as there is no growth.  For many governments this would be worrying. This one is simply denies the evidence. The Soviet Union’s Politburo was the same; whenever yet another five year plan failed they rewrote the targets and claimed success.

Of course, the Politburo was supported by the KGB, whose long reach meant it could treat the people as chattels of the state. Labour doesn’t yet quite have that power, although the state is working on it, non-crime hate incidents being an exemplar of creeping state procedures becoming part of the law. Likewise the expanding definition of terrorism means MI5 now spends 25% of its time on the “far right terrorism”, many of whom may be under 18. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen any Hitler Youth rallies - the only racist marchers I see are the pro-Palestinian ones whom London’s Mayor and the Prime Minister approve of.

Like the Politburo, this Labour government treats the individuals in the country with contempt. After providing a very vague manifesto they are claiming a mandate for whatever they do, regardless of what they campaigned on. Taxing pensioners to pay train drivers -neither was mentioned specifically. Increasing employer’s NI wasn’t either. Nor was changing the inheritance tax breaks.

Rather than working through the implications and consequences of their policies before imposing them, Labour relies on the work of intellectuals in  think tanks. (I use the word intellectual in the widest possible sense; some of them are also idealogues and fanatics, others can only aspire to adequacy.)

Torsten Bell’s Resolution Foundation came up with arguments for scrapping the agricultural relief in June and again in September as did some other clowns such as Arun Advani, Commissioner (should that read commissar?) of the Wealth Tax Commission. It’s not a statutory body, it’s a pretentious left wing think tank. Its funders include the University of Warwick, The London School of Economics and UK Research and Innovation, who all get money from government, that is our taxes. Why is the state funding the production of such drivel with our bloody money?

There is no mention of lifting the agricultural inheritance tax exemption in the manifesto. They do mention inheritance tax avoidance through offshore trusts (good luck with that – I suspect some of the wealthier Labour MPs and supporters will squeal blue murder.) The manifesto mentions farmers precisely three times, all in the context of support. That can’t be construed as a mandate to devastate an industry, which is what these policies will do.

The Prime Minister, Chancellor and assorted ministers continue to deny that  the £1 million inheritance threshold catches most farms. The National Farmers Union, which knows a bit about British farming, disagrees but is ignored.  Sir Keir may think that BBC Verify is a credible source, perhaps because they get their agricultural data from a non-farming Labour activist. No-one in the real world trusts the BBC any more.

As it happens I collect fruit from farms all over Kent. They vary in size, but are all much larger than ten acres, have extensive cold stores, packaging, washing and weighting facilities (which might be jointly owned between several farms). Some have their own fleets of trucks and tailers too. They are all worth over £1 million, some many tens of millions. Many are family owned. Most have other uses for their cold stores, using them for Mediterranean fruit too. (If you have an expensive asset you must work it hard all the year round).

If the family had to sell some land (i.e. orchards) to pay an IHT bill it would throw the whole farming enterprise out of kilter. Even if the new owner of the orchards agreed to cooperate closely, the owner needs to make a margin too, so more profit must be produced from the same acreage. If the new owner has other plans, as they might well do given the net zero subsidies, the family’s farm is smaller. Either they buy in more produce or accept that all their plant and machinery – millions of pounds worth of the stuff – is now oversized and thus inefficient and in need to replacement. Either way profitability will decline unless prices go up – welcome back inflation!

All this operational risk and inflation to give Rachel Reeves £500M a year to splurge on the public sector, or indeed to throw at UK farming’s competitors. This may be spectacular incompetence or it may be part of Crazy Ed’s plan to turn the best farmland in the world to solar parks. What it definitely isn’t is a policy that was mentioned in their manifesto (I read it so you don’t have to), nor a way to feed the nation. Labour has no mandate for this ill-researched lunatic policy. And yet, given their 100+ majority, it can’t be stopped unless more than 50 labour MPs vote against the government. Hell will freeze over first.

I recently read a book called “Britain is Better Than This”  by Gavin Esler, once of Newsnight fame. It highlights the problems that arise when a government gets a large majority with a minority of the popular vote. He illustrates repeatedly that a Prime Minster with a large majority is very hard to control or hold to account. He wrote it at the time of Johnson, (I don’t think Esler is a fan), who won an 80 seat majority with 43% of the vote, (28% of electorate).

Starmer’s 86 seat majority came from just 33.5% of the vote, representing  just 20% of the electorate. Starmer’s untrammelled power is far worse for the UK than Johnson’s; where Bozo treated the world with an insouciant disregard for society’s norms of behaviour, Two-Tier thinks he is the law. “L’état c’est Moi” ended badly for the Sun King despite his divine mandate. Two-Tier’s Labour party’s mandate is less compelling.

Which brings us to a chap called Michael Westwood, whom I’d not heard of until the weekend but am now keen to buy a pint. He started a petition to Westminster, calling for a general election on the grounds that “I believe the current Labour Government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election.” When I signed it had 30,000 signatures. As I type this it’s on 2,641,346. Check the current figure here (you can sign there too). The petition is now the third largest ever submitted. The top two, with over 6 million and 4 million signatures, were Brexit related.

Any petition over 100,000 signatures will be considered for a Westminster Hall debate, not a Parliamentary one. That means there is no vote and the petition cannot be fulfilled. To that extent this petition is a bit of hot air, the public letting off steam. Procedurally it can be ignored and, given that it’s asking for the impossible, it probably will be.

Outside of Parliament, in the real world, it’s a bit different. Imagine the implication of the number of signatures  rising to over 9,708,716 (the number of votes Labour got on July 6^th). The petition itself would still have no force, but the government’s life would become very difficult. “Where’s your mandate?” would be an unanswerable stock question for any journalist or, indeed, member of the public for any and every Labour MP.

This government’s contempt for us, the people, is utterly brazen. Whether caught with Taylor Swift freebies, exaggerated CVs or a expert paper telling them a net zero grid  is both unaffordable and unachievable by 2030, they ignore the evidence and then carry on regardless. Rather than solve a problem that they have created, they deny it exists. That might work in the lesser parts of academia, arguing perhaps how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or whether God is a woman. In the real world ignored problems don’t go away, they just get bigger, worse and more expensive to fix.

Labour’s visceral need to distribute other people’s wealth led to a tax change that wasn’t in their manifesto, or even the official preamble to the budget. That led to 20,000 farmers marching in London and now 2,642,018 signatures on a petition. The government ignored the demo and will ignore the petition. So eventually the discontented public, including the farmers, will be forced into things that the government can’t ignore.

If Starmer takes comfort from that sounding a bit like King Lear’s ineffectual rage, “I will do such things -- what they are yet I know not -- but they shall be the terrors of the earth”, he’s a fool. Some people, somewhere in the UK are planning something – I would guess blocking the food distribution network after Christmas. Then he’ll be sorry he didn’t read Kipling, as I suggested earlier this month. The relevant lines (from a “Norman and Saxon”) read:

From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest chained serf in the field,

They'll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are wise, you  will  yield.

You’ve been warned, Starmer.

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