Nicholas under Keir Starmer

Don’t despair, Nicholas!

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After fourteen years of pathetic Tory custodianship of Number 10, on July 5th, the keys will inevitably be handed over to the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer. While the Labour Party’s manifesto has not yet been published, the most important thing to remember is that there is no money to spend. In this respect at least, there will be no repeat of 1997, whatever journalists wishing to curry favour with the incoming regime might claim. In 1997, New Labour began their time in office with a year of 4.9% GDP growth. As they themselves would doubtless admit, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were the beneficiaries of difficult reforms undertaken by Margaret Thatcher and John Major. They had a younger and less diverse population to contend with, and, if necessary, they could always fall back on the abilities of a charismatic leader who was able to sell potentially unpopular policies to the masses. 

Partly due to years of Tory misrule, in 2024, the Labour Party will have a much more challenging situation to contend with. They are led by perhaps the only senior politician who isn’t reshaping his face with Ozempic, and whose main political achievement is the ousting of Jeremy Corbyn, one of the most shambolic leaders of a major party in British political history. There is little evidence that Starmer is riding an overwhelming wave of love, hope, and joy to his upcoming meeting with King Chuck. Nor are there any real signs that Starmer will grow more popular over time, given the circumstances he will be inheriting: GDP growth flatlined at 0.1% in 2023; public services are in a state of collapse, with close to eight million people waiting an average of five months to see a specialist; heavily indebted councils, and perhaps also universities, will start to go bankrupt; and, as a result of the rush to select candidates ahead of an unexpectedly early election, Starmer will likely end up with dozens, if not hundreds of MPs who are unfit to ride a bicycle, never mind represent some 80,000 people.

Given this, it is likely that, just like the Tory Class of 2019, the Labour Class of 2024 will manage to find innovative ways to get themselves into hot water. Seemingly every other week, Boris, Liz, or Rishi found themselves having to deal with the fallout from yet another MP being caught drunk driving in stockings and suspenders, finding themselves ‘cancelled’ over unwise tweets, or simply sexually assaulting someone. It will now be Starmer’s turn to manage this. The ‘Lavender Mafia’ will continue to run interference for parliamentary extravagances, but those scandals that manage to escape the confines of the Government Whips’ Office will result in a constant drip of embarrassing by-elections and awkward apologies.  

Starmer’s background as a barrister and his previous role as Director of Public Prosecutions suggests he will be most comfortable governing by committee. Hordes of blob creatures are waiting in the wings, eagerly anticipating a role in managing Britain via consultation after consultation with Stakeholders, thus shutting out any of the more imaginative solutions that relatively freethinking Labour ‘wonks’ might have for the myriad problems Starmer will have to deal with over the course of the next parliament. The presence of Sue Gray, a former ‘pub landlord’ — with The Troubles raging, Gray somewhat mysteriously took a break from the Civil Service, moving to Northern Ireland to run the Cove Bar, a pub in the border town of Newry — who is now Starmer’s chief of staff, indicates that the list of potential solutions will be kept firmly within the bounds of conventional wisdom. Although Grey’s suggestion of ‘citizens assemblies’ — blob speak for laundering legitimacy through gaining the approval of carefully chosen members of ‘the public’ — was ultimately rejected, it would not be surprising to see this idea reemerge as a method to manage ‘contentious’ issues, all of course under the watchful eye of Civil Service Sue.  

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But what will this new era mean for Nicholas (30 ans)? As there is no money, taxes will have to go up so that Simon and Linda (70 ans) can continue to wire Nick’s salary straight to P&O Cruises. This will be deeply upsetting for the aspirational Sensitive Young Man who commutes from Zone 4, but it will also make Britain an even less attractive place than it already is to start or grow a business, especially if Labour decides to reverse tax breaks on investment or to raise capital gains tax. Although Nick is decades away from claiming his pension, Labour could cap his ISA and continue to keep tax thresholds at their current levels, draining productive members of society to pay for the millions of ‘disabled’ people who suddenly appeared in the aftermath of the Pandemic. (Though if life as an idle ‘natural aristocrat’ appeals to you, the ‘DWPhelp’ subreddit is full of advice on how best to scam the British taxpayer out of neetbuxx.)

Labour has already confirmed that it will bow to the wisdom of the OBR and remain within fiscal spending rules, which will disappoint those who would prefer to loot the bank accounts of anyone earning even slightly above the average wage. In order to placate disappointed supporters, this will likely lead to a left-wing version of the Tory culture war strategy. The difference is that Starmer can legislate genuine poison to appease these people. The first step will be a new ‘Race Equality Act’. At a minimum, this Act will mandate public services to collect and report data on staffing, pay, and outcomes by ethnicity, but it can easily evolve into public funding being hypothecated towards ethnic minority-owned and/or minority-led companies, regardless of the outcomes they provide, throwing yet more sand into the already broken procurement process, and opening up billions of pounds of taxpayer money for opportunistic grifters. The Tory response to this will likely be pitiful: even while in government, attempts to stifle the culture war inside the Civil Service and society at large only resulted in white male RAF pilots being discriminated against, Central London looking like a Stonewall board member’s acid trip every summer, and the reimagining of British history as only beginning after the Empire Windrush arrived in 1948. Under Labour, all of this will accelerate, and the endless Telegraph complaints that the loony left have really gone bananas will remain just as useless as they already are now. 

Labour’s top pledge is to ‘get Britain building again’. On the face of it, this is a noble cause; indeed, for Labour, it should be a low-hanging fruit, as with a massive majority they should be in an excellent position to repeal the Town and Country Planning Act and burn the thousands of pages of unnecessary planning regulations, unleashing much needed economic growth. This would also go a long way towards meeting their fairly unambitious goal of building 300,000 new homes a year. Unsurprisingly, this is not what Labour is planning to do. Instead, they are betting on ‘New Towns’ that will not be built due to the absurd 40% ‘affordable’ mandate that will accompany them, making the new developments unprofitable even before considering the hundreds or thousands of additional planning stipulations that overzealous local officials will doubtless add. Even if Labour somehow manages to build loads of social housing — for reference, Blair and Brown managed to build 7870 council houses over thirteen years — there is no chance that Nicholas or Izzy (Nick’s latest squeeze) will be eligible. Social housing will continue to be prioritised for net recipients of state support, with all the enormous opportunity costs that this implies.

There seems little hope that energy policy, a cross-party dumpster fire, will evolve in a sensible direction under the future energy secretary, Ed Miliband, who was responsible for the Climate Change Act 2008 and its binding climate targets. Labour is committed to continuing to promote unstable sources of electricity, putting the country at the mercy of the winds, all while laughably claiming that ‘green jobs’ will power the British economy of the future (despite most wind turbines and parts being manufactured by Chinese companies powered by coal). As 2030 approaches and the wheels start to fall off the wagon, Labour is unlikely to be able to reassess the unstable energy gamble, resulting in higher energy bills for both consumers and industry, and making British manufacturing even more internationally uncompetitive than it already is.

So we can safely predict that housing and energy will continue to be strangled by the Great British Bureaucracy. But what of the winning Tory immigration policy of welcoming countless millions of Administrative Britons to our shores? Labour does not mention immigration in their pledges, and mostly seeks to avoid discussing the issue altogether. As such, at least outwardly, Labour immigration policy remains something of a mystery. Nonetheless, it seems safe to say that the next five years will for the most part see more of the same: hundreds of thousands will arrive in Britain, obtain citizenship after an absurdly short length of time, and then live here at a net cost to the taxpayer for the rest of their lives. The Tories have been crucified because they failed to deal with this issue, but at least the Tories, unlike Labour, are actually capable of discussing the issue in the first place. For Labour activists, any restriction on immigration, legal or illegal, is treated as a literal repeat of 1939. 

Appeasing emotional MPs, already a challenging task, will become even more difficult, with record numbers of women and sexual minorities likely to win seats next month. Parliament’s strong ethnic narcissistic factions will also doubtless grow even stronger. Labour MPs, who even before July are (on the whole) of very low quality and totally addicted to Westminster media rigmarole, will ceaselessly nag for more regulations on social media: a few mean tweets, and they will start demanding that the state crack down on chit-chat that they deem unseemly, whether or not this chit-chat is actually dangerous (it isn’t). Nicholas will also find some of life’s small mercies ruined by the Nanny State — mandatory daily limits on betting, a Woke football regulator to hamper one of Britain’s few attractive exports, minimum pricing for alcohol, and bans and taxes on nicotine in all forms will be important aspects of Labour policy in the coming decade, and will become more so if/when Starmer’s economic strategy falls apart.

Taken together, a flatlining economy, an uncharismatic leader, unhinged yet anxious MPs, and failing public services will likely combine to result in an already unhappy population coming to hate the new Government far sooner than most would predict. As such, Labour’s (likely) enormous majority will might well prove hollow. Westminster’s ‘Top Pundits’ predicted ten years of Tory rule in 2019 — at least on the face of it, not an entirely unreasonable prediction. And yet, through a toxic cocktail of incompetence, arrogance, and an inability to control the British state and their own MPs, the Tories have thrown away a once-in-a-generation mandate. All the signs ahead of this election point to Labour doing the same. On July 5th, it will be easy for the Right to be longhoused into a bottomless pit of despair. But remember, Anon: the worse things get, the sooner they will change.