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DOUGLAS MURRAY
Labour’s ride into office may be smooth but their big promises with little detail mean our future won’t be
Starmer is desperate not to do it is to say or promise anything that might scare off the low-energy voter
SO far this General Election campaign has been dominated by one story.
The utter disintegration of the Conservative Party.
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Not only has one poll already shown Nigel Farage’s Reform UK actually overtake the Conservatives, but Penny Mordaunt had TV audiences laugh in her face yesterday as she tried to defend her party’s record in office.
But fun or tragic as all of this is, it risks us all missing the bigger point.
Which is the whacking Labour majority that looks likely to be returned to the Commons next month.
There isn’t any great enthusiasm for the Labour Party.
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How could there be, with a frontbench led by the bland Sir Keir Starmer, the hopeless David Lammy and the insufferably superior Emily Thornberry?
But still they keep a lead of 20 points or more in the polls.
And so they look like they will drift into government with a super-majority anyway.
Like me, you might be wondering what Labour will do once they are in power.
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And like me you might be none the wiser after the party’s manifesto launch this week.
If there is one thing Starmer is desperate not to do it is to say or promise anything that might scare off the low-energy voter.
Nigel Farage declares Reform the real opposition to Labour in shock poll moments before a seven-way telly debate
Defence Secretary Grant Shapps was right to warn this week about a Labour super-majority being “bad news for people in this country” because it would prove to be “power unchecked”.
Although this message would be easier to take if Shapps hadn’t had a different ministerial appointment every few weeks in recent years.
So what is Labour promising?
Well, Starmer said this week that wealth creation would be his party’s No1 priority.
As if that is a novel idea. After all, you won’t often hear a politician promise the opposite.
He said that his government would “turn the page for ever” on held-back potential and be both “pro-business and pro-worker”.
Look for any detail on how they will achieve this and you will find none.
It is the same with the issue of the NHS.
Starmer came across as more of a zealot than anything last week when asked if he would ever turn to private healthcare if a loved one needed it to skip a long NHS waiting list.
Of course, Sir Keir could afford to do that, unlike most people in this country.
'PART OF THE PROBLEM'
But he wants to be a man of the people, so his reply was: “I don’t use private health. I use the NHS.
"That’s where my wife works, in one of the big hospitals; as I said, it runs through my DNA.”
Starmer saying that his wife works in the NHS is the modern-day equivalent of saying that his other half is a saint.
The sanctification of the NHS by both Labour and Conservatives is in fact a part of the problem.
We have longer waiting lists and worse healthcare than almost all our nearest allies.
Everybody in Britain is told to say that the NHS is “the envy of the world” but people struggle to get a doctor’s appointment.
Will Starmer’s Labour fix this? They say they will.
They promise that they will create a health service so world class that nobody would even dream of thinking of private healthcare in a moment of crisis.
But how? Again silence.
The reason for this silence is that Starmer’s Labour know that they will have to raise taxes to pay for all of the things they are promising.
The firebrands to Starmer’s left in the Labour Party play with the idea that you can just “tax the rich” more and that will fix everything. But it won’t.
The wealthiest people in this country already pay more than their fair share of taxes.
'SMOOTH GAME'
The top five per cent of earners in the UK pay almost half of all income tax.
The challenge in this country is to get more people to be in a position to contribute to the economy and pay their share of the tax burden.
Keir Starmer knows this.
But the temptation he and his party will have is not to try to broaden the tax base but rather to do the easy thing and squeeze the top five per cent that little bit more.
And everywhere it looks like Starmer’s Labour will do just that.
They know what they are doing.
They know that in making big promises but providing little detail they are playing a smooth game.
They know that after the election they are going to have to start taxing everyone more to pay for their promises.
And they know that even doing that will not raise enough money for what they say they want to do.
But they also know that they are on a beautiful slalom-ride into office at the moment, all smoothed for them through years of failures by the Conservatives.
Their ride into office may be smooth, but nothing after that will be.
For Labour or the country.
A BRITISH businessman is suing Apple.
The cause?
He had deleted messages to a sex worker from his iPhone, but apparently they were still visible on the family’s iMac.
His wife found them and filed for divorce, leading to a certain amount of pain for the man, I would have said.
I suppose there are several ways to look at this.
One is to view this as Apple’s fault.
That it is an outrage that the tech giant didn’t automatically delete the man’s iPhone messages to a sex worker from all linked devices.
The other way to look at it is to say: “Oy, how about not going around shagging sex workers if you’re married?”
I don’t know. Just a thought.
WAS IT RIGHT MOVE?
EMMANUEL MACRON once looked like the most regal leader in Europe.
Like Napoleon before him, he had the aura of someone who had crowned himself.
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He broke apart the main parties and darted through the political centre to power when he became the French President in 2017.
Now he has gambled everything.
Having been defeated by someone even younger than him (28- year-old Jordan Bardella) in the EU elections last week, Macron has called a general election in France.
It is a huge risk.
Macron is essentially saying to his voters and his right-wing rivals: “Put up or shut up.”
Could anything go wrong? You bet.
Maybe the voters will all recognise Macron’s genius again and turn out in droves.
Or maybe they will want to kick a whole political class in the nuts.
It’s not like any electorate hasn’t wanted
WOKES SERVE IDIOCY
SOME people shake their heads in despair at wokery.
Personally I laugh like a drain.
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Because of the stupid things that this stupid movement forces people to say.
This time it was the turn of BBC director of sport Alex Kay-Jelski, whose 2019 newspaper article on men competing in women’s sports was re-circulated online.
He had complained that tennis legend Martina Navratilova was not an expert on trans issues and, this week, allegedly blocked her on social media.
The funny thing is that nobody needs to be an expert on trans issues.
The issue of sports is not an issue.
Men should compete with men and women with women.
And so it is fairly easy to note that Martina is an expert on that.
Ordinarily the woke mob would accuse Alex Jay-Kelski of man-splaining.
But, in the woke world, a man is allowed to mansplain to women if those women do not support biological men competing in women’s sports.
Does that make sense to you? No. Nor should it to them.
But nothing the woke mob does makes sense.
And that is the only thing that needs to be said about them. They don’t strive for sense.
They strive for nonsense.
MUSK’S PAYOUT OUTTA THIS WORLD
TALKING of higher earners, this was a very good week for Elon Musk.
Shareholders awarded the Tesla boss a staggering $46billion payout.
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That makes the world’s richest man 300 times better paid than America’s top-earning CEO last year.
A lot of people will moan about this.
Expect left-wing firebrands in the US to rail at any one man earning so much wealth.
But keep in mind also that anyone who objects to such a payout should measure themselves not against Musk’s pay package but against his achievements.
If you think you or anyone you know should be paid such a vast sum of money consider what you would have to do to earn it.
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It turns out you would have to be the sort of person who, in his spare time, helps our species live on Mars.
It’s a high bar. But it’s worth aiming for.
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