Let’s see Sir Keir Starmer deliver the change Labour promised and Britain wants… not more rhetoric
BRITAIN wants the change Labour promised. Not more rhetoric.
Vanishingly few are listening to Keir Starmer’s missions and milestones.
His speech yesterday and others from the Cabinet — trotting out the same bingo card of Tory-bashing clichés and tired buzzphrases — give the impression of a Government which thinks that is all governing is.
As if confidently name-checking “border security, national security and economic stability”, as the PM did, will somehow conjure them into being.
Instead after five months of Labour our borders are still wide open, our national security now in peril — with our forces gravely diminished and no date set to upgrade them — and our economy LESS stable thanks to the Budget.
Indeed the National Insurance hike it unleashed in October was so damaging that more than half of UK firms now expect to cut jobs and raise prices.
Most anticipate lower profits.
That’s not growth, Sir Keir. It’s the opposite . . . an “act of self-harm”, as billionaire James Dyson says, which will “kill” investment and “snuff out wealth creation”.
That said, there WERE moments in the PM’s speech which give cause for hope, even if only that he now realises the scale of his task.
As reality dawns, once cast-iron pledges have been watered down.
So 100 per cent “clean power by 2030” is now 95 per cent.
Expect that to fall further as voters rebel against the hardship inherent in Ed Miliband’s Net Zero delusions.
The boast that growth under Labour will top the G7 is now just an “aim” since it is obvious it will do no such thing.
No immigration target is set at all.
The Government clearly fears it would never meet it and knows its failure on small boats can be measured every day by illegal arrivals at Dover.
It was gratifying to hear the PM berate Whitehall idlers luxuriating in the “tepid bath of managed decline” — as well as Nimbys who block all progress on infrastructure.
He is right on both.
Does he have the stomach to take on obstructive civil service unions?
Or sack Labour MPs who help their constituents block development?
That is the steel he will need to actually deliver change. Let’s see it.
AID CLAMP
WITH Donald Trump reportedly poised to end all US foreign aid, it’s high time we re-examined ours.
Britain is supposedly so skint the Government is abandoning OAPs to shiver in their homes with no winter fuel allowance.
Yet billions are still blown on projects abroad rife with fraud and waste.
We don’t want all aid scrapped.
Slash the £15.4billion annual bill by three-quarters instead.
That might just focus Foreign Office minds on truly worthwhile projects which NEED our cash, not just want it.