BRITAIN

DURING the election campaign, one of the very few things Sir Keir Starmer was clear about was that the Labour Party had “changed”. He said this even more often than reminding the nation that his father had been a toolmaker.

Anyone listening to this pledge must have assumed that he meant the party had changed for the better: less militancy, more readiness to tackle immigration, being tougher on crime, no rapid resort to higher taxes, and more consideration for the squeezed middle class.

Well, it has been far from that. The “changed” Labour Party has immediately resorted to traditional Leftist policies, from a penal VAT levy on independent schools to promises of higher taxes, based on highly dubious claims of a hitherto concealed £22bn black hole in the national finances. It has begun to sidle up to the EU, giving every sign of stealthy plans to undo much of Brexit. On top of that, it has cynically cut pensioners’ heating allowances, launched a frenzy of green spending, and lit a bonfire of the planning protections which have for many decades helped to keep the suburbs reasonably green and spacious. It all sounds pretty “unchanged”.

But above all Labour has remain unchanged in its treatment of trade unions and their excessive pay demands. There is hardly a militant union which has not received a large bag of taxpayers’ golden mint in the past few weeks, which is why Chancellor Rachel Reeves is now complaining that she does not have enough of our money and will soon be demanding more.

With amazing abandonment, within just a few short days of Labour coming to power, intractable disputes were cheerfully resolved. This was easy to do if you do not care how much it costs. The political benefits to Labour are considerable, especially now it has ended the very unpleasant and dangerous junior doctors’ dispute in England.

Such a primrose path which has started merrily will end in tears and trouble. That is a given. Perhaps Sir Keir and his government ministers have forgotten their party’s own history, and the story of how it was undone in the 1960s by an unstoppable round of pay claims, one group leapfrogging another. This did huge damage both to private industry and the great nationalised concerns which took up so much of the landscape.

Unions today, it is worth remembering, do not have the power, wealth, or strength of their 1960s and 1970s forbears. They tend to pester and annoy the public with short and frequent protest strikes, rather than marathon walkouts lasting months at a time. We should be grateful we are not contending with that.

But even so, strikes do great mischief. They slow down the economy, they can wreck the education of the young, they can get in the way of the very necessary movement of getting people away from “working from home”, and they keep inflation and prices on the boil.

Free trade unions are an integral part of any open and proper free country. But with freedom comes responsibility, and a combination of militant-led unions and an increasingly spendthrift Labour government does not encourage such responsibility.

If he is not careful, the PM will soon find that he has made a rod for his own back. He may think that he can pass on the costs of this policy to hard-pressed taxpayers. But experience shows he will instead destroy the very businesses he needs to pay for his largesse. We need real change before the bad times start rolling again.