Category Archives: Government

Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Sir Keir Starmer and the UK Labour Party

BRITAIN

FOR the first time in 14 years, and following an accurate exit poll, we have a Labour government. As protocol states, Sir Keir Starmer travelled to Buckingham Palace for an audience with King Charles III. In that historic setting, the Monarch invited Sir Keir to formally become the 58th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and to form a Government.

The people of the UK have spoken, and Labour has convincingly won the election by a healthy majority.

There are many others, of course, who will be disappointed. But it is important to remember that our democracy can only function if the losers of a free and fair election graciously accept the result. As they have.

There is little doubt Sir Keir has turned his party around since becoming its leader.

Previously, it was slipping towards irrelevance under Jeremy Corbyn. Sir Keir set about expunging its Marxist policies and MPs, and has tackled the scourge of anti-Semitism with some success.

Transforming Labour into the party it is today has surely tested his mettle. Yet it is now that the hard work really needs to begin.

However, other than saying he puts “country first, party second” and wants “change”, Sir Keir has left voters with little clue about what he intends to do in power or how he would tackle the country’s many problems.

Wealth creation is his priority, but we know he will saddle business with a slew of new rules and obligations, while driving rich foreigners overseas by abolishing non-dom tax status.

Relying, as he does, on faster economic growth to pay for better public services is welcome. But what will fuel such a miraculous turnaround?

Of course, creating a stable political environment can help. Trade union reforms put forward by Angela Raynor, however, and a plan by Labour to give workers more rights, would likely inhibit that progress.

As a result, the party will inevitably need to raise money to fund its “agenda for change”.

Since it has pledged not to borrow more and will not slash public spending, the answer is likely to be taxing businesses, pensions, property, and inheritance. The politics of envy may soon surface.

Despite Sir Keir’s insistence that Labour can be trusted with defence, he has refused to commit to boost our dangerously depleted military to 2.5% of GDP. And that raises questions of whether the UK will be in a position to continue helping Ukraine in its war with Russia.

On soaring levels of immigration, which is putting intolerable strain on public services and social cohesion, and Sir Keir saying he will scrap the Rwanda scheme for illegal immigrants, Labour has offered no fresh thinking.

Other questions are multiplying. Given the need for energy security in a volatile world, is Sir Keir really going to ban new drilling licences for North Sea oil and gas? And what of Labour’s dogmatic target to decarbonise electricity by 2030? Quite clearly, that would risk the lights going out.

And will Sir Keir defend the ancient freedoms of the press? That’s essential in holding the powerful to account in a free and democratic society like the UK.

The millions of voters that have given him the landslide victory, Sir Keir must use it for the good of the whole nation – not just Left-wing interest groups.

For the Conservative Party, a disaster at the ballot box never seen before in its history, must lead to a period of reflection.

Over the years, the Conservatives have boasted of being a broad church, encompassing a wide range of views. Today, the congregation seems to have no unifying creed at all. This schism will continue with members moving to the far-right Reform UK Party led by Nigel Farage unless solutions can be found in stabilising traditional Conservative values and principles within the party.

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Starmerspeak and the dangers that lurk

THE UK LABOUR PARTY

POLITICAL language, observed George Orwell, “is designed to make lies sound truthful …and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Euphemism, ambiguity, and “sheer cloudy vagueness” are deployed by politicians, he said, to conceal their true intentions and lull the people into a false sense of security.

Orwell wrote those words almost eight decades ago, yet they are as true today as they were then. Indeed, in Sir Keir Starmer they may have reached their apotheosis.

Labour party’s manifesto – in which Sir Keir’s photo appears 33 times – is a veritable typhoon of pure wind.

He presents himself as a man of action, saying “the time for reviews is over” – then proceeds to announce some 16 new reviews into everything from health to defence.

Wealth creation is ostensibly a key priority, yet he would saddle business with a slew of new rules and obligations, while simultaneously driving wealthy foreigners away by abolishing non-dom tax status.

Sir Keir says he puts “country before party,” yet throws red meat to Labour activists with spiteful measures such as stripping elderly soldiers who served in Ulster up to 50 years ago of their legal immunity from prosecution, and, of course, the tax raid on independent schools.

Labour’s “green revolution” is also a sham, Starmer falsely claiming that renewables will be capable of fulfilling our energy needs by 2030. That’s just six years away. Even if he covered half the country in wind turbines, we would still need oil, gas, and nuclear to keep the lights on.

Yet the most glaring falsehood in this tawdry document is that Labour’s “agenda for change” can be funded with just a few minor tax rises.

An extra 13,000 police offices, 8,500 mental health staff, 6,500 teachers, 1.5million homes, nationalising rail, a new state energy company – where’s the cash coming from?

Estimates of the size of Labour’s fiscal black hole vary, but most analysts believe it to be in the tens of billions. Sir Keir claims the shortfall can be covered by economic growth. The reality is that taxes and borrowing are certain to rise.

He has ruled out increases in income and corporation tax, national insurance, and VAT, but there are plenty of other options, such as raiding pension funds (again), wealth, fuel, and property taxes, extending capital gains tax, and much more.

Instead of being told what’s coming down the line, voters are being shamelessly fobbed off. In his novel 1984, Orwell gave deceitful political language a name – Newspeak. Starmerspeak is its modern-day manifestation.

Despite Sir Keir’s unwillingness to give straight answers, he’s on course to win with a “super-majority” – especially if traditional Conservatives are foolish enough to switch their vote to Reform UK.

Their anger and revolt are entirely understandable, but Reform is a sideshow. They must weigh the desire to punish their own party into oblivion against the consequences of propelling a self-professed socialist into government with virtually no checks and balances.

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Aid, Britain, Defence, Economic, Government, Politics

Defence spending is lacklustre. Structural reforms are needed.

DEFENCE SPENDING

Intro: Why do we still send millions to China when we desperately need that money to defend ourselves against countries like… China?

WHEREVER you look, Britain’s adversaries are on the offensive. Russian hegemony and aggression shows no sign of abating. China’s military jets breach Taiwan’s airspace almost on a daily basis, and with its unprecedented defence spending, Beijing’s ambitions evidently stretch further. Iran’s proxies attack British ships in the Red Sea while Tehran is on the verge of gaining nuclear weapon capability. The security threats we face are the greatest in a generation.

In geopolitics, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. And the UK, hands meekly by its side, is yet to muster any credible response. Despite a recent increase in spending, our Armed Forces are still reeling from 30 years of cuts and disastrous unwinnable wars that have steadily eroded our conventional capability. We are shockingly under-prepared for this more contested world.

At the outbreak of the Falkland War in 1982, the Royal Navy had 43 frigates and 12 destroyers. It now has 13 and six respectively.

Russia regularly deploys spy ships to tamper with our undersea cables, yet neither of the two specialist ships needed to protect them have materialised, despite being announced in 2021.

The British Army has shrunk to its smallest size since the Napoleonic era. Of serious concern, there is a £17billion black hole in the Ministry of Defence’s ten-year procurement plan. By some estimates, if Russia invaded a NATO member – a very real and distinct possibility – our stockpile of ammunition would last just eight days.

Most scandalously, the foundations of our defence, our Trident nuclear deterrent, has been appallingly neglected. Just two of the four submarines that deliver our continuous at sea deterrent are functional. They are so stretched that our Vanguard submarines are being sent on longer deployments than ever before. Submariners now have to spend five months continuously at sea – three months more than in the past. The next generation of Dreadnought submarines set to replace our old and creaking fleet is well behind schedule.

The dangerous and humiliating collapse of our nuclear deterrent is a catastrophe waiting to happen unless we urgently grip this crisis. A reckoning is inescapable.

The cost of sustaining Trident is cannibalising the rest of the UK military budget. We have no choice but to increase defence spending to three per cent of GDP to deliver the uplift we need to defend ourselves. If Greece and Poland can do it, why is it beyond the UK’s reach? Most in Parliament agree; that’s the straightforward part.

What’s much harder to explain is how to fund this increase when money is tight. Hard trade-offs will need to follow.

Strong defence rests upon a strong economy that can fund military upgrades. To provide the type of defence we need the UK will need to relentlessly pursue pro-growth, supply-side reforms. This will include liberalising planning to build more affordable homes, roads and factories, reforming welfare to get abled bodied people back into work, and cutting regulation that stifles entrepreneurs and small firms.

We cannot continue shovelling more money into increasingly bloated public services. The UK must drive through radical reforms. The security of a nation depends on having a strong military capability.

Strong economic growth will not appear overnight. We cannot wait until tomorrow to tackle today’s crisis. The choices are stark: either taxes are raised hitting an already squeezed middle class, borrow more upon the trillions we already have as public debt, or divert spending from elsewhere.

We mustn’t add to the national debt with interest payments at already astronomical levels, nor increase taxes when the tax burden is at an unacceptable high. Neither should we divert existing spending on the NHS or policing.

Instead, we should cut the foreign aid budget, and redirect that money to defence. While the aid budget does provide vital resources for alleviating extreme poverty that we should continue to support, a significant chunk of our “development” spend is incoherent, wasteful, and not necessary. It’s beyond ludicrous that we send hundreds of millions of pounds to nuclear powers China, India, and Pakistan.

Almost a third of our foreign aid budget goes on the ballooning costs of supporting asylum-seekers in the UK. If we ended the abuse of the system by economic migrants and closed the farcical asylum hotels, billions of pounds could be freed.

Another third goes to multinational organisations such as the UN and World Bank. An estimated 15 per cent of that aid is spent on managing humanitarian crises, the rest we have little control over.

Only ten per cent of the total expended by the Foreign Office on aid goes specifically and directly to deal with humanitarian emergencies. Other uses of taxpayers’ money include nebulous spending on “open societies” and “research and technology”.

Halving the aid budget would free about £7billion a year and immediately push defence spending above 2.5 per cent of GDP. When growth returns, or a crisis unfolds, we could make carefully targeted increases in overseas aid spending.

In a world of difficult choices, we should view our contribution to global peace and security as primarily through hard power and free trade. After all, the expansion of global commerce has been the biggest alleviator of extreme poverty.

There’s an argument, too, that we should also bring back “patriot bonds” which enabled citizens to invest in their security during the World Wars. We should stop guilting City investors out of putting money into our defence industry through warped environmental, social, and governance regulations. Instead, they should be encouraged to support British manufacturing jobs, and our military.

We need to continue reforming our defence procurement systems to ensure taxpayers’ money goes much further and bring an end to the indignity of the MoD having to beg the Treasury for money every year. Nonetheless, billions could be saved in procurement efficiencies if proper structural reform was carried out.

In the words of Churchill, we appear “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift”. If we continue to dodge the difficult political decisions that need to be made, they will only come back as greater crises in the future.

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