Tag Archives: Labour Party

Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Ingratiating the unions will lead to ruination

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.

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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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Arts, Books, Britain, Government, History, NATO, Society

The Labour Party, Soviet intelligence and the Cold War

BRITAIN: LABOUR & THE COLD WAR

THE postwar government of Clement Atlee was instrumental in the founding and formation of NATO, which binds together the defence of North America and Europe. Attlee’s successors as leader of the Labour Party have not all been as staunch as he was in the national interest. Amid the Cold War tensions of the early 1980s, for example, Labour’s candidate as a potential prime minister was a man who had willingly taken money from the Kremlin. Michael Foot, a hero of the Labour left who served as party leader from 1980 to 1983, was paid the equivalent of £37,000 in today’s money from the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, while he was a backbencher in the 1960s.

A new book, The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Mcintyre, recounts the remarkable public service of Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB officer who was a double agent for MI6. Gordievsky was recalled from the Soviet embassy in London when his cover was blown in 1985. In peril, and with the help of western intelligence, he escaped the Soviet Union. Macintyre’s book details evidence that Gordievsky gave to his British spymasters. It includes the revelation that Foot was paid as being a KGB contact.

The information has topicality as well as historical significance. Every British government since Attlee’s has treated the transatlantic alliance as the bedrock of defence policy. The current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, claimed in 2014 that NATO had been “set up to promote a Cold War with the Soviet Union”. This is nonsense. NATO was created in 1949 as an alliance of free nations to deter Soviet expansionism and aggression.

Communism collapsed a generation ago having turned the former Soviet Union and its satellite states into lands of penury and oppression. And the current regime in the Kremlin likewise threatens western interests, alters internationally recognised borders by force and pursues lethal violence against its critics at home and abroad. In the nerve agent attack in Salisbury on Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which has left one British woman dead and three people seriously injured, the prime suspects were recently disclosed as officers of Russian military intelligence (the GRU).

Any government faced with an attack on British soil ought to be able to count on bipartisan support. Yet, affecting a façade of continued open-mindedness, Mr Corbyn at every stage cast doubt on Russian culpability for the crime, despite the circumstantial evidence that was overwhelming. It also emerged earlier this month that two Russian agents were expelled from the Netherlands this year for spying on a laboratory where samples of the poison used on the Skripals were being tested.

Michael Foot was on the left of the party and advocated an irresponsible policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. Paradoxically, however, he has never been widely regarded as being sympathetic to communist autocracy. He denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When a British newspaper published Gordievsky’s claims in 1995 that the KGB held a file on him, Foot successfully sued for libel and was awarded substantial damages.

Inconsistencies do, however, remain. Whilst is known that Foot served as a confidential contact for the KGB, had Labour won the general election of 1983, Gordievsky would have been faced with the bewildering task of serving a prime minister who he knew to have taken money from Soviet intelligence. There is also the point of Gordievsky’s testimony which shows that Jack Jones, leader of the transport workers’ union in the 1970s, was regarded by the KGB as a disciplined agent, whom the spy agency had paid until 1968.

In explaining why he had not shared information about Britain’s nuclear deterrent with any but a few trusted cabinet colleagues, Atlee said bluntly: “I thought that some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind.” His judgment of senior Labour figures was acute and accurate, and resonates today.

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