Labour are a disaster – and it’s the British people who are paying the price

Tory MP James Cleverly

Mr Cleverly was both Home and Foreign Secretary for the Tories (Image: Getty)

The first six months of this Labour government have been a disaster. There isn’t a single metric of government compliance that is heading in the right direction. The British people can see it and the collapse in Labour’s popularity reflects this.

Having been on the receiving end of Labour’s criticism for years it would be easy to assume that schadenfreude would be the predominant feeling in the hearts of Conservatives.

Watching Labour learn the painful lesson that government is a lot harder than opposition should make us Conservatives smile. It doesn’t. It doesn’t because the British people are suffering as a direct result of Labour’s ineptitude, arrogance, and hypocrisy.

This week’s cold weather is a stark reminder that one of the first things that Labour did was to strip millions of pensioners of their Winter Fuel Allowance.

So keen was Rachel Reeves to implement this spiteful and counterproductive policy that she held an emergency fiscal event to do so.

A set piece parliamentary event to parade their nastiness, she couldn’t even wait for the budget to stick the boot in. And while taking money off of old people she took the opportunity to give a huge pay increase to members of a rail union affiliated to (and therefore donors to) the Labour Party.

Labour said over and over again during the election that they would not increase taxes above those set out in their manifesto.

That “promise” only lasted a few weeks, Labour put up taxes by £40 billion, taking us to the highest tax burden in British peacetime history.

Employers, farmers, schools, all seeing their taxes going up by record levels.

Labour’s tax assault on the UK economy is being felt by families and noticed by businesses and potential investors. It helps explain why we are looking at a potential recession and the cost of long term government borrowing is at its highest level since 1998.

This ideologically driven economic ineptitude might be forgivable if other areas were going well. They’re not.

Starmer is refusing to address the issue of grooming gangs and branding swathes of the British public as “far right” when they express concerns about immigration and integration.

Despite Labour’s criticism of Conservatives in general and me in particular on illegal immigration we see small boat arrival numbers soaring since Labour took office. This winter’s numbers were particularly bad with the worst winter day on record this December.

We have a Foreign Secretary intent on alienating the President of the USA, our most important ally. An Education Secretary desperate to reverse the improvements in educational attainment. A Defence Secretary who won’t say when we will increase defence spending. A Housing Secretary reducing targets for house building in Labour run cities and increasing them in the countryside.

We see Labour ministers dressed by donors, one resigning over a mobile phone, one being named in an overseas embezzlement investigation, and a Number 10 pass given to the multi-millionaire who bought Starmer’s designer glasses. And it’s only been six months!

The country can’t afford another four and half years of this.

People are suffering, businesses struggling, our international reputation being damaged.

Kemi [Badenoch] and the Conservative opposition will hold this useless government to account, highlight their failings, and at the next election put forward a credible alternative that will see them kicked out.

That moment can’t come too soon.

is the Conservative MP for Braintree and a former Home, Foreign and Education Secretary.

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