Prime Minister Keir Starmer (Image: PA)
The great Austrian economist Frederick Hayek, who had an immense influence on Margaret Thatcher’s free market philosophy, once wrote that “if socialists understood economics, they would not be socialists”. Those words are as true of Sir ’s failing government as they are of every other left-wing government in British history. In this country the ideology of socialism has always led to rising taxes, debts, unemployment and stagnation.
Just seven months into office, that is exactly what is happening again under Starmer and his beleaguered . The pair came to power in July promising a dynamic new era of dynamic growth.
Instead, they have presided over deepening malaise, as they have adopted the traditional approach of tax-and-spend, with the Government’s overall bill going up by a colossal £70billion in the .
Most of that money was squandered, however, on civic bureaucracy and union pay demands. Despite a small drop in the latest inflation rate and a stuttering return to growth in the last quarter, the Government is in a hole, and urgently needs to win back trust by strengthening the public finances.
There are just three possible options. The Cabinet could agree to borrow more, but that would spook the markets even further. Or Reeves and Starmer could increase taxation. Indeed, at on Wednesday, Sir Keir refused to rule out that policy. But such an approach would cause severe damage, given that the tax burden is already at its highest level since the 1940s. Moreover further hikes would undermine enterprise and job creation.
As Winston Churchill, the Chancellor of the 1920s, memorably once put it: “For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up.” The third option, that of major cuts in spending, is the least palatable to socialists but by far the most realistic.
Left-wingers will moan that our public realm has already been “cut to the bone” after years of austerity. But the idea that the public sector has no fat is absurd. There is tremendous scope for savings in the benefits system, for instance, especially on incapacity payments which have exploded in recent years.
Similarly, getting tough on immigration would reduce the vast sums that the state has to spend on accommodation and support for arrivals.
Slashing bureaucracy could be just as fruitful. Successful businessman and former Treasury Minister Lord Agnew stated in 2022 that the Government could easily make £35billion-a-year in efficiency savings. In fact the state machine has never been more bloated. The civil service payroll alone has grown by almost 100,000 since 2016, just as there are more managers than ever in the , universities, town halls and the school system. Socialists might loathe imperialism but they love empire-building.
Their addiction to officialdom is highlighted in the Labour Government’s creation of a new quango or taskforce for every single week they have been in power since July. Starmer was at it again this week.
Launching his new “action plan” on Artificial Intelligence, he declared that Labour will set up an AI Energy Council, along with a network of AI growth zones, a National Data Library, an AI Sovereign Unit, and a Digital Centre for Government.
This is keeping with the philosophy of Starmer’s favourite economist, the Italian-American Mariana Mazzucato, who lectures at University College. London. A left-wing advocate of radical state intervention, she is Starmer’s intellectual inspiration, just as Hayek was Mrs Thatcher’s. “I love your ideas,” he said when they first met in 2021. Yet Starmer’s faith in so-called “mission-led government” – which stems from his discussions with Professor Mazzacuto – is really just a reheated version of the classic destructive socialist belief in the big state, like Clement Attlee’s doomed enthusiasm for nationalisation or Harold Wilson’s for planning. Starmer should be shrinking the state, not pumping it up.
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Republican Gerry Adams (Image: PA)
The Prime Minister tells MPs he will use “every conceivable way” to block any compensation payment to top Republican
The former Sinn Fein President could be in line for a payout on the grounds that his human rights were violated by his internment without trial in the 1970s. But Sir Keir’s pledge is hardly convincing.
He is after all a classic north London progressive lawyer who prefers judicial activism to democracy and is more concerned with slavish obedience to global rules than the protection of our national interests. Had Starmer really wanted to stop a payout, he would have fought such a move in Parliament with new legislation and in the courts with vigorous appeals.
But it looks like the humiliating process of surrender is already underway. But any award of British taxpayers’ money to Adams would be a sickening mockery of justice, as well as an irrefutable argument for pulling out of the malignant European Convention on Human Rights.
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It was the cherished creed of multi-culturalism that inhibited the authorities from acting against Pakistani predators. So you might have thought the rape gang scandal would given the diversity zealots pause for thought. But not a bit of it.
These ideologues carry on as if nothing has happened. In fact, they are recruiting to their ranks more intensively than ever. Stratford NHS wants a £91,300 Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), the College of Paramedics requires a £50,000 Diversity, Equality and Belonging Manager at and Cambridge University feels it needs a £55,000 EDI consultant.
Filled with a sense of moral superiority, the woke brigade continue to cocoon themselves in groupthink, as one NHS clinician commented this week on social media. Having explained that his workplace is drowning in ”awareness initiatives” like Black History Month, Refugee Week and International Women’s Day, he was amazed that nothing had ever been done about the white, working-class girls , even though his unit is in one of the northern towns badly scarred by the abuse. “It is never spoken about, never addressed. And if someone does mention it in passing, they are looked at as if they are speaking Latin. Repulsive, wilful blindness.”
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Jesse Eisenberg attends the 2025 National Board of Review Gala (Image: Getty Images)
Much of ’s output these days is puerile, predictable dross but my wife and I were entranced by the new movie A Real Pain, written and directed by the creatively brilliant Jesse Eisenberg, who also has a starring role as one of a pair of Jewish US cousins visiting their ancestral Polish homeland.
Alternately funny, original and deeply moving, it is the sort of film Woody Allen would love to have made in his prime. I have to confess my tears flowed at the agonising scenes when they go to a concentration camp, an emotion that makes me all the more furious at the rampant antisemitism now raging in Britain and Europe, epitomised by the shameful demand of the Islamic Human Rights Commission for a boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day later this month. That kind of bigotry shows precisely why this commemoration is so important.
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The terrible have brought devastation and death on an unthinkable But they have also been a disaster for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who have provoked fury with their attempts to exploit the scenes of destruction for publicity stunts, behaviour that has seen them labelled “disaster tourists,” particularly because they have no official position in California. It is hard to see their careers rising from the ashes of this fiasco.