Illiberal Dogmatic Bullying
We have now caught a glimpse of the true heart of Labour...
‘ WE ARE the masters’ and will be ‘for a very long time to come’. So said Labour’s attorney general Sir Hartley Shawcross in 1946, almost a year after his party won a landslide victory.
Any doubts that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party are the masters now should have been dispelled by yesterday’s King’s Speech. Beneath the harmless Ruritanian flummery, this was a naked expression of Labour’s power, and its plan to transform our country.
Since election day, some Conservatives have comforted themselves with the thought that Labour won its landslide with a surprisingly small proportion of the vote. Other Tories have welcomed the prospect of the smack of firm government after years of turmoil.
Well, now they’re going to get it — except it will be less of a smack and more of a painful kick up the backside, which will go on hurting for some time.
It was all there in Labour’s manifesto. Yet somehow, when measures are extracted from a waffly document and announced by His Majesty in the form of 40 prospective Bills, they become both more real and more terrifying.
Yesterday, we caught a glimpse of the true heart of Labour. It is illiberal and bullying. Those who oppose its radical measures can expect to be swept aside.
Yet a programme for government that is contemptuous of opposition is bound to create many enemies. Labour ministers may act as though they are the masters but will constantly be reminded that only about 20 per cent of the adult population voted for them.
At the centre of the party’s intended transformation of this country is a shake-up in planning law. The impending revolution was barely visible in the King’s bland pledge that ‘my ministers will get Britain building, including through planning reform, as they seek to accelerate the delivery of high-quality infrastructure and housing’.
In fact, the Government has suggested that it will consult on ‘how, not if’ projects should take place. New legal measures will force councils to identify enough land to meet future housing needs. Councils that fail to comply can expect house building blueprints to be imposed on them.
If Labour has its way, which it probably will, local residents will have little or no redress against enormous new housing estates, towering wind turbines or pylons criss-crossing the countryside. They will be imposed, and locals will have to lump it.
Do you doubt it? Look what Ed Miliband, our pig-headed Energy Secretary, has just done. He has given instant approval with the sweep of his commissar’s pen to the creation of three vast solar farms in the East of England, despite widespread local opposition.
Never mind the despoiling of thousands of acres of productive agricultural land. Or the fact that solar panels are of questionable benefit in our cloudy, sundeprived country. Or that they look plain ugly and desecrate the countryside.
Ed Miliband is a zealot. No, that word doesn’t do justice to the blinkered way in which he pursues the Holy Grail of Net Zero, oblivious to the consequences for businesses and ordinary people. Bigot would be a better word.
His latest broadside against drilling in the North Sea could put up to 100,000 jobs at risk, according to the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce. Higher levies on oil and gas extraction, plus a prohibition on new exploration, are deterring large companies. Aberdeen will end up as a ghost city.
A similar dogmatism can be seen in Labour’s plan to cover England with new housing, in spite of local objections, without acknowledging that immigration is a major factor behind the demand for homes.
Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics show that, between mid-2022 and mid2023, births exceeded deaths by only 400. In other words, there was virtually no natural population growth. Yet over the same period the number of people in England and Wales increased by 610,000 as a result of immigration.
Countless fights lie ahead — or perhaps not so much fights as routs, with Labour using new powers it has granted itself to quell local opposition against developments.
Unless, that is — wouldn’t this be an irony! — someone invokes Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to ‘private and family life’. A group of women in Switzerland successfully argued that their government breached their rights under Article 8 by putting them at greater risk of death by not tackling climate change.
Lunatic, of course, but perhaps someone here will argue that Labour (the progenitor of the Human Rights Act) has breached Article 8 by sticking pylons and wind turbines close to their back garden.
It’s not only in the area of planning that Labour has demonstrated its determination to push ahead with new legislation in defiance of common sense.
An Employment Rights Bill will ban the zero-hours contracts that are popular with many, and businesses will be forced to offer benefits such as parental leave and sick pay to workers from day one of their employment. The right to work from home could be enshrined.
These measures, which are championed by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, will pile extra costs on companies, and could be near fatal for smaller ones. Another example of a doctrinaire political mindset that brooks no opposition.
There are admittedly some proposed Bills — for example, on crime and policing — that seem unobjectionable. And I suppose we should be grateful that the plan to give votes to 16 and 17-year-olds has been shelved, at least for the moment. Sir Keir may have realised that many in this age group favour Reform UK.
But a number of these Bills seem coercive and overbearing — including the long-expected measure, born of a desire to re-open the class war rather than improve education, to impose VAT on private school fees.
How telling that the one policy Labour has filched from the Tories in the King’s Speech should be Rishi Sunak’s bewilderingly illiberal proposal to ban anyone born after 2009 from buying cigarettes.
The mention of Rishi reminds me that I’m still smouldering about his inexplicable decision to call an election before it was clear that inflation had been tamed and the economy revived. I don’t say victory was ever possible, but defeat on such a scale was certainly avoidable.
On Tuesday, the IMF forecast that UK growth next year will be higher than that of France, Germany or Italy. Labour will claim the credit while maintaining, mendaciously, that it has inherited the mother of all economic messes. It will continue, in the spirit of the King’s Speech, to govern as though it can do whatever it pleases.
Yet, as I say, Labour will provoke much enmity as it stamps with entitled, hobnailed boots on ancient rights of opposition and dissent. And although strong in its number of MPs, it is relatively weak in public support.
The Tories must first get their act together and find a plausible new leader. They should remember that what Sir Hartley Shawcross said in 1946 turned out to be wrong. Labour were not then the masters for very long, and it is not divinely ordained that they will be this time.
Those who oppose it can expect to be swept aside
Locals will have little or no redress against huge new housing estates or towering wind turbines
The Bills seem coercive and overbearing