Keir Starmer's Labour Dystopia

National Review, January 23 2025 (Published in March Issue)

If the Labour Party won the United Kingdom’s July 2024 general election, promised Keir Starmer in June, it would “relight the fire” of optimism in Britain. Well, it went out. According to one recent poll, three-quarters of Britons think that the country is going in the wrong direction. According to another, 62 percent disapprove of the job the government is doing. Six months after Tony Blair had won a similarly lopsided parliamentary majority, in 1997, one poll found that 52 percent were satisfied with his government and 70 percent with Blair himself.

But Blair was endowed with sociopathic charm and a superficially unthreatening set of beliefs. Starmer is dour, dull, and more of an authoritarian than the Blair of the Cool Britannia era. Starmer will do what it takes to get ahead. He was for Jeremy Corbyn before he was against him, but his current costume — 21st-century softish-left red/green with a class-based chip on his shoulder — is a more natural fit.

There was a lot less to Starmer’s landslide than to Blair’s. In 1997, Labour won 63 percent of the constituencies with 43 percent of the votes cast. Under Starmer, its share of seats was about the same, but it secured a little over a third of the vote, not much more than in the 2019 election, which it had lost badly. Much of the supersizing of its parliamentary majority arose out of Britain’s electoral system, which worked against a Right split between the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. — Starmer’s Labour was just not that popular.

But by late December, YouGov’s polling showed that only 28 percent of Labour voters thought the government was doing a good job. The economy bore much of the blame. Blair had inherited a thriving, prosperous Britain from his (largely) Thatcherite Tory predecessors. Starmer was not so fortunate. The financial crisis and the pandemic have battered the U.K.’s finances. A badly botched Brexit has hurt trade. The “race” to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (a folly supported by all the major parties) is proving increasingly damaging, as is the extra regulatory and fiscal burden produced by the Tories’ leftward drift.

The state has swollen, real wages have been stagnant since 2008, and real per capita GDP has not fared much better. The tax burden is the heaviest it has been in seven decades, the budget deficit is somewhat over 4 percent, and the debt-to-GDP ratio (roughly 100 percent, a 60-year-high) is more than twice that inherited by Blair. GDP growth (1.2 percent) was relatively strong in the first half of 2024, but apprehension over Labour’s tax plans — and gloom over what they turned out to be — slowed that right down in the second. Expectations that growth will be around 1.5 percent this year look like wishful thinking. An unseasonal decline in retail sales between November and December was not a good omen.

The budget put forward on October 30, by Rachel Reeves, Starmer’s chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister), envisaged substantial hikes in taxes (in nominal terms, the largest in British history), borrowing, and spending. Naturally, a good slice of the proceeds was earmarked for “our” National Health Service’s insatiable maw. Naturally, large off-balance-sheet unfunded “investments” will be on the menu soon.

Labour’s election pledge not to increase “working people’s” (definitions vary) income tax or National Insurance (Social Security) rates meant that while capital gains tax (apparently not a tax paid by “working people”) would go up, much of the new money raised would come from employers’ higher National Insurance contributions: effectively a tax on employing, uh, “working people.” Some of this cost will be passed on to consumers. It will also hit employment, as will the budget’s blow to business confidence, which had fallen to a two-year low by December. And then, as referred to above, there is the toll taken by the “race” to net zero now being run at an accelerated and thus even more reckless pace under Ed Miliband, the secretary of state for energy security and net zero (choose one), a fanatic’s fanatic.

Climate policy’s effect on energy costs (now 40–50 percent higher for industrial users than in infamously expensive Germany) has been gnawing away at the competitiveness of what remains of Britain’s industrial sector. Jobs are disappearing as the green vise tightens. The trashing of Britain’s once flourishing North Sea oil and gas industry is a familiar tale, but there are plenty of other examples. Take the coerced “transition” to electric vehicles, which Miliband wants to speed up even though it’s already threatening to drive the country’s car industry (on which about a million jobs depend) into the abyss. Meanwhile, a prominent industrialist is warning that the U.K.’s important chemical industry is “facing extinction.” Claims that new green jobs — the “Greener NHS” team assembled by “our” NHS England comes to mind — will make up for such losses, whether in quality or quantity, are laughable.

How Britain’s climate transition will be paid for is a mystery, made even more mysterious by the fact that no one knows what it will cost. Five hundred billion by 2050? More? Whatever the amount, it will be boosted by Miliband’s decision to advance the date by which the grid shall be “fully” decarbonized, from 2035 (fantasy) to 2030 (straitjacket, nurse, quickly, quickly). Merely attempting to meet this impossible deadline will involve turning to China’s manufacturers for help: That is where the “real” green jobs are.

The U.K. is already dangerously and expensively reliant on inherently unreliable renewable energy (the wind doesn’t always blow; the sun doesn’t always shine). Rushing the grid’s decarbonization will only increase the likelihood of blackouts, a no-no, incidentally, if Britain is to be competitive in the digitalized economy. Before the election, Starmer said the U.K. needed three things, “growth, growth, growth.” That won’t spring from a green transition in which “investment” is a pointless, pious exercise in capital destruction and “traditional” businesses are ground into dust.

With its mounting costs and countless restrictions, the race to net zero will eventually turn politically toxic. It will also add to the economic crisis, which is clearly on the way and will be set off, probably, when financial markets start to panic about Labour’s dodgy math. Warning shots were fired in early January. Yields rose globally, but British government bonds appeared to fare worse than those of some key peers. Ominously, the pound slid against the euro as well as the dollar.

Reeves has little headroom. If yields stay up and slower growth (which would hit tax revenues) persists, she would have to do one or more of the following: put up taxes some more, cut spending, or abandon her plan to balance the current budget by 2029–30. That plan may not be particularly credible, but pushing back its timetable would send a signal that might well spook markets. Then again, raising taxes to pay for a revenue shortfall partially attributable to higher taxes is not an ideal way to go. Spending cuts mean a fight with the Left. So, what would Reeves do? The only safe forecast is that it will be messy.

Even if Reeves can fend off an economic crisis, trouble may come from another direction. According to YouGov, the next most important issue to the British after the economy is immigration. Seventy-one percent believe that the government is handling it badly. That must (mainly) be due to Labour’s being in charge rather than to anything it has done or not. Discontent over immigration has been growing for some time (70 percent now think that it has been too high over the past ten years). The spectacle of boats illegally taking “irregular migrants” across the English Channel will have been one trigger, but what must count for more is the sheer size of the overall influx.

Brexit was partly a response to high levels of immigration from within the EU and (sotto voce) outside it. Ending “free movement” — the right of EU citizens to settle freely within the bloc — was, apart from an absence of homework, one reason why Prime Ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson made no effort to keep Britain within the EU’s single market on a basis akin, say, to that enjoyed by non-EU Norway, a disastrous mistake.

And yet such was the eagerness of the establishment to accommodate the ill-advised addiction to imported cheap labor of both Britain’s private sector and its social services that Johnson’s post-Brexit immigration regime, supposedly intended to cut back numbers and favor the highly skilled, flung open Britain’s doors a very long way. Annual net migration in the 2010s was typically in the mid-200,000s. In the year that ended on June 30, 2023, which was possibly the peak of the “Boriswave,” the figure for net immigration was 906,000.

Add the Boriswave to the long list of sources of distrust many Britons have for their ruling class on immigration. Despite some harder-line talk, there’s little sign that Starmer will be different. Shortly after he became prime minister, a wave of rioting, partly stirred up by false rumors about the killer’s identity, broke out after a knife attack left three young girls dead. The tough policing that quickly halted the rioting was widely (and correctly) applauded. But the authorities’ focus on the role played by social media in allegedly fomenting the mayhem looked disturbingly like an attempt to change the subject.

Even if a good number of the rioters were thugs on the rampage, the extent of the disorder was a sign that something deeper was at work: Two-thirds of those surveyed in a YouGov poll at the time named “immigration policy in recent years” as one cause of the disturbances. That was not what the government wanted to hear. There was also concern that some of the sentences for comments on social media were too harsh, especially when compared with those usually handed out for offenses involving much more than angry words.

Two-tier policing is real enough. The willingness of officialdom to look the other way in the interest of community relations played a major part in enabling the abuse, rape, and sexualized degradation of thousands (no one knows how many) of predominantly white girls and young women by “grooming gangs” of men of predominantly Pakistani heritage mostly between the 1990s and the mid-Teens, including during a period when Starmer was director of public prosecutions (he became a member of Parliament later).

Interest in this nightmare was revived by tweets by Elon Musk calling for a national inquiry, which Starmer angrily resisted — not, I imagine, because of embarrassment over his time at the DPP, or because earlier inquiries had covered all the ground (they hadn’t), but more likely out of fears that the findings might be so incendiary that the government would lose control of the “narrative” about ethnic relations in the U.K. that it and its predecessors had for so long been peddling and, sometimes, enforcing. Some of the social media commentary was obnoxious and unfair, but Starmer’s attempt to deflect the story from horrors that had been too easily underexamined was worse. The plan for a series of inquiries announced by Home Secretary (interior minister) Yvette Cooper is a step in a better direction.

Efforts to keep the peace in the U.K. and other European countries that have been transformed into multicultural and — if in the EU —  “European” states with little active popular consent have primarily been focused on their “indigenous” populations. They are discovering that there is an ever-growing list of things that they cannot say and topics they cannot discuss (Labour will be adding to them, in schools too). But the new taboos are not confined to questions of identity. And they can often affect many more people who find themselves on the wrong side of the progressive attempt to reshape society (see, for example, the panic over climate “misinformation”).

Such soft authoritarianism is typically top-down and, as such, intrinsically fragile. That social media can disrupt the narratives that help sustain it alarms those in charge, thus the plethora of laws passed in Europe (including the U.K.) to rein in online dissent. The transatlantic social media wars are going to intensify.

Starmer, meanwhile, has a huge majority and no need to call an election until 2029. The fire of optimism will just have to wait.

This article appeared as “Storm Clouds over Starmer” in the March 2025 print edition of National Review.