Daniel Hannan: Starmer is speed-running the usual lifecycle of Labour failure

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.

It must be obvious, even to Sir Keir Starmer when he is alone with his thoughts, that Labour has run out of steam. Unable to get reforms past his own backbenchers, rocked by scandals, lacking any vision, the prime minister looks tharn – the word used by the rabbits in Watership Down to describe the glazed state that overcomes them when they are paralysed by fear of a predator or a car.

Did the reshuffle look to you like the work of a man with a clear agenda? Of 26 cabinet ministers, ten have been moved around the table and two replaced. Why? After a year in office, they were presumably just getting properly stuck into their briefs. So why slide them around?

Take the example of Yvette Cooper. She had been either Home Secretary, Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, or Shadow Home Secretary for 15 years. Moving her to the Foreign Office might have been a big statement. Will there be a change in immigration policy? Might Labour withdraw from the ECHR?

Of course not. It’s simply that someone had to take over from the manifestly incompetent David Lammy. We are seeing movement without progress, like car wheels spinning in mud.

What would a genuine relaunch have looked like? Ed Miliband would have been sacked, allowing for a more affordable energy policy. Rachel Reeves, who seems to have arrived in the Treasury imagining that there was a lever somewhere called ‘Growth’ which the Tories had inexplicably refused to pull, and who has been looking sadder and sadder since learning that it does not exist, would have made way for someone who understands economics. Lord Hermer, whose fondness for judicial activism lies heavily across every department, would have been released back into the lucrative world of acting for Britain’s enemies against the Crown.

Has any government been becalmed after so short a time? The only precedent that comes remotely close is John Major’s hapless administration after White Wednesday in 1992. The Conservatives had narrowly won the election in April. In June, Major appalled a chunk of his voters by insisting on ploughing on with the Maastricht Treaty after Denmark had rejected it in a referendum; and in September, the pound dropped out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which Major had claimed would be an economic disaster.

Instead, the economy recovered, and the Tory party collapsed. Minsters spent the next four years relaunching, reshuffling and rebranding, before going down to a crushing defeat, which saw Tony Blair win the largest single-party majority since the universal franchise.

That happened, let us remember, at a time of strong economic growth. Today, by contrast, the economy is deteriorating, largely because of policies that Labour already knows to be mistaken, but lacks the authority to reverse.

There was excited talk last week about shelving the Employment Rights Bill. Well, like the Prophet Amos, I am no prophet, nor prophet’s son, but an herdman and gatherer of sycamore fruit. But I will make this prediction: the legislation will go through, Labour MPs being necessarily pulled further left by the dynamics of the deputy leadership election.

And I’ll make another forecast: Britain’s long run of structurally low unemployment is over. For over three decades, unemployment here has been lower than in much of Europe, especially Mediterranean Europe, because of our light regulation. If you want to encourage companies to hire people, make it straightforward to fire them.

The proposed legislation makes each new employee a risk. Add in the hike in National Insurance and the massive rises in the minimum wage (up 18 per cent this year, and 55 per cent since 2021) and you end up with what we are now seeing: a Mediterranean-style spike in youth unemployment.

Nothing new, you might say. Every Labour government – literally every one – has left office with unemployment higher than when it started. This one, though, is exceptional for the speed with which it has got there.

Can we take another four years? You can be sure that Labour MPs, knowing that they face unemployment, will do all they can to avoid an early election, and will hang on to every day they can of extra pay and pension contributions. Nothing will change. There will be no surge in housebuilding, no challenge to the model of our useless state-run healthcare system, no benefits reform.

In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien dangled the hideous image of a boot stamping on a human face forever. Do you want a vision of the next four years? Starmer delivering his nasal clichés to a staged cabinet meeting, while the country falls to pieces around him.