With Sir Keir’s Labour, we still face the old danger

Despite new appearances, the party’s core ideology remains that equality always trumps excellence

Too many Conservatives seem to have written off the next election already. Channelling Private Frazer in Dad’s Army, they wail that we are all doomed and the party needs to reconcile itself to opposition. “It won’t be so bad,” they say. “Keir Starmer won’t do the damage Corbyn would have, and anyway maybe middle England quite likes ‘dull’ nowadays.”

If you are one of the Conservative supporters tempted to think this, I urge you to think again. For all the differences of view within the Tory parliamentary party, its centre of gravity is still far from the Left’s. The Labour vision for the country is very different: it looks at Britain not as a country of free people but more in the way a surgeon looks at an unresisting patient etherised on the table.

Look at what Labour has said or done in recent days.

First, its constitutional reform proposals. These are amazingly radical. Certainly, there won’t be much left of British government as we know it by the time they are done.

This plan would finish the UK as a unitary state and turn it into a “Union of Nations”. There would be a “Council of the Nations and Regions” to regulate co-operation between “the UK’S different governments”. Scotland would be able to run its own foreign policy by concluding its own international treaties, including with the EU. And the Supreme Court would settle any difficulties within Britain’s new Napoleonic system of governance.

What does this horror tell us about Labour? It tells us its politicians think they know best. They care nothing for the centuries of evolution that created a flexible constitution once admired around the world. They can’t see that the devolution they introduced has fuelled nationalism, not killed it stone dead as promised. They just think that, this time, the clever Labour experts will get it right.

Next, look at the approval this week of a new coal mine in Cumbria. Michael Gove endorsed the independent recommendation to go ahead, on the very sensible grounds that not doing so would not reduce the amount of coal used, just require us to import it instead. The hysterical reaction of Ed Miliband, Labour’s shadow climate change minister, was to describe this perfectly logical decision as “absurd, indefensible, and outrageous”.

Yet Labour’s professed aim, set out in the pinned tweet on the top of Miliband’s Twitter feed, is “to make Britain energy independent”. Given that you need coal to make steel, how does Labour plan to achieve this?

What does this tell us about the party? It tells us it is not serious. Its MPS are in the grip of their ideology. Coal is a bad look, so we can’t have it, even if we need it. If we are in a crisis, can we really be sure Labour will do its all to keep the lights on?

Thirdly, look at its view of the current wave of strikes. We are facing co-ordinated action to undermine the Government. Rishi Sunak is right, in response, to push forward Europeanstyle minimum service laws and to look to extend a strike ban from the police to other “blue light” services.

Can Labour acknowledge this reality? No. All Starmer can say is to urge the Government to “get round the table and resolve these issues”.

Again, what does this tell us about His Majesty’s Opposition? It tells us it has no sense of the responsibilities of government. Instead, it has an overwhelming emotional commitment to public sector workers, whatever they do, and will always be tempted to do deals that keep them happy rather than consider what is best for the country.

And finally, look at Labour’s plan to apply VAT to school fees. The acknowledged effect of this will be to destroy many good schools and certainly force tens of thousands of pupils back into the creaking state system.

Yet normally, if you want to improve a service, you look at which aspects work well, identify why, and try to do the same elsewhere. You don’t close them down because their existence is “unfair”.

This tells the most important story of all about Labour. It is a zero-sum party. It thinks there is only so much excellence to go round. If one person has got something good, they must be depriving others, so it’s the government’s job to correct that. It doesn’t understand that you can’t make things better that way, that the tide can lift all the boats, and that we can only improve things by churn and change, by experimentation, by imitation. In short, by getting people and institutions to do things differently.

Labour is unfortunately supported by a state clientele that doesn’t want anything to change and thinks that the solution to everything is taxing the rich and “government knows best”. That means stagnation and decline.

So think hard before you let Sir Keir and his apparatchiks, his white-coated Year Zero know-all experts, get their hands on the country.

Remember, the people who think they have all the answers will never be happy until they have made you live your life as they think you should. Don’t give them the chance.