CAST your minds back to Rishi Sunak calling a surprise general election and the enduring memory of the then Prime Minister standing outside No 10 in the rain while protesters blared New Labour’s anthem ‘Things can only get better’.
Fast forward a few months and we have a new PM in the form of Sir Keir Starmer, who last week delivered a speech where he conceded that ‘things will get worse before they get better’.
The turnaround is predictable: a left-wing party riding high following over a decade of relatively chaotic Conservative rule promised the earth to the electorate and has fallen at the first hurdle.
Forget the first 100 days of the new government, the first weeks of Starmer inside Downing Street have been catastrophic and provided an insight into what we can expect from a party not equipped to govern.
As MPs return to Westminster following the summer recess, it feels as if the public mood towards the Labour Party is really going to get worse before it gets better. Throughout the general election campaign, both Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer were at pains to declare that they would not raise taxes if they formed a new government.
Despite this, businesses and the public wait with bated breath ahead of the Autumn Budget as the Prime Minister has hinted at tax rises. During a cost-of-living crisis and following years of economic despair and uncertainty, the last thing the public want to hear from a new Prime Minister is that an announcement on taxes is going to be ‘painful’.
It was inevitable that we would witness broken promises from the Labour Party but perhaps not quite so quickly or in such an egregious nature. It is almost sadistic that the public and businesses operating in the UK are now left in limbo wondering which taxes will rise: will it be income tax, will it be capital gains tax, will it be inheritance tax?
The Labour Party’s tax betrayal is just one way in which Sir Keir Starmer is doing his utmost to break what remains of the UK economy and society.
Whether it be the politics of envy in the form of imposing VAT on private school fees, or the overt courting of European leaders in a bid to handcuff us back to the European Union, the short-sightedness and failure to grasp the mood of the nation is shocking.
The fact is that the people of the United Kingdom cannot afford things to ‘get worse before they get better’. The nation is hopelessly fighting against a set of economic circumstances that were deepened by the disastrous handling of the pandemic, and Starmer looks set to put the recovery back by another ten years.
Those who can afford to will quit the UK for more financially prosperous shores; they are already beginning to leave in their droves. Despite this and the endless plight of the common man and woman on the street, the new government would rather lock up people for social media crimes than address the needs of the nation.
Sir Keir Starmer is slowly chipping away at what is left of the UK. The economy and society were in a challenging position when he swooped in and took the keys to power. Now it looks as if they may have degraded beyond repair.
