Labour’s greatest lie has been exposed – and the backlash will be terrible

It’s an absurd caricature that progressives are ‘nicer’ and more compassionate. Keir Starmer is proving that Labour is now the nasty party

It’s time to call out the greatest lie in British politics: the claim that the Left is more moral than the Right. This sanctimonious humbug goes to the heart of how the Labour Government sees itself, and drives its insufferable messiah complex. Self-styled “progressives” consider themselves to be better people: they “care”, they are compassionate, they are “kind”, they believe in social justice, trade union powers, anti-racism, altruism, “equity” and saving the planet – unlike the selfish, demagogic, reactionary, hateful, imperialistic, capitalist, corrupt barbarians on the Right. 
This ludicrous caricature is the product of a toxic psychological conceit. The truth is that Labour in 2024 is the new nasty party, obsessed with divide and rule. Far from occupying the moral high ground, it fights dirty. It specialises in pitting one group against another, in buying votes and paying off potential supporters, and is supremely skilled at dressing up political self-interest as virtue, hypocrisy as philosophy, and revenge as careful policy. It should engage in less virtue-signalling and more soul-searching. Its angry self-righteousness, constant slandering of the Tories as having “crashed the economy”, shamelessness in making up “noble lies” about fiscal “black holes”, the assumption that anybody who questions or disagrees must be evil, is backfiring, as Sir Keir Starmer’s plummeting popularity indicates. 
Labour’s peculiar tone, its mix of the hectoring and the triumphalist, derives in part from the fact it has abandoned its more benign traditions. It is no longer committed to its original mission of ameliorating the living conditions and opportunities of working people in Britain. Yes, it still wants to regulate companies more – which will reduce job-creation and productivity – but that is primarily displacement activity. It has become more interested in post-material concerns, in telling everybody how to live, in re-engineering society along environmental, woke and egalitarian lines. 
In the 1940s, it wanted the NHS to serve the people; today it sees the people as serving “our” NHS, hence proposed restrictions on smoking outdoors (a misguided policy on its own terms, as smokers generally die earlier). Labour once wanted the working class to own cars and travel on holiday abroad like the rich; Barbara Castle, the 1970s Left-wing firebrand, argued that “the private car has brought the boon of mobility to millions of people … that boon should be available to everyone”. Now Labour, by forcing a ban on new pure-petrol cars in just five and a half years, will price poorer drivers off the roads, at least until the cost of electric cars drops. How can it be right to prevent people from seeing friends or family? 
Ed Miliband is driving up energy prices, rushing through decarbonisation before technologies are ready, hurting the poor and middle classes for the sake of reductions in emissions that will barely make a dent to the global picture. At the same time, Labour now prefers technocracy to democracy, handing powers to quangos, such as the Office for Budget Responsibility, or lawyers, and is uncomfortable with traditional, old Labour varieties of patriotism. It venerates so-called international law, remains secretly devastated by Brexit and is heavily influenced by woke ideology. Its refusal even to pretend to tackle illegal immigration won’t do genuine refugees any favours. It is cowardice camouflaged as liberalism.
When Robin Cook was foreign secretary, Labour boasted of its ethical foreign policy (until it was discredited by Iraq); today, it appears driven by an unprincipled fear of losing votes to Jeremy Corbyn’s alliance. Labour’s treatment of Israel is revolting. 
One day after six Israeli hostages were butchered by Hamas savages, David Lammy signalled that the terrorists’ tactics are working when he suspended 30 arms export licences to Israel. We continue to sell far more weapons to Qatar, protectors of Hamas; we continue to tolerate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Britain. Lammy’s disgraceful decision came on the 85th anniversary of the Tiger Hill scandal, an earlier British capitulation to terrorism, when the Royal Navy opened fire on Jewish refugees seeking to disembark off Tel Aviv. 
Labour’s other betrayals may not be as extreme, but they emphasise its nastiness. Angela Rayner is considering stopping people buying their council houses, despite having benefited from the policy herself. Pulling up the ladder is a Leftist trait; there is nothing moral about dashing working people’s dream of home ownership. The right to buy didn’t create the housing crisis. Britain still has a huge supply of social homes – only three European countries have a larger share of “sub-market” rental housing than we do, as noted by the Centre for Policy Studies. Our problem is that we have a much smaller overall housing stock per capita, exacerbated by very high levels of immigration. 
This Government seems to revel in preventing others from obtaining the advantages they themselves enjoyed. Keir Starmer received a bursary to fund his sixth-form studies at Reigate Grammar School when it became a fee-paying institution after he joined (itself the result of an earlier battle in Labour’s never-ending war against private education). Yet now he is punishing private-school parents, most of whom scrimp and save to pay fees out of post-tax income, with his despicable imposition of VAT and removal of business rates relief. 
His party is reducing opportunities for state school children, too. Ofsted single-word school judgments have been scrapped: this makes life easier for headteachers, and harder for parents. Labour doesn’t care about strivers, those seeking to better the lives of their families. It puts Left-wing ideology and the interest of the public sector first. 
I support the removal of pensioners’ winter fuel payments, a universal benefit that cannot be justified at a time of population ageing. But even then Labour’s motivations are vicious: the savings are being transferred to overpaid train drivers. Labour’s approach to pensioners is inspired by zero-sum generational warfare, tinged with Brexit revanchism, not principled anti-welfarism. The assumption is that young people want to hurt the old, even if they don’t themselves gain directly; there is no constructive attempt at building a more viable retirement system. 
Any move to impose a wealth tax would confirm Labour is primarily concerned with hurting those it doesn’t like, not helping those that need a hand-up. The politics of envy has never worked in Britain in the past, and it won’t succeed this time.