BORIS JOHNSON enters the election fray and declares: There's no doubt that Keir Starmer would be the most dangerous and Left-wing prime minister since the 1970s
No, I don’t believe these opinion polls for one second. I don’t believe that Labour will maintain anything like this lead, as polling day approaches on July 4.
Here is why: I just cannot believe that the British people would be so utterly mad as to hand Keir Starmer a majority on this scale.
According to one poll I saw yesterday, the Tories would be reduced to 11 seats. If that were really the case, then the entire parliamentary Conservative Party could be accommodated, if they were prepared to snuggle up, in my 31-year-old Toyota Previa.
It is simply not going to happen. This election will be much closer than currently forecast, because when people actually suck their teeth and consider the possibilities, they will hesitate deeply before opening the bilges and pumping parliament full of hundreds and hundreds of unknown Left-wing Labour MPs.
![Starmer's biggest achievement, so far, has been to keep the focus off Labour, and to moan, in his best Captain Hindsight way, about the failings of the Tory Government](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/24/16/85304771-13456697-image-a-9_1716564476425.jpg)
Starmer's biggest achievement, so far, has been to keep the focus off Labour, and to moan, in his best Captain Hindsight way, about the failings of the Tory Government
Not when Europe is still in the grip of the worst war for 80 years – and when the Labour front bench is already full of ban-the-bomb unilateral disarmers who were at least once willing to subject this country to perpetual Russian nuclear blackmail (step forward David Lammy et al).
Not when taxes are already so high – and when Labour is blatantly planning to reverse the current Tory reductions, and to push them higher.
Not when illegal immigration is so tough to crack – and the Labour plan is essentially to throw in the sponge and let the boats come.
Not when Starmer himself is placed under the examination he deserves and has so far avoided – because there is no doubt that he would be the most dangerous and Left-wing Labour prime minister since the 1970s.
Starmer’s biggest achievement, so far, has been to keep the focus off Labour, and to moan, in his best Captain Hindsight way, about the failings of the Tory Government. Well, the one advantage of an election period is that the Opposition lose the luxury of obfuscation.
The spotlight is on them – and we already know enough to see that if Labour gets in, they have £10billion a year, at least, of unfunded spending commitments. Starmer and his Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves have been licking their lips vampirically as they prepare for a wealth tax. But that won’t be anything like enough.
![From the moment Starmer took over as Leader of the Opposition, he has been a pathetic captive of the woke tyranny](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/24/16/85304039-13456697-image-a-2_1716563982194.jpg)
From the moment Starmer took over as Leader of the Opposition, he has been a pathetic captive of the woke tyranny
They will come for your pensions, and your inheritances, and yes, they will come for your incomes – because their stated plans allow for no alternative. How will they spend it?
On welfare, we are told, on restoring benefits for families that have many children, for instance. They will spend more taxpayers’ money undoing some of the painful reforms that the Tories enacted, and that have helped this country to create such a phenomenal number of jobs.
I don’t believe that there is a single reputable economist around the world who believes that the answer now to the UK’s productivity problems is to raise taxes in order to spend on welfare payments.
You don’t promote growth, you don’t make people richer, by spending yet more money on welfare. But that is what lefties do.
![Anyone who does the job of Prime Minister will rapidly discover that we face big and long-term decisions, which cannot be shirked](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/05/24/16/85304051-13456697-image-a-3_1716564002221.jpg)
Anyone who does the job of Prime Minister will rapidly discover that we face big and long-term decisions, which cannot be shirked
I don’t believe there is a single reputable economist who believes that you can fix the problems of the housing market by attacking the private sector. Like so many North London lefties, Starmer has the benefit of owning his multi-million-pound house, but like so many London lefties he seems to hate the idea of home ownership by anyone else.
A Labour government would follow the ghastly precepts of London mayor Sadiq Khan, and thwart good developments by insisting on minimum quotas for social rented housing. The result is always the same: fewer homes actually get built under Labour.
Now, Rachel Reeves says that she wants a cap on private-sector rents. It is a terrible policy. It has always failed. The Vietnamese communists tried it, and the foreign minister later said that it had done more damage to the fabric of the city of Hanoi than the United States Air Force.
So why try it again? Because that’s what lefties do.
Starmer would follow Sadiq Khan in being weak on crime, not just cutting sentences for violent and dangerous criminals, but frustrating such essential crime-fighting procedures as stop and search.
Why would he allow kids to go around the streets with knives, rather than allowing the police to take them? Because that is just what lefties do.
From the moment Starmer took over as Leader of the Opposition, he has been a pathetic captive of the woke tyranny – a tyranny that stifles common sense and that forces people to start spouting blank nonsense.
He took the knee during the Black Lives Matter campaign – even though he was effectively supporting an American lobby group that wanted to cancel funding for the police. He started claiming – in defiance of the biological evidence – that women could have male genitalia, without realising that he was infuriating many who have long campaigned for the rights and protection of women.
He was still in such a muddle about it this week that he held a campaign launch in Kent, but failed to invite the local Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, perhaps because she does not share his bizarre gonadal theories.
Why does he behave like this? Because he is a woke lefty lawyer from North London – he doesn’t even eat meat, only fish (NB British farmers). It is precisely because he is a woke lefty lawyer from North London that he will do nothing to fix the problem of illegal immigration – because it is people like him, after all, who are the main cause of the problem.
He has said he will scrap the Rwanda policy, even though it is the only plan that has a chance of offering a serious deterrent to the people-smuggling gangs; even though a version has worked in Australia; and even though there are many other European and other Western countries who are now adopting it, some of them also entering into discussions with Rwanda.
On the contrary, he claims the answer lies in our relations with the EU – and we all know where that will lead. Give this man a big majority, and he will do what he tried to do dozens of times as Shadow Brexit Secretary, namely to reverse or frustrate the will of the people.
It is clear that there is a large majority of Starmerites who want to go back into the EU single market, as a first step before trying to get us back into the EU. That would be a total disaster.
Rejoining the Single Market would mean rule from Brussels, and yet with no British say in the decisions of the EU. And the first step would be to restore free movement for EU citizens – meaning that all 448 million citizens of the EU, and anyone else who happened to be in the EU at the time, would have unfettered access to Britain.
Starmer also says that he wants to take Britain back inside the European Common Foreign and Security Policy. Let me just remind you: if we had stayed in the Single Market system we would never have been able to license the Covid vaccines faster than any other European country, and so deliver the fastest vaccine roll-out of any major economy.
If we had stayed in the EU Common Foreign Policy, then we would have been in the wretched position of allowing France and Germany to continue to take the lead on Ukraine – and in February 2022, that would have been far from ideal.
Today, we have to do even more to help Ukraine, and to stand up to Putin. We should be doing more, as President Zelensky requests, to help the Ukrainians shoot down some of the missiles that are killing so many innocent civilians. Does Starmer’s Labour really have the bottle?
Anyone who does the job of Prime Minister will rapidly discover that we face big and long-term decisions, which cannot be shirked, about Britain’s own nuclear deterrent. But David Lammy – seemingly about to be our Foreign Secretary – voted against Trident. This is a serious, serious problem.
Around the world we face challenges to British interests, from countries that contest our sovereignty. Will Starmer and Lammy stand up for British sovereignty over the strategically crucial British Indian Ocean Territories? Will they stand up for Gibraltar?
They should be brutally interrogated on all these points during the campaign – but whatever they say I fear I know the answer. We have already seen that Starmer and Lammy are completely unable to think straight on the biggest issues of our time – such as Israel’s miserable and protracted campaign to prevent Hamas from committing further massacres.
The other day Lammy effectively pronounced a moral equivalence between the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the terrorist leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar. He said that they should both be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.
Is he really incapable of seeing the difference between the Israeli government and Hamas? Does he really equate the hideous rapes and torture and mutilations of October 7 with what the Israel Defense Forces are trying to do?
Have the brains of Lammy and Starmer turned to complete mush? Or if Starmer disagrees with Lammy, why hasn’t he sacked him?
What are his real views? Today he wraps himself so tightly in the Union Jack that he looks like Ginger Spice’s leotard – and yet it wasn’t so long ago that Starmer was an avowed republican, who wanted to abolish the Queen.
He always brags about his time as head of Crown Prosecution Service, and how he takes responsibility for everything that took place on his watch – except of course for the failure to prosecute the paedophile, necrophiliac and BBC superstar, Jimmy Savile. Just, as they say, sayin'...
People treat this point as a taboo, an unmentionable. But let’s face it, if others had that kind of failure on their CV (a Tory, for instance) it would be thought at least worthy of comment.
He was helped by a bursary at his fee-paying school – and yet now he wants to kick away the same ladder of opportunity from other children, by whacking private education with VAT at 20 per cent.
Everywhere you look, Starmer’s Labour loves to punish aspiration, to expropriate the rewards of effort, and to snatch away opportunity. They are emphatically not what this country needs now; and yet anything other than a vote for the Conservatives – including a vote for Reform – is effectively a vote for the miserabilism of Labour.
Step back, and look at the big picture.
In 2019 the Conservatives won a big majority because we had a fantastic plan, to get Brexit done, and use Brexit freedoms to unite and level up the country, with skills, infrastructure, technology, and a green industrial revolution. And we had the fiscal space to stimulate growth by cutting taxes as well as regulation.
Then came Covid. We had to spend hundreds of billions. We had to restrict freedoms in ways that we never imagined. You can disagree with lockdown, but most people I meet understand that it was the only way – before vaccines – to save the lives of many older and vulnerable people.
I think most people can see that what we did was probably sensible and unavoidable. But at every stage, believe me, the Labour Party under Starmer wanted to go further: to lock down longer, to spend more on benefits, to take more control for the state, and to rack up an even bigger bill for the taxpayer.
It is now urgent, essential, that we put that era behind us. Every other country in the developed world can see that it is time to reduce the role of big government in people’s lives, to promote growth, to give people more chance to spend their own money and buy their own homes and run their own lives.
In most other countries, people are going for the centre-Right, not the Left.
So why on earth are we about to lurch left, as if under the hypnosis of the political pendulum?
People need to snap out of it, now. Wake up. Look at Starmer – and never mind your exasperation with recent politics – save this country from socialism on July 4.
Socialism of the Starmer kind has never worked in this country, and it is frankly the last thing we need now.