10 failures of Labour’s 8 months in power

The first eight months of this Labour government have been an unmitigated disaster. There isn’t a single metric of government compliance that is heading in the right direction. The British people can see it and the collapse in Labour’s popularity reflects this. Watching Labour learn the painful lesson that government is a lot harder than opposition should be a source of smugness for those of us on the right. However, it doesn’t because the British people are suffering as a direct result of Labour’s ineptitude, arrogance, and hypocrisy.

Here we look at the 10 ways in which the Labour government have failed catastrophically since coming into power:

1. Hypocrisy, sleaze and cronyism

   
   

Despite sanctimonious Starmer and his hypocritical ministers promising during their time in opposition to “clean up politics”, their time in power has been punctuated by hypocrisy, sleaze and cronyism. Here are just some of the prime examples:

• Lord Alli cash for access scandal: The early days of the Labour government were punctuated by a cash for access scandal, with long time Labour donor Lord Waheed Alli given an unrestricted pass to No. 10, despite not holding any formal role as a political advisor or in the civil service. A glaring example of the kind of cronyism that Labour repeatedly lambasted the Tories for during their 14 years in power, and an early hammer blow to Keir Starmer’s claims that his government would herald a new era of honesty and accountability in politics.

  
  

• David Lammy private jets: Foreign Secretary David Lammy splashed a staggering £891,719 of taxpayers money on private air travel in just his first three months in office—nearly half of what Liz Truss spent during her entire tenure as Foreign Secretary in 2021-2022. This, from the same Labour Party that endlessly criticized Tory ministers’ travel expenses. Apparently, when it comes to swanning around the world in private jets, it’s one rule for them, another for everyone else!

  
  

• Labour peer Lord David Evans cash for access: In February it was revealed that a Labour member of the House of Lords, Lord David Evans, offered access to ministers during discussions about a commercial deal worth tens of thousands of pounds, as reported following an undercover investigation by The Guardian.

  
  

• Miliband accused of breaking rules over approval of Dale Vince solar farm: Ed Miliband was accused of breaking the ministerial code after his department rushed through approval of an application for a solar farm owned by the millionaire Labour donor Dale Vince. Vince’s company Ecotricity has donated £5.4 million to Labour since 2021, making him one of the party’s most prominent business backers.

  
  

• Labour accused of hypocrisy over lavish spending: Analysis by The Times uncovered thousands of pounds of spending by Labour ministers, aids and advisors on meals at private member’s clubs, crystal glasses, and bespoke shoes. In total, David Lammy’s Foreign Office spent £521,525 on “restaurants and bars” in the first four months of the Labour Government. This despite Labour ministers, and in particular deputy PM Angela Rayner, appearing highly vocal in their criticism of the previous Tory government for squandering taxpayers’ cash when in office. In February 2023, Rayner was on record accusing the then Tory government of a “scandalous catalogue of waste” and claimed money was being “frittered away across every department of government”. Again… one rule for them, another for the rest of us.

  
  

• Voice coach-gate: Keir Starmer was accused of breaching covid lockdown rules, and a police investigation was called for, following revelations that the PM invited a voice coach to a face-to-face coaching session on Christmas Eve during lockdown. This despite the fact that vocal coaches were not classified as key workers, and the particular coach in question, Leonie Mellinger, was conducting all other client engagements over Zoom. This blatant rule breaking highlighted the hypocrisy of ‘Mr. Rules’, who lectured Boris Johnson on lockdown breaches and repeatedly parroted the sanctimonious line that “lawmakers should not be lawbreakers.”

2. Lies and broken promises

Labour won power by repeatedly lying to the British public about how they would govern. Election promises broken, lies exposed and the electorate taken for fools, here are just some examples we have seen during the past 8 months:

• Rachel Reeves CV: Where to start… an MP elected to the most senior position in cabinet (Chancellor of the Exchequer), is (i). found to have exaggerated her time working at the bank of England, claiming repeatedly to have worked there for almost a decade, when it was in fact only 5 years (of which one year was spent studying for a master’s degree… so 4 years in reality, not even close to a decade); (ii). Made false claims to have worked as “an economist”, when in actual fact it transpires she headed up a small team responsible for admin duties in a complaints department; and (iii). Hid the circumstances of her exit from her role at HBOS, where she was subject to an investigation over expenses fraud and left shortly afterwards under an unspecified compromise agreement. It is clear that Rachel Thieves is dangerously under-qualified for the post she holds, and that she lied repeatedly to the electorate about her experience in order to trick the public into believing she was capable of fulfilling such a role in government. What a disgrace.

  
  

• Sadiq Khan lies about ULEZ benefits: London Mayor Sadiq Khan misled the public about the “benefits” of Ulez in radio and newspaper advertisements, a report leaked to The Telegraph revealed. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) criticised Transport for London (TfL) for “misleading” claims about the expansion of the Ulez zone reducing levels of poisonous nitrogen dioxide (NO2) particles. Just one of many examples of Labour mayors and councils all over the country lying to the public in order to force through their deeply unpopular policies, and enforce their unjust and undemocratic agendas.

  
  

• Labour promise not to raise taxes on working people: Keir Starmer told the country that they could trust Labour’s promises not to raise taxes and not to unleash a borrowing spree. In the House of Commons on 9th October last year, the PM said “We made an absolute commitment to not raise tax on working people”. Rachel Reeves has previously been quoted as saying a rise in National Insurance was a ‘tax purely on people who work’. Labour have done just that and more. They fiddled the fiscal rules, increased borrowing by billions of pounds, and raised taxes on businesses – which they have now admitted will leave working people worse off. The Office of Budget Responsibility have said an increase in employer National Insurance will be passed through ‘entirely’ onto working people.  Steadfast manifesto commitments broken at the very first opportunity… did we honestly believe them anyway?

  
  

• Broken promises to farmers: Keir Starmer, Steven Reed and the Labour Party told farmers that Labour respects them, would protect their livelihoods and promised that they would not change Agricultural Property Relief for farmers. In the 2024 Autumn Budget, Labour broke their promise to farmers – reducing the relief and imposing inheritance tax rates on farmland – which will devastate family farms and pose a serious risk to domestic food security and food prices. Amongst Labour’s Budget of broken promises, Labour have made the political choice to target family farms and the consequences will be felt by thousands of farms and families across the country.

  
  

• Starmer’s promise to freeze council tax: Keir Starmer was condemned for making “false promises” after his Government announced massive increases in council tax - despite promising to freeze it. While leader of the opposition, Sir Keir pledged to freeze council tax for a year, using a windfall tax on profits from energy companies to pay for it. However, most councils around the country have announced an increase to tax on residents of 5%, double the rate of inflation, while some have been given permission for increases of up to 10%. Another clear breach of Labour’s pre-election promises.

  
  

• Milliband’s promise to cut energy bills by £300: During the election, Labour promised they would cut energy bills for good. Labour announced proposals to “set up Great British Energy, a publicly-owned clean power company”, and in the run-up to the election, prominent Labour politicians, including energy secretary Ed Milliband and PM Keir Starmer, claimed that this would cut bills by up to £300 a year. On 1 January the latest Energy Price Cap came into effect, and in March bills are predicted to rise again – the third time energy bills have risen despite a clear promise by the government to cut them – another broken promise which we are paying the price for.

  
  

• £22bn black hole: Perhaps the biggest lie of all, the almost entirely fictitious budgetary black hole that the Labour government supposedly inherited from the Tories. We all knew they would claim to have opened the books and found things much worse than they expected, in order to justify breaking their own pre-election fiscal rules by raising taxes and increasing borrowing. However, the repeated claims that there exists £22bn of unbudgeted spending in the treasury finances has been dispelled on numerous occasions, by both the OBR and the Office for Fiscal Studies. Of the £22bn figure they consistently quote, almost half of this is attributable to public sector pay rises for train drivers and junior doctors. It was a political choice by this government to award inflation-busting pay rises to these groups, and they could easily have declined to do so in the face of other budgetary pressures and a cost-of-living crisis. A thinly-veiled deceit and blatant abuse of public trust that we all saw coming.

3. Disastrous economic policies

As soon as they had won the election, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves set about trashing the economy and claiming it was in its worst state since the Second World War. That needless self-sabotage proved a wet blanket for consumer and business confidence. The Chancellor’s decision to adopt a new fiscal rule allowing increased government spending for investment has been dismissed as a ‘fiscal illusion’ by the Office for Budget Responsibility. It has undermined the standing of UK bonds and gilts on global markets and raised the cost of government borrowing. Now UK ten-year bond rates sit at 4.6 per cent – higher than during Liz Truss’s short and disastrous sojourn as prime minister. That means higher costs for our mortgages and for businesses that need to borrow money to invest. Labour promised the fastest growth among the G7 advanced nations. So far it has dismally failed to deliver.

4. Restricting freedom of speech

The Labour government has started to chart a dangerous course on free speech in Britain, which could roll back free speech rights by decades. Senior Labour figures are progressing an expansion of the Online Safety Act, which promised to be a much-needed bill to increase transparency but fast became a censor’s charter, inventing loose concepts like “legal but harmful” speech that must be censored. Ministers recently held discussions with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate on expanding the Act to create alarming new ‘emergency’ online censorship powers.

The new home secretary has also taken steps to expand police recording of so-called ‘non-crime hate incidents’ – a U-turn on the last government which sought to reduce petty non-crime reports. A FOI investigation found police are still recording ‘non-crimes’ such as a man putting Israeli flag stickers on lamp posts, and children drawing with chalk on pavements – which can show on individuals’ criminal history checks. The plans are likely to make this pointless recording far worse.

In addition, Labour have rebooted the secretive Counter Disinformation Unit (now renamed the ‘National Security Online Information Team’) and tasked it to snoop on online discourse about controversial topics such as Israel and Gaza.

Throughout all of this covert rise in censorship and unwarranted state oversight, we have also seen law-abiding citizens thrown in jail for posting opinions on social media, as Starmer’s Stazi prioritise tackling the over-hyped danger of the so-called far-right by taking punitive action for hurty words, rather than focusing on burglaries, assaults and knife crime. I’m pretty sure I know which the majority of the public would prefer our police to concentrate on.

5. Squandering money on net zero

£22bn spent on carbon capture projects that have failed everywhere they have previously been employed; £10bn committed to the building of onshore wind farms; £11.6bn committed in overseas aid to help foreign nations combat the effects of climate change; and a commitment at COP29 to contribute towards the £300bn to be paid to developing nations every year to support their transition to net zero. Energy Secretary Ed Milliband has been given a blank cheque to squander taxpayers’ money on his net zero vanity projects, without any parliamentary scrutiny or public say. No support for pensioners, rising energy bills, National Insurance and council taxes going up… but apparently a country that contributes less than 1% of global carbon emissions can both afford and justify spending hundreds of £bns on net zero. Madness.

6. Pensioners Winter fuel allowance

Not much more to say here… as noted above, we can apparently afford to pay nearly £12bn in overseas climate aid, but any pensioners not on benefits had there vital Winter fuel allowance taken away from them with very little notice, despite a report that Labour themselves carried out in 2020 concluding that to do so would lead to 4,000 deaths a year amongst our elderly population. All to save a (relatively) paltry £1.3bn a year. This Labour government prioritizing its virtue-signaling globalist values over the needs of its own elderly population. Someone please make it make sense.

7. Caving into Union pay demands

Within weeks of taking power, the Labour government capitulated to their union paymasters by agreeing to every one of their demands for above-inflation pay rises, most notably for train drivers and junior doctors. They triumphantly claimed to have “ended the strikes”… many of us were left wondering how giving in to ransom and agreeing to pay demands without any form of negotiation or any reciprocal commitments on worker productivity could be classed as a win, especially when the bill is being funded by the taxpayer.

8. Damaging UK/US relations

In 2018, David Lammy described Trump as a "tyrant" and "a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath". In 2019, ahead of Trump's state visit to the UK, Lammy also posted that the then-president was "deluded, dishonest, xenophobic, narcissistic" and "no friend of Britain".

In 2017, Streeting called Trump an “odious, sad little man” in a post on X. “Imagine being proud to have that as your president,” he added.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband labelled Trump a “groper” and a “racist” in November 2016. “The idea that we have shared values with a racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper beggars belief,” Miliband told the BBC.

In 2021, Deputy PM Angela Rayner said of the recently-elected President, “He’s an absolute buffoon. He has no place in the White House. He’s an embarrassment.” And also in 2021, our Prime Minister Sir Keir declared himself to be “anti-Trump but pro-American”.

Our front benches are filled with Trump-hating loud-mouths who have permanently damaged relations with the new US President through their ineptitude with diplomacy. And as if the litany of past insults weren’t bad enough, the final nail in the coffin came during the run-up to the US Presidential elections when over 100 Labour staffers attempted a sojern to the US to campaign on behalf of Trump’s Democrat rival, Kamala Harris, despite this being a blatant breach of the rules regarding foreign interference in elections.

The early days of this Labour government now require significant efforts to repair damaged relations with the leader of our most important ally, a necessity that could have been avoided if senior figures in the party weren’t so obsessed with pandering to their hard-left followers on social media.

9. Scandals

Despite promising to "clean up politics", and that his Labour party would be a government of honesty and integrity, Keir Starmer has been left with egg on his face following a string of embarrassing high-profile scandals to have gripped his party in their first few months in charge, including:

• Britain’s anti-corruption minister, Tulip Sidiq, resigned following intense media scrutiny over her financial relationships with her aunt, former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, as well as a flurry of reporting about how London properties she lived in were paid for.

  
  

• Transport Minister Louise Haigh, the minister responsible for awarding greedy train drivers with inflation-busting payrises, was forced to quit after a previously undisclosed fraud offence was revealed.

  
  

• Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds investigated by the Solicitors Regulation Agency for making false claims to have worked as a solicitor, despite the fact that he never completed his training. Under s17 of the Legal Services Act 2007, pretending to be a solicitor is a criminal offence, leading to widespread demands for Mr. Reynolds' resignation (which at the time of writing he has thus far refused to do).

  
  

• Angela Rayner investigated for benefitting from the Right-To-Buy scheme when selling her former Council property, profiting from the RTB discount despite not actually living in the property. Despite testimonies from her neighbours confirming that she did not live there, “Teflon Ange” somehow managed to avoid prosecution. No chance her ties to Stockport Council and the Labour PCC for Greater Manchester had anything to do with the investigation being brushed under the carpet.

  
  

• Labour MP Mike Amesbury sentenced to 10 weeks in prison (subsequently downgraded to a suspended sentence) for punching one of his constituents in street in an unprovoked attack. Despite rightly losing the Labour whip over the incident, it was not a good look for the Labour government who have claimed to clean up politics and to “re-connect” with voters.

10. Plummeting approval ratings

Since day 1 of this Labour government, the approval ratings of both the government and PM Keir Starmer have nosedived. As with the prime minister’s personal approval ratings, the government over which he presides is likewise more unpopular than it has ever been. On 21-23 December, more than six in ten Britons (62%) say that they disapprove of the government’s record to date, while only 17% approve.

Even Labour voters are now divided on the government they elected, with 38% having a negative view and 34% a positive one.

Indeed, almost half of Labour voters (46%) said in a Times survey in mid-December that they had expected Labour to do well but have been disappointed. Just 28% consider them to be doing well – a figure which falls to 10% among the wider public.

No UK government in living memory has suffered such a rapid and pronounced fall from grace, proving assertions at the time of the General Election that support for Labour was wide but shallow, and their victory was driven entirely by a desire to “get the Tories out” rather than any great support for the alternative offered by Keir Starmers’ Labour party.