When will Keir Starmer stop lying?

The public have been taking to the streets this weekend ‘en masse’ to protest against the Labour government and their complete failure in all aspects of their duties since coming into power. Ordinary Brits are becoming increasingly exacerbated by the repeated failings, which include an authoritarian censorship of our right to free speech, a low growth economy, rising unemployment, inflation back on the rise, record numbers of illegal channel crossings, the meek surrender of British sovereign territory, and the highest tax burden in over 70 years.

But a common theme running through all of the above is a prevailing sentiment that our government is not being honest with us. In fact, even worse than that, that they are deliberately lying and gaslighting the British public, trying to take credit for fictional successes whilst trying to hide their failings beneath a cloak of deceipt and obfuscation.

As highlighted by a number of senior and respected political commentators in recent days, including today by Andrew Neil writing brilliantly for The Daily Mail, here are just some of the shameless lies that Keir Starmer and his incompetent bunch of ministers have been guilty of since coming to power:

Gaslighting over migration statistics

Starmer and co. have this week tried shamelessly to take credit for a 50% fall in net migration last year, despite the fact that Labour weren’t even in power for the first half of 2024. Anyone with a basic grasp of immigration policy knows that the drop in migration numbers is almost entirely attributable to the VISA limitations put in place by former Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly last year. In opposition, Labour had actually opposed this tightening of the rules that the Tories put in place (along with every single other measure put forward by the previous government to tackle immigration). And yet on Thursday, Keir Starmer tweeted “We have nearly halved net migration in the last year. We’re taking back control”, quite unashamedly trying to take credit for the success of his predecessors, and believing the public too stupid to see through his gaslighting.

Southport cover-up

Keir Starmer has spent since the early days of his premiership battling against accusations of a two-tier approach to the law implemented across the police and judicial system under his watch. Much of this can be traced back to his abominable handling of the Southport murders, and subsequent civil unrest, where his focus was wrongly applied almost exclusively to castigating anyone speaking up against illegal immigration, whilst blaming the troubles on the “far right” (and in doing so, labelling anyone with concerns about national security as a nazi thug deserving of an immediate and elongated custodial prison sentence). And yet this was a thinly veiled ploy to distract from his government’s agenda to keep secret the identity of the murderer, as they knew that to admit the murders were an act of terrorism committed by the son of immigrants would be to add fuel to the fires of racial tension, and strengthen the argument that multi-culturalism has failed. So, instead of being honest with the public about the identity and immigration status of the perpetrator, Axel Rudakubana, he chose to obfuscate and delay details being made public.

This acted to fuel the anger amongst the public, rightly feeling that they were being lied to and legitimately asking questions as to why, and in so doing acting to further exacerbate the scale of the disorder. Even when the killers’ identity was made public, we were only provided with a photo of Rudakubana as an 11-year old smiling choir boy, dressed innocently in a school uniform. This again was a deliberate ploy to disguise the true reality of the monster he had become, in order to prevent further escalation of racial tensions. This act of deceit really sowed the seeds of mistrust amongst the British public in their new Labour government. Why should we place our trust in a government that, when matters of public safety are at stake, prioritises protecting its agenda to promote diversity and multiculturalism over trusting the public with the truth?

Promising not to raise taxes

“We don’t need higher taxes” shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves insisted during last year’s election campaign. Labour has “no plans to increase taxes” she regularly repeated. Labour fought the election campaign on a basis of tax rises of just £8.5bn, £9.5bn of additional public spending, and additional borrowing of £3.5bn. However, in her first budget as Chancellor, Reeves announced tax rises totaling £40bn, increased borrowing of £36bn, and a massive £76bn of public spending (largely to fund her government’s capitulation to public sector pay demands from their union paymasters).

So, an overspend of £76bn compared to a pre-election promise of just £9.5bn. Even their promise that they would not raise taxes on working people has been broken. The Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated that 80% of the £25bn employer’s NI hike will fall on workers through lower wages and consumers via higher prices.

£22bn black hole fallacy

Much of the justification for the above monumental overspend revolves around the widely discredited claims that her hand had been forced having “discovered” a £22bn black hole in the public finances inherited from the Tories. It was common knowledge that Labour’s plan was to say “we’ve opened the books and things are much worse than expected” in order to circumvent the deliberate understating of Reeves’ planned tax hikes and unprecedented borrowing splurge. So, it came as little surprise when they did so. And yet the OBR have never been willing to endorse the existence of said “black hole”. The IFS has publicly stated that the figures were readily available to anyone who cared to look prior to the election, and hence Reeves’ claims that she was unaware of any shortfalls are entirely disingenuous.

And the black hole claims have been parroted so many times by so many Labour ministers since last year’s election, that it’s mere mention now draws derision and ridicule from anyone who hears them.

Not to mention that almost half of the so-called black hole is attributable to the £9.5bn of inflation-busting public sector pay rises that this Labour government doled out within months of coming into power… a political choice that could have been avoided, were Starmer and co. not willing to be held to ransom by the trade unions that fund them.

Chagos surrender

Starmer has been accused of manipulating statistics in order to downplay the true cost of our unnecessary handover of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Quite why our useless government has agreed to give away our sovereign territory for free, and then to pay the Maurition government to lease them back, is beyond most of us. My understanding is that the legal argument for giving the islands away (presided over by a foreign court whose judgements our own courts are allowed to overrule), was not a legally binding decree but merely a recommendation, meaning that we have made a political choice to hand over control of the archipelago “because it was the right thing to do”.

Perhaps this would be more palatable if it was a simple giveaway, but to then agree for the British taxpayer to pay for the privilege of leasing them back really takes the biscuit! And then there is the true cost of doing so. Starmer has claimed the cost of his Chagos surrender would be £101million every year for 99 years, meaning the "net present value of payments" under the treaty will stand at £3.4billion. But independent analysis has revealed that, with rising inflation and additional schemes to fund "development projects" in Mauritius in mind, the true cost of the deal will reportedly surpass £30billion.

But Starmer has deliberately hidden this figure because he knows that the public perception of committing £30bn of public funds to pay a foreign government to take control of UK sovereign territory that we are under no legal obligation to give away would not be particularly favourable. Again, he would rather hide the truth from the public than face up to his failings… a common theme from Starmer and his government since taking office.

EU reset deal

In the face of trepidation amongst brexiteers that the governments new deal with the EU is the start of rejoining via the back door, Starmer has been frustratingly and deliberately vague in any detail regarding what he has signed us up to. He boasts of his new youth mobility scheme with the EU, but cannot tell us how many will come, or for how long. He says he has negotiated a better deal for British food and defence exports to the EU, but has not told us how much this improved access will cost us. He claims to have opened e-gates at airports to British travelers to the EU, but can’t say when they will be opened (and it remains at the discretion of individual European airports whether they even offer this). All we know is what we are giving away (fishing rights in British waters to EU trawlers for the next 12 years). But we know very little about how this deal benefits Britain, nor how much we will be paying the EU each year as part of this deal.

The usual rule is, if a government are withholding the truth, then it probably means the truth hurts. I have absolutely no doubt that this reset deal benefits the EU to a significantly greater extent than it benefits Britain. Starmer is so desperate to regain the trust and confidence of his chums in Davos, can anyone doubt his willingness to trade away British interests in order to do so?

It's in their DNA

But we shouldn’t be surprised at Starmer’s pathological propensity to lie. He has been doing it for years, and getting away with it free from recrimination. He has become so used to lying his way through his political career that he genuinely believes anything he says is beyond scrutiny or reproach.

When standing for leader of the Labour party nearly 5 years ago, Starmer stood on a Corbyn-lite manifesto, promising to nationalize energy, water, and Royal Mail, and to scrap university tuition fees, the 2-child benefit cap, and banning of outsourcing in the public sector. Within a year of becoming leader, every single pledge he had made had been dropped, showing his shameless disregard for his principles is not just reserved for the general public, but also the Labour party members whom elected him as their leader in the first place.

Whilst in opposition, he and his party continuously peddled the same lies over and over, believing that if they told the public the same lie enough times, that we would eventually believe it. Most notably, they repeatedly spun the myth that “Liz Truss/The Tories crashed the economy”, without ever supporting this claim with any factual evidence, or explaining by what metric they believed this to be true. In reality, it is very difficult to “crash” an economy, and you would be hard pressed to even find consensus over what “crashing an economy” actually means. The most common statistic that they have used to support their claim is the temporary but sharp rise in the cost of government borrowing that occurred following the Liz Truss mini-budget.

However, following Rachel Reeves’ anti-growth Autumn budget, the cost of 10-year government guilts has surged beyond the levels seen during Truss’ premiership, meaning the cost of government borrowing is now the highest it has been in almost 20 years. By their own metric then, Labour themselves have “crashed the economy”.  But don’t expect them to be up front about it.

And let’s not forget their lies about their own lockdown gatherings, including the infamous beer and curry quiz night in Durham, attended by both Starmer and his deputy leader, Angela Rayner. Despite their sanctimonious criticism of Boris Johnson for lockdown gatherings in No.10, they lied to the British public about their own non-essential social activities taking place at the same time. The old “nothing to see here” rhetoric.

And the media in this country must accept some responsibility for the situation that has developed. They repeatedly failed to hold Labour to account for any of their egregious claims during their entire time in opposition, choosing instead to focus all of their energies on whether Boris Johnson ate a piece of cake in his office during lockdown. As a result, the Labour party from top to bottom became accustomed to being able to do and say whatever they wanted without consequence. When a party and its leader have become so used to lying without recrimination, the behaviour becomes habitual, and we have seen this transcend from their time in opposition to their time in power.

Starmer and Reeves tell us that further tax rises are not on the horizon. However, given their track record to date, that almost certainly means we should expect the opposite in Rachel Reeves’ next fiscal event in the Autumn. Brace yourselves.