Alex Burghart: The Labour doom spiral begins again

Alex Burghart MP is Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, and Conservative MP for Brentwood and Ongar.

After the psychodrama has subsided, how will Starmer’s premiership be remembered? Unquestionably as one that failed to confront or solve the deep problems that continue to destabilise the country. A failure to create growth, a failure to manage public spending, a failure to restore our Armed Forces, a failure to secure our borders, and so on and so on.

The next Labour leader, whoever they are, from whatever wing of the party they hail, will, without doubt, also fail. The decisions that need to be made are not to be found in the Left’s locker. Starmer could have used his majority and early authority to make difficult decisions in the national interest that were counter to Labour’s culture. Instead, he immediately played to the socialist gallery, sending huge amounts of money to the unionised professions whilst hiking business taxes to cover the cost.

The result has been chaotic tax and spend, anaemic growth, inflation, unemployment and cripplingly high borrowing costs. And a Labour PLP manifestly unwilling to cut public spending. A classic Labour doom spiral in which reality and left-wing policy drag the economy into the sewer.

The greatest lie was, of course, that Labour had a plan for growth. The plan, such as it was, was simply to talk about growth whilst doing precisely nothing to achieve it. Indeed almost everything major policy decision worked the other way. Not least the work of Ed Miliband to spend huge amounts of money locking in high electricity prices to the detriment of families, businesses and public services.

But within the lie that Labour had a plan for growth, was the lie that the solution to the country’s problems lay in ‘resetting’ our relationship with the EU. From the outset, Labour was unclear about what it wanted from Europe. Not that this has dimmed its belief that putting Britain ‘at the heart of Europe’ would somehow nullify and neutralise all the harm it has done to the economy.

Thus far the ‘reset’ has been a classic triumph of Labour-led negotiation. The Government signed away 12 years of fishing rights (something deeply prized by our EU neighbours) and received the square root of diddly squat in return. Instead, before the ink had dried on that agreement, the EU gave a two-fingered salute to the UK’s request to join the SAFE defence fund (despite the enormous contribution Britain makes to continental defence).

We are now faced with the bleak prospect of the UK accepting vast tracts of EU law with no say over how those laws are made and paying for the privilege of doing so. And now, as the Labour leadership contest lumbers into life, Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham are flashing their Rejoin credentials, attempting to distract from their terrifying lack of thought-through policy.

The truth is that Labour’s ‘reset’ was never part of a plan to fix the UK economy, it was simply a kneejerk reaction to a new status quo that Labour did not (and perhaps could not) understand. The major structural challenges that face our country cannot be overcome by accepting EU rules. We know this because the economic woes of Germany, France and the like have not been overcome by this means. The EU has become a low growth zone. Becoming subservient to it will not miraculously make the UK a high growth zone.

To resolve the immense challenges facing Britain we will need to acquire cheaper energy and electricity (see the excellent work of Claire Coutinho). We will need to dramatically reduce business regulation (see Andrew Griffiths). We will need to significantly reduce public spending by cutting welfare (see Helen Whately) thereby freeing up money to reduce the deficit and taxation (see Mel Stride). This must needs be coupled to a massive overhaul of the Blairite constitutional settlement so that government and ministers can again take decisions and use a sovereign parliament to make unimpeachable statute. None of this will be easy. It will require tough, consistent, brutally honest leadership. And that, only Kemi Badenoch can provide.