All politicians are economical with the truth, but few are as brazen as Starmer. He lies with the skill and cunning of a five-year-old child.
His fingers are sticky, there are crumbs on his chin, and he’ll still look you in the eye and claim he didn’t raid the biscuit tin.
In December, I ran through a list of Starmer’s broken promises and policy u-turns until I gave up out of sheer exhaustion. I warned then that he wouldn’t stop, and he hasn’t.
He lied to win the Labour leadership, by pledging to back Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-left policies such as abolishing tuition fees and the two-child benefit cap, nationalising energy, water and mail. All swiftly dropped.
Starmer learned his lesson. Lying works in the pursuit of power. So he carried on.
During the general election, he gave the impression that Labour would retain the Winter Fuel Payment and keep the £86,000 cap on social care costs. Both have gone.
For all we know, he may now be lying about bringing the Winter Fuel Payment back.
Starmer claimed he would “reshape” Labour’s ties with business. That turned out to mean Chancellor Rachel Reeves hammering them with £25billion of national insurance (NI) in the Budget.
He pledged not to raise taxes on “working people”, yet the Office for Budget Responsibility reckons 80% of the employer’s NI hike will fall on workers through lower wages and consumers via higher prices.
His most brazen lie may have been over the 1950s Waspi women. In opposition, he publicly backed their calls for fast, fair compensation. In power, he dropped them without a word.
In 2023, Starmer promised farmers a new relationship and “certainty”. He then plunged them into a world of uncertainty by clobbering them with inheritance tax.
Starmer and Reeves pretended to know nothing about the £22billion “black hole” in the nation’s accounts.
But as the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out, the shortfall “was obvious to anyone who dared to look”.
Happily, I’m not the only one keeping track. In the Daily Mail today, veteran journalist Andrew Neil accused Starmer of taking “the lying and the gaslighting and the deceit to a new level”.
He said Starmer’s hallmark is “telling us things we know not to be true, but doing it with such authority that we begin to question our own sanity”.
His own list includes Starmer telling Parliament earlier this year that Labour inherited interest rates of 11%. They peaked at 5.25%.
It includes Starmer boasting of an £880million rise in social care funding, without mentioning that the Budget’s NI hike will cost care homes £900million.
Now he’s at it again with his EU deal, Neil says.
Starmer claims to have secured better access for UK food and defence exports, but won’t say what we’re paying for it, or how much.
He says e-gates are open to British travellers, but not when.
The only firm detail we’ve got is that he’s handed over UK fishing rights for another 12 years, without saying what we’ve got in return.
Which is most likely nothing.
Nothing he’s said about the disastrous Chagos Islands deal holds up either.
Voters have seen through Starmer. His lies no longer fool us. That won’t stop him though. It’s become a habit.
Starmer rose to power by promising the nation “honesty and integrity”. That turns out to be his biggest lie of all.
