The Labour Government seems to be on a mission to render political language almost meaningless. Sir Keir Starmer and his Ministers continually make statements that are directly contradicted by their own policies. This is more than deceit or hypocrisy. It could be described as verbal surrealism. So Sir Keir promises that his Government will “tread more lightly on our lives”, while he unleashes a deluge of new bans, regulations and official interventions.
His Chancellor Rachel Reeves also frequently resorts to this kind of double-speak, where her actions are the opposite of her stated intentions. “Labour will always protect pensioners” she said shortly before axing the Winter Fuel Allowance. She trumpets “wealth creation” as one of her top priorities, then strangles enterprise by imposing a brutal hike in employers’ national insurance.
She was at it again this week, posing as the champion of fiscal rectitude while presiding over a record-breaking expansion of the state. As she launched a major review of governmental expenditure, which will theoretically require all departments to make 5% efficiency savings, she promised to “take an iron fist against waste.”
In isolation, the rhetoric may have sounded impressive. But the Chancellor has neither conviction nor credibility as the guardian of the public purse. Throughout 14 years in opposition, her party constantly wailed about “Tory cuts” and agitated for more taxpayers’ cash to be spent on every conceivable cause. The reality is that Labour, tied to the big public sector trade unions, remains the party of the bloated state machine, the defender of sclerotic bureaucracy and the advocate of socialist control.
If Reeves really believed in her iron fist, she would have already embarked on some serious cuts. After all, she is spoilt for targets. She could take an axe to the sprawling managerial hierarchies of Whitehall, whose payroll has expanded by almost 100,000 employees since 2016. Or she could order a sweeping reduction of the 8000 “communications officers” in the civil services.
The public sector’s army of 10,000 equality and diversity commissars is ripe for abolition, given its malignant role in promoting a culture of intimidation, indoctrination and incrimination in British workplaces. Severe pruning could have also commenced on the regulatory quangos, whose workforce has doubled over the last decade and is estimated to add £70 billion in costs to the British economy.
For too long, officialdom has been out of control, keener on empire-building and social engineering than on service delivery. One damning aspect of this shameful extravagance has been brilliantly exposed by the writer Charlotte Gill, who has undertaken an in-depth analysis of £75 million-worth of taxpayer funding for a vast range of academic research projects that promote an extreme woke ideology. The long catalogue of these indulgent exercises in subsidized dogma includes a grant of £841,830 for an archival initiative called “The Europe that Gay Porn Built: 1945 to 2000”; £2.9million to the Decolonising Arts Institute in London; £330,700 to study “Migrants, Queermothers and Gender-based violence in Ghana”; and £1million for “the Abundance Project” which aims to enhance “cultural and green inclusion” in south-west London and so “address ethnic inequalities in mental health.
This is identity politics gone mad, yet there is no sign of the iron fist smashing into the unaccountable public bodies that bankroll such indulgent lunacy. In truth, the Labour Government is only interested in power, not in balancing the books.
Numbers of welfare claimants, the state workforce and civic bureaucracy all continue to expand, epitomised by the huge new £8.3 billion quango Great British Energy. Public sector sick leave is too high, productivity too low, management too weak. Her war on waste is a phony one.
