OK, let’s suppose for a moment that these polls are right, and that election night really is going to be a total bloodbath for the Conservatives, and that Keir Starmer gets a bigger majority than Tony Blair in 1997.
Let’s suppose he gets a bigger majority than Margaret Thatcher in 1983. Imagine that he gets a bigger majority than any in the past 100 years – the biggest since the election of Stanley Baldwin in 1924.
That would in itself be a nightmare, and, in my view, the least-merited election triumph in history, by one of the least-scrutinised of Opposition leaders.
And yet I have to warn you, amigos: those numbers may well be an underestimate.
It was clear from the Labour manifesto launch (pictured yesterday) that they have absolutely no hesitations about more tax hikes – even for the elderly and homeowners
If they get a predicted 461 MPs in Westminster, the Labour Party will conclude that they have a mandate for a decisive break with Conservatism, and a sharp left turn (an ironic triumph for former leader Jeremy Corbyn, here with Starmer in 2019 before their relationship soured)
Starmer with his Labour leader predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn
I have just consulted the website of Electoral Calculus, a respected group of psephological analysts, who try to translate polling results into seats in Parliament. Its latest projections are that on July 4, the people of this country are going to send to Westminster such a vast wave of finger-jabbing, Palestinian flag-waving Corbynistas – who still make up the Labour grassroots from which the candidates have been drawn – that the governing party will have to occupy both sides of the House of Commons.
On current predictions, Labour will have 461 MPs, the Tories will have 80 – and the overall majority for Keir Starmer will be 292. Yes, it will not just be a majority bigger than Blair’s or Thatcher’s. The coming Labour majority, if these polls are correct, will be about as big as Blair’s and Thatcher’s majority COMBINED.
Imagine what it will feel like that Friday, when dawn breaks on the Starmergeddon – and the blinking Labour leader tries to take in what has happened. Oh, I am sure there will be a fetching display of modesty, as he stands on the steps of No. 10. The new PM will affect humility, and claim that he is now the servant of the people, and so forth.
But beneath the veneer of restraint there will be a bubbling, intoxicating delirium of power. As they try to come to terms with their success, the new Government will have a secret but glorious certainty about the people’s intention. The Labour Party will conclude, on the basis of this result – or anything like it – that they have a mandate for a decisive break with Conservatism, and a sharp left turn.
With 461 MPs, there will be nothing and no one to stand in their way, or to stop them from doing whatever they damn well please.
We are looking at an elective dictatorship, a super-majority of a kind unknown to modern times, in which the sheer weight of Labour MPs will start to skew politics and change the direction of the country in a way that most voters have simply not bargained for.
They will assume that they have a right to go way beyond their current promises, and the existing Labour pledges are already bad enough. We know from the campaign so far that Starmer would be way, way to the left of Blair. It was clear from the Labour manifesto launch that they have absolutely no hesitations about more tax hikes.
They are going to hammer business with taxes on investment. They are going to clobber the elderly with a tax on pensions. They are going to persecute homeowners with higher taxes on property.
After the miseries of Covid, and the inevitable expansion in the size and role of the State, this is precisely the opposite of what we should be doing.
We should be cutting taxes, and moving to the Centre-Right – like most other European democracies. Starmer already wants to go left, left, left: punishing aspiration by putting a 20 per cent premium on private school fees; grotesque hypocrisy, by the way, from a man who benefited from education at a fee-paying school.
So twisted is his Lefty ideology that he announced in the TV debate that he would not even use private healthcare to help a relative faced with a long wait for NHS care – a terrible omen for the NHS, many of whose clinicians are heavily cross-subsidised by the private work they also do.
As he made clear in his manifesto launch this week, he would happily begin chucking away the benefits of Brexit – beginning a process of alignment with EU law, so that we are gradually sucked back into the single market and customs union, and yet with no say in Brussels.
Boris predicts: ‘On July 4 the people of this country are going to send to Westminster such a vast wave of finger-jabbing, Palestinian flag-waving Corbynistas that the governing party will have to occupy both sides of the House of Commons’
Starmer made clear this week that the whole painful settlement is now up for renegotiation, and that he intends to do a new deal with the EU in which we return to free movement of EU nationals to this country.
In other words, he is about to give up Britain’s hard-won right to control our own borders; just as he is gleefully planning to jettison the Rwanda plan, the only credible idea for deterring the cross-Channel people-trafficking gangs, at the very moment other European countries are actually taking it up.
As the Labour manifesto makes clear, he wants to give in to all sorts of wokery. Starmer’s demented refusal to distinguish between the male and female sex will have expression in law, so that people are allowed to change sex more or less at will, like parrotfish, with all the ensuing misery and mistakes, especially among the young.
He will gerrymander the constitution, changing the law to lower the voting age to 16 (when turnouts are low enough already, frankly), and doubtless extending voting rights to prisoners – as the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has long since demanded. All this we know, because it is what Labour is daring to say before the loon army tsunami of Labour MPs – 461 of them – arrive at Westminster.
We know that Starmer tends already to flip-flop under pressure from his backbenchers; we know that he has the air, sometimes, of a seriously rattled bus conductor. How will he behave with this lot on his back, waiting to dump on him like a tipper truck full of bricks? He will be the prisoner of an army of Lefties – most of them Corbynistas – constantly yammering at him to give in to his Left-wing instincts, and he will.
We must face the reality. Whatever the polls may say about the Reform surge, there is only one way to stop a Starmer government, or to reduce the size of a Starmer majority, and that is to vote Conservative.
Neither the Liberals nor Reform have the remotest chance of forming the Opposition – not in Parliament, not on the basis of the first-past-the-post system. Under that system, General Elections are a bit like having a very long bath – in that the water gently slooshes left and right and back again. But if these numbers are right, the wave will be so big that it will wash right over the end of the bath in a cataclysm.
If Starmer gets a majority on the scale currently forecast, it won’t be just the rich who get soaked – it will be the entire population.
I really don’t think that’s what people want, and they should vote against it. A Starmer majority would be bad enough; a freak majority would be dangerous.
