Early alarm calls at this time of year are brutal. Christmas is over, a new year has begun – and the mornings are black. You long to linger under the duvet but there is no escaping that blasted alarm clock – unless you are a Labour MP.
Readers of the Daily Mail understand that livings must be earned. There is no alternative but to stagger from our pits, eyeball the grotesque spectacle in the bathroom mirror and confront the future.
Without work we cannot pay the mortgage, fill the supermarket trolley or turn up the heating. Everyone knows this – except Labour MPs.
Last year Sir Keir Starmer took a terrible drubbing. Little went right for him. The economy stalled, public sector workers went on strike, school standards drooped, the European Union played its usual childish games, farmers brought Parliament Square to a halt, trans rights hit the legal buffers, small-boat crossings increased, medical waiting lists swelled, anti-Semitism festered and the government’s poll ratings sank.
None of this should have been a surprise. It’s what socialism does.
While the United States, Italy, Argentina and others (including the British public) have been surging to the Right, Westminster has drifted the other way.
The consequences should jolt Labour MPs out of their delusions. But don’t count on it. Left-wing MPs believe in higher taxes, more bureaucracy, more welfare handouts. Tax hikes make multi-millionaires emigrate. This is what happened in 2025. Higher taxes also force businesses to sack workers. Sure enough, unemployment rose.
Rachel Reeves forced inheritance tax on family farms. Apparently she had ‘no idea’ the policy would be unpopular. How can any senior politician be so naive? Farms closed, at least one unfortunate farmer killed himself, and protesting tractors caused traffic jams in central London.
While the United States, Italy, Argentina and others (including the British public) have been surging to the Right, Westminster has drifted the other way, Quentin Letts writes
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband says the world will respect our ‘global leadership’ on Net Zero
Some Labour MPs finally took notice. The reason Ms Reeves diluted the policy just before Christmas was that several of her backbenchers were calling for her resignation. She U-turned to save her job.
We can but hope that the same will soon happen on Net Zero. Leftists (who include Lib Dems and the Greens) are weirdly attached to a policy that is pushing up our energy bills while China and India burn more coal.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband says the world will respect our ‘global leadership’ on Net Zero. Rival countries are more likely to think: ‘What idiots the British are.’
Sir Keir must know Net Zero is problematic. Why else did he try to move Mr Miliband to a different ministry last September? Mr Miliband refused to budge. But you can probably do that only once.
Delusions prevail elsewhere. The Left believes we can continue to borrow billions and not worry about the consequences. Financial markets have adjusted their borrowing rates accordingly, making government bonds more expensive.
The Left wants to increase international aid, even though that means borrowing yet more from those usurious markets. The government is imposing new employment regulations. Entrepreneur Sir James Dyson concluded that the Starmer Government had ‘given up on manufacturing’.
The innocent bystander, listening to this tale of woe, might be tempted to say: ‘Starmer is bound to be replaced soon, so let’s not worry too much.’
If only that were true. Sir Keir is indeed in danger of being challenged for the premiership but that will only push him – and us, unfortunately – further to the Left.
A rumoured Labour leadership contender is Wes Streeting, the current Health Secretary
The same parliamentary arithmetic that forced Rachel Reeves to U-turn on the family farms tax will, sadly, prevent Sir Keir or any obvious successor from taking sensible policy decisions.
To understand this, look at the Labour activists who will choose any new Labour leader.
They are hot-to-trot Lefties. Many of them are Corbynites, critical of British values, obsessed with Palestine, gender politics, climate shroud-waving and union militancy. That is why Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband are so fancied to replace our sub-standard PM.
Mrs Rayner is still rancid with the tax scandal that removed her from ministerial office in September, but she is the plaything of Labour’s trade union backers.
Miliband was rejected by the voters in 2015 and since then has become only dorkier and dafter – yet he is liked by Labour’s rank and file. Every ugly duckling has its adoring mother-duck, after all.
Another rumoured leadership contender is Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary. He stands a little to the Right of his party, so he has been trying to compensate for that by making fanatically pro-EU noises.
This is crazy politics in two respects. First, you never extract a better deal from Brussels by sucking up to its arrogant overlords. They see such positioning as a sign of weakness.
Second, it will lose Labour electoral support. Working-class voters, who so strongly opted to leave the EU nine years ago and who repeated that message in the 2019 general election, will only be driven into the arms of Reform or the Conservatives by such a stance.
The Leftist rot began in some areas years ago. Anthony Crosland, a Labour education secretary in the 1960s, set about dismantling grammar schools. His work is being continued by our current Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, who is waging sour war not only on private schools, which have been hit by VAT, but also on free schools and Blairite academies.
Dogmatic egalitarians think it doesn’t matter if schools and universities fail to produce an intellectual elite.
Does common sense not tell us that we need tomorrow’s scientists, engineers, soldiers, teachers and even politicians to be as clever as possible? Of course. But that does not fit with the Left’s ideology, so common sense is ignored.
For decades elitism has been disowned by Whitehall and by our national institutions, not least the BBC. Oxford and Cambridge universities relaxed their entry exams. Minority quotas were introduced for admissions. This made the university vice-chancellors (on their distinctly elite salaries) feel wonderfully noble but it did nothing for academic standards. My son is studying for a university degree in China. He is made to work twice as hard as my daughters were at their British universities.
The difference in expectations is remarkable. How does any Left-wing MP think this won’t affect our two nations’ respective prospects?
The Left’s soggy thinking has tainted the arts, sport, entertainment, manners and even diet. We were told formal drawing skills were no longer essential for fine art, that rhyming poetry was old hat, youngsters need no longer dress smartly or speak clearly and that it was ‘judgmental’ to comment on people’s weight.
All this has only made us less aspirational. Far from making us more equal, it grottified our country and denied clever low-income youngsters a glimpse of the excellence to which they might rise. A country of sloppy standards becomes lawless.
Then came the trans nonsense, when youngsters were told they could change gender on a whim. Female could become male. Red could become green. Truth was no longer a hard certitude, it was a feeling. The Left really had rewritten the facts of life. Newspaper cartoonists have a convention. When they draw the departing year they depict a stooped old man with a scythe, whereas the new year is a chubby infant in its nappy. For Sir Keir Starmer’s Britain, alas, there is little that looks innocent about 2026. A cartoonist might be excused for drawing the incoming year as a skinhead with a cudgel.
Our once-tolerant society is disintegrating. Knife crime, particularly in London, is horrendous. Respect for the police has fallen. Graffiti has returned to the Tube with a vengeance.
Abandoning the two-child limit on benefits was the Left’s worst mistake last year. A relatively small number of families will soon receive thousands more pounds a year – money that will be taken from taxes paid by the rest of us.
A three-child couple with a joint income of just £10,000 will, after benefits, be as rich as a single person on a salary of £140,000. It’s mad. Left-wing MPs rejoice in ‘the redistribution of wealth’. The rest of us wonder why anyone bothers to go out to work.
For most of Earth’s inhabitants, life is far harder. Illness, tiredness, discomfort, boredom, suppression, squalor: for billions, these are everyday experiences. Of the world’s population of eight billion people, 700million are estimated to live in extreme poverty. Some 44 per cent of humanity lives on less than £5.07 a day. Yet Starmer’s Britain is giving financial assistance to people so they pocket 46 times that sum.
For as long as the United States adhered to the post-1940s security settlement, Western Leftists saw no reason to alter their ways.
Last January, Donald Trump returned to the White House. Washington DC no longer feels obligation to defend a Europe whose governing class is indolent and scornful of Christian values.
The problem can no longer be denied. Hard decisions are needed, the sooner the better.
Most of the obvious solutions are on the Right. In defence that means rearmament, stronger borders and in some countries a return to conscription.
On immigration it means less indulgence of legal challenges to deportations. On energy it means dumping Net Zero and using our own resources, including fracked gas. On prisons it means sticking foreign prisoners on planes back to their own countries.
On tax it means giving incentives to entrepreneurs and shop owners and publicans rather than driving them out of business.
Prime arable land should be used for food-production, not solar panels. Schools and universities must be allowed to use a measure of selection.
In foreign affairs (for instance, on the Chagos Islands) we must put raw national interest above elusive concepts of international law. That may mean ignoring the UN or international tribunals that have been taken over by vindictive anti-colonialists making spurious demands for slavery reparations.
We must pursue a distinctly pro-British position, because no one else is going to. And when it comes to trade deals and regulatory agreements, we must avoid being sucked back into a European Union that plainly resents us.
Labour MPs are putting party before country at a time when British voters are becoming more Right-wing. Support for striking doctors is dropping. The public, likewise, is increasingly fed up with mass-immigration, ‘two-tier’ policing and welfarism.
Sir Keir’s embrace of the EU’s Erasmus scholarship scheme – which will benefit a few privileged youngsters – is going to cost an extraordinary £810million a year. Erasmus might win Sir Keir a few votes from genteel Lib Dems but one suspects most Red Wall voters would far rather see that money spent on tax cuts.
The political alarm clock is ringing so hard, its clackers could soon fly off their moorings. Only the doziest Leftists can fail to wake.