Starmer and the government of disservice

During the run-up to the 2024 U.K. election I was busy explaining that the “anti-establishment” party Reform UK was actually an establishment charade.  In the meantime, I ignored the threat from Starmer’s Labour Party as it was a given that their policies would be a dreadful combination of Big State intervention and globalist Agenda 2030 socialism.

Starmer really set out his stall in his September 2021 paper for the Fabian Society called the Road Ahead¹.  Before diving into the paper, I wanted to repeat my belief that politics is, to a large extent, driven by one’s world view and specifically of man’s relationship to God (or the universe, if you prefer).  I am a subscriber to the view that rights are God-given and inalienable and cannot become dependent upon the usually flawed and occasionally corrupt decisions of men and women sitting in a building in Westminster, London.  I also believe John Curran’s assessment that there are always people trying to steal your rights in order to enhance their own power, his warning from 1790 is really timeless:

Sir Kier Starmer is clearly a believer in Big Government and his whole paper is laced with calls for the government to grab the commanding heights of the economy and to interfere in all aspects of human life.  I wanted to focus on the lessons that he seems to have drawn from the COVID debacle, in particular he calls for “a better, bolder, brighter future, one in which we learn the lessons of the pandemic and build a new society”.  The document rails against individualism and this is a common theme in far Left circles, SAGE SPI-B member Professor Reicher’s dystopian text Together Apart also believed that the draconian COVID response was an excellent step on the path to collectivisation².

The main lesson that I drew from the pandemic is that the Government needs to be restrained wherever possible and that it never had the right to lock-up its own citizens, let alone coerce them into taking dangerous and ineffective mRNA gene therapy product.  The lockdowns imposed by government, with enthusiastic support from Starmer’s Labour Party, achieved nothing in terms of disease control³ whilst inflicting enormous damage on people’s health⁴ and the country’s financial position.  In fact the COVID response is a fantastic case for small government, properly restrained within firm boundaries. 

As part of the fantasy narrative pushed by Sir Keir Starmer he boasts that “It was the NHS that stepped up most spectacularly during the crisis.”  This again is fiction, since the first thing that happened in the run-up to COVID was that the NHS discharged 37,500 patients in March 2020.  You could perhaps justify this overreaction if you were foolish enough to believe Professor Ferguson’s perennially wrong models, but the fact that the hospitals were largely empty in April 2020 demonstrated that the model was a hoax (something I identified in March 2020)⁵.  But instead of reversing the overreaction, beds stayed empty and deaths at home skyrocketed during the pandemic.  There is no way that this could be described as stepping-up, instead patients were sacrificed for the benefit of the system. 

Another major policy area is the wholesale acceptance of the climate hysteria, despite that fact that hundreds of extraordinarily well qualified scientists have denounced climate change hysteria⁶.  Sir Kier Starmer then spins an impossible lie that he will both tackle the confected climate crisis, whilst improving living standards.  These are really mutually exclusive objectives since the cost of meeting the net zero targets could be around £ 3 trillion⁷ and will involve replacing reliable power generating capacity with unreliable power generating capacity.  These gigantic costs will not generate any tangible benefits for consumers and will at best lead to undetectable reductions of CO2 levels.  There is much truth in the summary that net zero will leave British citizens both colder and poorer.

Sir Keir Starmer does understand that the implementation of socialist dystopia will be hampered by free speech and he has increasingly put “misinformation”, which is likely to include dissent, in the state’s crosshairs.  He stated that “conspiracy theories, crankery, misinformation and hatred” are challenges that should be taken on.  Doubtless the warnings that we produced about the Imperial model being wrong, the lockdowns being deadly and the mRNA “vaccines” being unsafe would be classified by Starmer’s government as misinformation, despite the fact they all proved to be accurate.

Most worryingly of all, a separate Fabian Society paper from October 2023 called Plans for Power makes clear that any socialist revolution will be made irreversible and put beyond the reach of future parliaments⁸.  They intend to disperse power into a labyrinth of leftist quangos; “In particular, creating more dispersed centres of power within the public sector and stronger partnerships involving businesses, unions and the third sector will make it harder for the right to unpick progress in the future…”.

There are many other inconsistencies and problems in the Starmer document, along with some reasonable suggestions, but in a nutshell the document is largely an extension of Blair’s “modernisation” project.

I am beginning to get a better understanding of Dr. Joe Boot’s position set out in his book The Ruler of Kings that when a society rejects Christianity, this is not replaced by some kind of rational humanism, but rather with neo-Pagan religious substitutes.  With regards to state overreach, Dr. Joe Boot suggests that “We will either be faithful office-bearers calling the state to order in light of the Word of God and His creation ordinances or we will submit ourselves to the arbitrary dictates of the autonomous man and his reason, enabling the ancient idolatry of statism to give shape to the future of our children.”

Sir Kier Starmer’s vision is indeed the idolatry of statism and represents a negation of many features that made the West successful.  The results of heavy handed government meddling in the economy, electricity supply and people’s health will doubtless lead to the same tragic outcomes that have been witnessed from similar experiments.  There will be some selected winners from this overreach, it is likely that one of Labour’s biggest donors, Dale Vance, will benefit greatly from increased green subsidies for his £ 540 million turnover wind and solar businesses⁹.  However, for Joe Public, Labour policies will likely have a negative outcome. 

The tragedy of the 2024 U.K. election is that we embraced our captors and ended up with an even more oppressive government.  The grass roots parties, who stood up against COVID tyranny like Heritage and the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom received very little support at the ballot box.  The large non-voting block (around 40% of the public) does not seem to have coalesced into a force that could push back on government overreach.  It looks like we will collectively have a long and painful lesson in order to relearn the fact that oppressive government is not the solution to anything.

Let me have your thoughts below and please don’t forget to circulate our material and support our work, we have already had to suspend various parts of our activities due to lack of funding as only a very small proportion of our subscribers pay for the service.

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model¹⁰, he is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach (www.thinkingcoalition.com)

1. https://fabians.org.uk/publication/the-road-ahead/

2. https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/together-apart/book275359

3. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13484

4. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/907616/s0650-direct-indirect-impacts-covid-19-excess-deaths-morbidity-sage-48.pdf

5. https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/readying-the-nhs-and-adult-social-care-in-england-for-covid-19/

6. https://clintel.org/world-climate-declaration/

7. https://www.thegwpf.org/publications/3-trillion-and-counting/

8. https://fabians.org.uk/publication/plans-for-power/

9.

10. https://twitter.com/ThinkingSlow1/status/1257578069797339137?s=20