Socialism means never having to say you’re sorry

‘When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” So said ex-president Richard Nixon. Perhaps he has inspired Keir Starmer. “When Labour does it, it’s not immoral.”

We know now the simple fact that Sir Keir has taken more gifts than any other MP. Still it’s worth looking at the detail on Parliament’s website. The expensive hospitality tickets at half the Premier League grounds in England. The free holiday. The National Theatre tickets. The “Jingle Bell Ball”, whatever that is. The specs that cost the same as a family’s annual holiday. The “work clothing”, as it is delicately described – perhaps he was hoping we would think they were overalls for this horny-handed son of a toiling toolmaker?

Clearly Sir Keir agrees with “Big Bill” Haywood, the American union leader and Soviet sympathiser, who said of his own lifestyle “Nothing’s too good for the working class.”

It’s true we didn’t know quite what to expect from Labour in government, but one thing I did think we’d get was puritanism. A stern, moralising, we-know-best policy, that familiar sheer socialist oddness, veganism, anti-smoking, compulsory health checks in the office, all administered by the kind of people who actually enjoy sorting their rubbish and think everyone else should too.

That curious earnestness and detachment from ordinary pleasures, that belief that the right public policy can control human nature, which George Orwell mocked in the 1930s and John Betjeman parodied in his poem Huxley Hall in the 1950s, “the deep depression of this bright hygienic hell”, the “free thinker” sitting in some bleak nameless new town waiting for his weekly lecture on “sex and civics”.

Well it’s true that most of us are going to get exactly that treatment. Wes “Savonarola” Streeting is clear we must all give up our pleasures and learn to live within the stern dictates of the NHS. Bridget Phillipson will force on us her new history-free, diversity-rich, socially conscious national curriculum. Cold Sir Keir’s atheism is fine, but silently praying near an abortion clinic will land you in court.

But it doesn’t look like the PM and his team are going to live like that. Sue Gray gets the highest ever salary for a special adviser. Labour donors and political cronies are shoehorned in on the public purse. Lord Alli gives Angela Rayner a holiday in New York. And for proud Sir Keir at the top of this merry band of brothers, let the free football and the Taylor Swift tickets roll.

Some Labour ministers can see how all this comes across, to judge by their gritted teeth and flashes of anger this week. I don’t blame them. Perhaps they can see it doesn’t look good when pensioners face the winter cold while a Niagara of public cash pours out to the brothers in Aslef. Perhaps they don’t like it when haughty Sir Keir says he needs VIP treatment at the football to avoid mixing with the hoi polloi in the cheap(ish) seats? Maybe some still have some residual socialist conscience, some distant echo of Welsh valley non-conformism, some folk memory of Stafford Cripps and austerity under Attlee?

Or perhaps they remember Harold Wilson’s comment that “the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing”. Even Sir Keir quotes this from time to time, though perhaps less so recently. In 2021 he said, “Our own moral crusade must be to address the inequalities and injustices that this crisis has so brutally exposed.” Is that the injustice in allocating the hospitality boxes at Arsenal?

It’s this self image that is the problem. The truth is that Labour politicians think they are good people because their cause is just. So they can safely be exposed to temptations that would lead astray lesser, fragile, mortals such as members of the Conservative Party. How can you mere voters suspect such good people as us of having impure motives? Cut us some slack. Don’t you realise we’re trying to build the New Jerusalem here?

Not every crusade, of course, reached Jerusalem. The Fourth Crusade, in 1204, got no further than Constantinople, sacked it, and took most of the gold and the art home to their leaders’ palaces. Back in Europe, they couldn’t understand what they’d done wrong. Perhaps that’s the sort of crusade Sir Keir sees himself leading?

Until July 4, Starmer couldn’t see a government minister without accusing them of venality. Labour repeatedly accused the Tory mayor of Tees Valley, Ben Houchen, of corruption on the basis of the most flimsy evidence. But now it has changed its tune. The deep deep silence of government prevails. Why answer questions from the little people? After all, we are the masters now.

It won’t do. High and mighty Sir Keir needs to show some humility and change his and his team’s behaviour. Moralising Leftist politics doesn’t excuse taking for free what others must pay for. Everyone is subject to temptation, even socialists. Human nature doesn’t change.

Betjeman’s narrator in Huxley Hall ends his reflections:
“Not my vegetarian dinner, not my lime-juice minus gin, 
“Quite can drown a faint conviction that we may be born in Sin.”

Think on it, Sir Keir.