Voters should not be fooled by Starmer’s hollow words
You wouldn’t be human if, after 14 years, your hand this week didn’t pause before ticking the Conservative box on the ballot paper.
14 years is a long time for anyone to be in power. Add to that the near-daily scream of social media and voters could be forgiven for choosing anyone but my Party.
The “change” message is always a powerful message when delivered at the correct moment. But let’s be honest. Acting to “change” something because the media chorus and Labour says we should is not just a shallow reason, it is also foolhardy.
Imagine if we conducted the rest of our lives that way? Imagine if we popped down to our local village shop and declared: “I know you have always been there, and I know you do your best, and I know we have been through tough times together, but I have decided to go and shop for the next five years at the store 10 miles away.” Or if we did the same to our dentist or butcher or pub. Worse still, imagine if business owners closed down, making everyone redundant, because they felt like it.
The reality is that Labour’s “change” slogan is as shallow as it is hollow. It’s what lazy political parties use when they don’t want you to look in depth at their offerings. It’s the throw away slogan. The “nothing to see here” distraction.
It’s no wonder the pub bore of a man Nigel Farage has appeared on the scene at this very moment. Perfectly on cue, just like Private Walker from Dad’s Army offering nylons from the back of a van.
But I urge you to resist the social media battle cry of change. Because behind those hollow words is a Labour Party without a plan. A Labour Party which uses slogans as a substitute for substance. Take, for example, their pledge to not tax “working people”. What that really appears to mean is that they will tax business and wealth creation. They are still the party of Gordon Brown, the one which thought we were all idiots and wouldn’t notice the tax raid on pensions dividends.
The deception at the heart of these slogans is that these working people are the very same individuals who suffer the consequences of their employers being taxed more or relocating abroad. I read recently that the Labour candidate in Leeds North East has said his party will ban aerospace sales to the Middle East. If we do, we can kiss goodbye to tens of thousands of jobs and a defence industry that pays the tax he will need for the NHS.
We should not forget the enormity of what this country has been through. I remember sitting in a COBR meeting during the early days of the pandemic, when we really were worried that the NHS could collapse and the scale of deaths would be so huge that we would struggle to deal with the bodies. The whole international community were in the same boat. The rest of the West, like us, did what we could based on what we knew.
The furlough scheme, Eat Out to Help Out programme, and the world-beating vaccine roll out understandably cost billions. We were at war with the virus and wars are expensive. Estimates suggest that, not only did the UK spend over £400bn fighting Covid but, to this day, the effects of the pandemic are still costing the NHS an extra £5bn per annum at least.
Before Covid was Brexit, and after it came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Soaring energy costs drove up inflation, which of course impacted interest rates and mortgages – mine included. These events happened to us in the UK as well as our friends in Europe. They weren’t the result of a bad decision in Downing Street – as Labour would try and persuade you they were. Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have steadied the ship and our economy is starting to grow. Inflation has dropped to the 2 per cent target and I predict that, within weeks, interest rates will be cut.
There are some enduring truths in politics. In 1979 and 2010, Labour left the economy and country in a worse state than when they found it. Brown tripled the national debt, having inherited a balanced budget, and he didn’t have a coronavirus or a Russian invasion to contend with.
The reality is that Labour always runs out of other people’s money and fails to understand that without wealth creation there can be no growth. Change can only happen when the word is associated with someone who embodies change which, to be fair to New Labour, Tony Blair did. This time round Change plus Starmer is just a ploy and a cheap slogan. On Thursday, don’t vote for change for change’s sake. Vote for the Party that has actually had the respect for the voter and set out a plan.
Rt Hon Ben Wallace is a former secretary of state for defence
