From policing to tax, Keir is two-tier on everything
That the Labour backbench is not a drawer filled with especially sharp knives is a fact becoming clearer by the day. There’s the man from Runcorn with an apparent penchant for beating up his constituents outside a chippy. Or “slum landlord” MP Jas Athwal, accused of presiding over Dickensian squalor like some latter-day Wackford Squeers.
Even among such luminaries, there are few blunter knives than Dawn Butler MP. She is famous for her long-running campaign to raise awareness about homosexuality in giraffes (“90 per cent of them are gay”), her insistence that children are “born without sex” or her proud use of corporate gobbledegook: she once claimed to feel “belittled” by the fact that the word “upskilling” was not in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Engaging in what a particular type of Leftist views as harmless banter, Butler unwittingly unveiled another example of “two-tierism” in Labour’s Britain. Over the weekend, she shared a post describing Kemi Badenoch as the UK’s “most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class”. Never mind that Butler has previously called for other MPs to be sacked for similar incidents, nor that in 2022, Rupa Huq lost the whip for several months after describing Kwasi Kwarteng as “superficially black”. That was then; now in power, progressive race-baiting goes unpunished.
For all the pantomime nature of Labour’s hypocrisy here, there are far more insidious examples of two-tier Britain in action. We are moving towards a sharply-divided economic setup between the “chosen” public sector workers and their private sector counterparts. Not only is the public sector effectively exempted from paying the increase in employer NI contributions, with the Treasury allocating money to offset higher costs, the private sector will bear the brunt of Rachel Reeves’s IHT pensions raid.
The parliamentary Labour party seems to view the private sector primarily as a milch cow for maintaining the public sector. Astonishingly few of their number have ever set up a business or employed people (for a party obsessed with “lived experience”, this seems one sort that doesn’t bother them at all). Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds offers a striking example; his sole interaction with the private sector consists of a short stint as a solicitor in the late-noughties, sandwiched between various jobs in local and national politics. Not that this stopped him from, hilariously, lecturing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on how to run his business. Labour’s definition of “working people” clearly didn’t include employers, self-employed people, farmers and countless others slogging away in the productive side of the economy. Perhaps “work” only counts if it means working for the state.
In pre-election interviews, Labour frontbenchers insisted that their spending plans would be funded by a push for growth, rather than taxation. Last week’s budget made clear that their real priority is redistribution.
This is hardly surprising, but depressing nevertheless. Low growth begets a corresponding “zero-sum” mentality. Incapable of enhancing prosperity, the business of politics is limited to divvying up an ever-diminishing pool of spoils. You can detect this growing sense of bitterness in public discourse. News of the ongoing exodus of millionaires from Britain is often greeted with a nonchalant “who cares?”, or even “good riddance!” But supporters of an expansive welfare state should be especially worried; high-earners are essential to funding it. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for all their faults, understood this.
I have lost count of the number of high-flying friends who have left, or plan to leave, Britain for opportunities in countries offering a better chance of saving for the future. Again, the usual suspects might say, “good riddance”, but someone earning £100,000 a year pays more than £30,000 in income tax and NICs (before student loan or pension contributions), meaning that it would take at least six people earning £30,000 a year to cover the contribution of just one of these high-earners, who may also be subsidising services they never use through private healthcare and so on. Graduate higher-earners face marginal rates of 60+ per cent, perhaps even 100 per cent if they have young children and lose their “free” childcare entitlement beyond £100,000.
The response from progressives is usually “they’ve done well, so why should they complain?”, rather than worrying about unintended consequences, or thinking it a shame that more people don’t earn these kinds of salaries. What are piddling considerations like economic incentives when there’s petty class warfare to be waged?
Ever since The West Wing was screened, swathes of the British ruling class began to believe they were no longer governing a medium-sized monarchy in Western Europe, but were in fact holding the reins of the grand American republic. Politicians began speaking of the “separation of powers”. Bog-standard parliamentary assistants found themselves relabelled “chiefs-of-staff”. John Prescott became a “running mate”, instead of a pugnacious man from Hull.
With all eyes on the US election, it strikes me that we are “America-brained” in precisely the wrong way. If we could achieve a fraction of the USA’s growth prospects we’d be laughing. The Yanks are famously pleased for other people who’ve done well. In classic British style, we’ve stumbled on the worst of all possible worlds; America’s venom and culture war obsession with none of her positivity or economic drive.