Rachel Reevesrepeatedly tells her audience the world has changed.
Her plan is to grow the economy by taxing work and growing the state, the power of which Starmer really believes in.
Alongside Reeves stands, when not raving in some high-brow night club, Angela Rayner and her “pro-business, pro-worker, pro-growth” Employment Rights Bill.
Rayner will make employment more expensive; Reeves will give trade unions more power.
To no one’s surprise, our stability will increasingly resemble that of North Korea.
And for similar reasons, not least ideological.
Our obese state is devouring evermore future resources with gay abandon.
The cost of government increased by close to 250 per cent in the decade to 2025.
The taxpayer’s collective bill is now £1.2trillion, 41 per cent of the national income.
For services, some wags maintain, as we laughed.
The official workforce in the United Kingdom stands at around 34 million.
Around a fifth, though, are fully subsidised: they work in the public sector.
Contrary to what the latter might honestly believe, they do not pay taxes.
They do see PAYE subtractions from their nominal salaries, are charged VAT and pay council taxes, but these are merely a rebate to the State.
They arestill a 100 per cent burden on the private sector remuneratedtaxpayer, as are theirperks, fromcredit cards to pensions.
Keir Starmer is about to give away what remains of our sovereignty in the name of net zero - Alex Story
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Not to comment on their productivity or desirability, they nevertheless never contribute to public coffers. They stand on the liability side of the equation.
The consequence is that the revenue-generating workforce in the United Kingdom is just 28 million.
On these fragile shoulders weighs the full burden of the British state.
In addition, 10 million are benefit claimants, out of a 41 million working-age population (discounting the tens of millions of under 16s and over 65s).
To these, as of October 2024, must be reckoned the disabled, a quarter of 16s to 65s, according to House of Commons research.
That segment will inevitably overlap with the broader benefit claimant population, but they do represent another very heavy obligation on actual taxpayers.
The disability numbers, on their own, are eyebrow-raising.
Indeed, as comparison, according to the United Nations, only five per cent of the Somalian population lived with disabilities as recently as 2021.
Closer to home in Ukraine, as of 2023, 8.4 per cent of the working-age population was disabled, an increase of 1.4 times “compared to pre-war levels”, official sources estimated.
There are three to four times more disabled in the UK than in Ukraine or Somalia respectively.
Somalia is one of the world’s poorest countries; Ukraine fighting a very serious war. Britain, on the other hand, was one of the richest and is only fighting a cultural one.
With such cumulative burdens crushing a shrinking working population, we are not stable but decomposing.
Growth might help but absent any real large-scale reform to the state it will remain illusory.
Only immigration, our experts fervently believe, can deliver the short-term growth that Reeves and Starmer need for the pound sterling to keep some incidental value and the country from turning fully into a European Venezuela.
Immigration is seductive to economists and politicians alike because theory suggests that population growth leads to economic growth.
Thankfully, unlike the Hermite Kingdom of North Korea, we have no borders.
Our aggregate growth, if any, will mainly come, then, from immigration, much of which will come from countries where Mohammed is seen as the example for the whole of mankind to follow.
As an aside, we can expect ever more exotic religious celebrations.
One such being Ramadan, which seems at first glance, to be a fun justification for cornucopian nocturnal feasting, requiring a full daytime’s rest, or “fast”, from glutenous eating in time for the next orgic dawn-to-dusk bacchanalia to restart afresh at the following sundown.
An amusing side-effect of this religious fast feast is a near doubling of constipation rates among followers of the peace creed, according to the National Library of Medicine.
Leaving aside the benefits of mass immigration though practice tells a very different story.
Population growth, in a rotting state such as ours, is leading to the pauperisation of the productive taxpaying population as the number and strident demands of those living off the sweat of his brow accumulates.
Times have not changed. They have remained what they always were.
Bad governance always leads to failure.
Too many are feeding off the productive few.
What makes this position eminently worse is that our leadership believes in paying to give away what collectively belongs to us, impoverishing us even more.
A few examples to make a bitter pill bitterer yet.
The Chagos Islands never belonged to Mauritius. As the British Empire retreated, the United Kingdom bought them in 1965 from Mauritius in perpetuity, out of politeness presumably.
Now, Starmer proposes to spend our money to give them away to the very people we paid to secure them.
In the field of security, Britain recently proposed to help Ukraine and to contribute magnanimously, with our taxes, to Europe’s defence.
However, the French, backed by the European Union, felt that we could only do so if we gave away our sovereign waters to them, missing the irony of the UK being asked to give away her sovereignty to better help a distant country keep hers.
Our government, if precedent serves, will comply and demand that we be grateful for the humiliation.
To the French and the EU, it is noteworthy, fishing and war carry equal weight.
Further, Starmer and team are preparing to give away what remains of our sovereignty by accepting (again) the jurisdiction of a foreign, and partial, court, to align with European Union net zero laws.
To give so grandly on this topic is rather odd. After all, the UK is way ahead of the EU in terms of industrial and agricultural self-harm.
The UK parliament passed the 2008 Climate Change Act, a law drafted by the then Secretary of State for the Environment and Climate Change, Ed Miliband.
In that time, CO2 emissions dropped to 50 per cent of the arbitrary 1990 baseline, whereas the EU saw their numbers drop by only a quarter.
Industrial output fell at a similar pace.
Starmer, we notice, pays to take and to give – always with other people’s money.
Against Reeves’ claims though, times have not changed. They remain, brutally, the same.
If you give all you have, you end up destitute.
If you believe your country’s sovereignty to be meaningless, she will be controlled by someone else, whose interests are not those of your people.
If you punish those who work to benefit those who don’t, the number of the latter will grow until the edifice crashes down.
More broadly, if you give away that which is not yours to give, you are a nothing more than a thief.
Reeves is not facing changing times; she is facing the immutable rules of life.
And, for a Progressive, there is no more humbling lesson.
