Quote of the day 12th February 2024

"I fear that Starmer will have the shortest-ever honeymoon as prime minister, and that the new government will become unpopular very quickly."

John Rentoul, Chief Political correspondent of  "The Independent," writing in that paper that in his view Labour is not ready for government and if Labour win the coming election things will go wrong for them very quickly. You can read the full article at:

Will Keir Starmer enjoy the shortest ever honeymoon as prime minister? | The Independent.


A couple of other extracts from the article:

'As a former Labour special adviser said to me, it is only now that the £28bn has been stood down that “people are talking about what it would have paid for – it got in the way of talking about what actually needs to be done with the money; it was classic big statism for the sake of it”.

More worryingly, the retreat suggests that “Starmer needs to be biffed on the nose by a problem – see also gender self-ID – before he deals with it, which bodes ill for what he’ll be like in office”.

Sure enough, here is the next problem that he doesn’t seem to have seen coming: the £28bn has gone, but the “mission” for which it was supposed to pay remains. Labour promises that the entire UK electricity supply will be carbon-free by 2030. This is a target that people in the energy industry think would be impossible even with unlimited funding, and yet Starmer and Reeves say they will achieve it with less funding than they were promising before.'


'Professor Dieter Helm, who was Reeves’s economics tutor at Oxford, is scathing in the Financial Times: “Having set an unachievable target, and then come up with an incoherent plan to achieve it, the plan has effectively been abandoned but the target remains. This is not a credible energy policy.”

It is not clear which is more worrying: that Starmer and Reeves don’t know that the target is green pie in the sky, or that they don’t care. Maybe they hope to swivel once in office to say that they never thought they would hit it; what they meant was that they would try really hard to get there faster than a Conservative government would – the Conservative target of 2035 is after all already testing enough.'

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