Labour voters stand warned

The warning was issued by Robert Walpole, 1^st Earl of Oxford, the dominant political figure in the first half of the 18^th century. (Does anyone know why he was 1^st Earl of Oxford? After all, the title goes back to the early 12^th century.)

The facts of his life are widely known. Walpole was de facto the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, and the longest-serving one in history. He was also the first PM to move into 10 Downing Street, making this address synonymous with the office.

What’s less known is something I pride myself on discovering. Walpole was a seer who saw the future more clearly than most people see the past. In that capacity, he cast a prospective glance over tomorrow’s elections and passed his verdict.

Labour politicians and their fans are more triumphant the day before the General Election than few parties have ever been the day after. As far as they are concerned, the biggest landslide in history is just around the corner, and Britain is about to become effectively a one-party state. The Tories will be too marginalised to offer any meaningful opposition, and Labour will unerringly steer the ship towards the rocks of socialism.

Walpole himself was no stranger to marginalising the Tories. Under his leadership the Whigs ran practically unopposed for at least 20 years, with the Tories reduced to a handful of seats.

In general, this sort of arrangement is rarely beneficial to the country. But in particular, the country may still do well if the dominant party pursues good policies. Walpole did: he lowered taxes, strengthened exports, promoted tolerance and moderation, established a solid working relationship between Crown and Parliament.

Today’s Labour Party may well achieve the same domination as Walpole’s Whigs, but their policies are exactly the opposite. They will raise taxes with suicidal abandon, stifling Britain’s competitiveness and hence her exports. They will treat the monarchy as a mildewed artefact belonging, next to the House of Lords, in what an earlier socialist called the “rubbish bin of history”. And instead of tolerance and moderation they’ll impose tyrannical rule by woke fiat.

Listening to their jubilant shrieks on the eve of the elections, Walpole is smiling wryly. “They may ring their bells now; before long they will be wringing their hands,” he says, repeating his adage of some 300 years ago.

So they will, but our constitution says that wringing their hands will be about the only thing they’ll be able to do about it. It’s extremely hard to replace a government before its five-year term has run out. The people will have to take to the streets, French-style, but this political stratagem doesn’t come naturally to the British.

Even when the country comes to a standstill, as she did in the 1970s, Labour still completed its term. They were only ousted in the 1979 General Election, leaving Margaret Thatcher with the Augean stables of a country to clean out.

Barring a cataclysmic internecine revolt, a party with any majority in Parliament rarely has problems passing the laws it desires. And if the Labour majority is as vast as predicted, Britain will remain a multi-party state only technically. In essence, Starmer will have almost as much power as Xi has in China, and he won’t even have to rely on the secret police to get his way.

Anyone with a modicum of political nous realises that the policies Labour will be likely to pursue will quickly take Britain to the brink of disaster, and ‘quickly’ is the operative word. Effective opposition will come not from the Tories but from the markets, which don’t like socialism any more than I do.

Once the socialists start implementing their time-disproven policy of high tax, high spend, the markets will push the SOS button. Wealthy people who have to share their wealth around even if they aren’t especially charitable will flee, taking their businesses with them. Global corporations based in Britain will move to sunnier economic climes. The pound will collapse.

Again speaking in generalities, that last development is supposed to make our exports more competitive. But Walpole knew that British producers could only take advantage of that if domestic taxes were low enough to give them some freedom of movement. That won’t be the case under Labour.

Our economy will be further crippled by Labour’s fanatic commitment to net-zero madness. The Tories are feigning the same psychiatric disorder, but upward pressure from their grassroots may force them to be more flexible. No such pressure from the Labour rank-and-file: they are much more doctrinaire than they were even under Wilson and Callaghan.

The economic damage Labour will cause in the first few months (only my natural prudence prevents me from saying ‘weeks’) will be dire. But it’ll be minor compared to what they’ll do to the social fabric of British society. Not to cut too fine a point, they’ll rip it to tatters.

Alien immigrants, both legal and illegal, will flood in, and Labour will do all they can to make sure the mighty stream will flow unabated. During Blair’s tenure, so far the most disastrous in history, Labour politicians learned how to perpetuate their power by importing ready-made Labour voters owing their livelihood to social handouts.

Once those sluice gates are flung open, the stream will be difficult to stop even if the ruling party wants to, which Labour won’t. The Tories would want to, in theory, but in practice they lack the nerve and gumption to introduce the kind of measures that can succeed. Still, half-hearted efforts to stem the flow are better than none – and certainly better than concerted efforts to do the opposite.

Our armed forces will be degraded even more than they are now, and we won’t be forearmed even though we have been forewarned. So far Starmer has promised to start spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence “when conditions allow”. That’s the Labour for never.

Though incapable of waging war on foreign predators, a Labour Britain will be plunged into aggressive class warfare domestically. So far, Starmer has only hinted at the offensive he has in mind, but the hints (such as the plan to impose a 20 per cent VAT on private school fees) are clear enough. What Corbyn extolled, Starmer will do.

Blair taught his socialist brethren how to throw a camouflage net of centrist phraseology over their essentially subversive nature. Starmer learned the lesson well and, having ousted Corbyn, he has assiduously cultivated the image of Walpole-like moderation.

Yet nothing in his political life paints him any colour other than red. When he was Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer never saw a criminal he couldn’t free. What do you suppose his stand on law and order will be when he’s PM with virtually a single-party majority?

Incidentally, extremists of the whole spectrum of hues have learned the same trick. In France, for example, Marine Le Pen has worked tirelessly to change the image – not the essence – of her party, shifting it (the image) away from its original neo-fascist design. And Mélenchon has been doing exactly the same with his Trotskyists.

It doesn’t take much perceptiveness to see what’s lurking underneath the camouflage, but, alas, more than the voting masses possess. That’s why the sage people who lovingly nurtured Britain’s constitution for centuries knew how vital it was to counterbalance the elected power of the Commons with the hereditary power of king and aristocracy.

Walpole, for example, was rather the opposite of a populist. He now listens to the ringing bells in the mournful knowledge that the future points to a lot of wringing hands. Alas, there’s nothing he can do about it now. Neither can we, come to think of it.