What’s your score out of six?

If anyone able to add two and two looks at Labour’s spending plans, he’ll see they’ll have to raise taxes. But which taxes?

They’ve pledged not to raise income tax, National Insurance tax and VAT. Taking them at their word, we have to look at the areas left for them to plunder.

This explains the headline in today’s Mail: Labour Will Target Pensioners, Drivers, Savers and Homeowners. Adding businesses and council taxes to that, we get your starter for six.

In the interests of full disclosure, my score is five out of six (I no longer own a business). What’s yours? I’d suggest that few families in Britain would be untouched by this six-pronged offensive.

And yet those very families are marching to polling stations where they are predicted to give Labour the biggest majority a single party has won for 200 years. The words ‘turkeys’ and ‘Christmas’ spring to mind.

I’ve been banging on about the same subject for weeks: the decision to vote against the ruling party has to be a two-part process. The first part is deciding where the government has gone wrong. The second is believing that the other lot would have done better – or will do better, given the chance.

Considering the legacy of Gordon Brown’s economics that left Britain with the greatest deficit in history, and also the global economic downturn and especially the Covid force majeure, the Tories haven’t done as badly as they could have done, although not as well as they should have done.

For example, bringing inflation under control was an impressive achievement, in view of the billions that had to be printed to cover the emergency cost of Covid and the resulting pandemic of state-funded slacking that infected millions of Britons.

Realigning the economy after Brexit was another challenge, and I can only repeat the same thing: the Tories could have done better, but it was easy to do a whole lot worse.

The government’s efforts to curb illegal immigration have oscillated between non-existent and inadequate. And here we get to the second part of the decision process that any responsible voter with half a brain has to go through.

What would Labour have done better? Its immigration policy is based on the old concept of the more, the merrier. They have a vested interest in an inflow of migrants, most of whom would become the state’s dependents and hence supporters of Labour, the big-state, big-spend party.

Johnson’s government exacerbated the Covid damage by locking the country down for the best part of two years. But Labour campaigned to extend the lockdown for another six months, which would have made the damage even worse.

The Tories haven’t taken full advantage of the liberties won by Brexit. Specifically, they made immigration control well-nigh impossible by cravenly refusing to leave the jurisdiction of the European Court and ECHR.

Yet the Starmer government – and also the grassroots of his party – are predominantly Remainers. They’ll seek closer ties with the EU and hence a tighter noose on the throat of British sovereignty.

Tory grandees were mostly Remainers too, but upward pressure from the rank and file in their party forced them to call the 2016 referendum. The British then voted for shaking the EU dust from their feet in greater numbers than they’ve ever voted for anything else. The Tories have played fast and loose with that popular demand, but Labour will ignore it altogether.   

The spending policies mooted by Labour will guarantee a climbing inflation rate, and their taxation policies will stunt growth, such as it was under the Tories. This is a matter of fact, not opinion. In line with their ideology, every Labour government in history has increased spending, raised taxes and pushed the national debt up to suicidal levels.

The Tories have done nothing to stop wokery, that blight that threatens to destroy what little is left of British civilisation. Yet Labour will do much worse: they’ll use wokery to stifle any freedom of expression and promote every idiotic cause, the more perverse the better.

Again, this isn’t a matter of opinion. Just look at their leader, the knee-taking Starmer who believes that some British women (34,000, to be exact) have penises. Tory ministers are wishy-washy on wokery, but at least Sunak never paid genuflecting obeisance to revolting masses and he seems to be sure about which sex has which primary characteristics.  

To sum up: the Tories are rubbish. But it takes a huge amount of irresponsible idiocy to believe that Labour could have done, or will do, better. They won’t. They’ll do immeasurably worse, and they won’t waste any time doing it.

Everything in public life is fundamentally interrelated, so my next comment is on a different but not unrelated subject. This morning’s Sky News, a solidly Labour channel, devoted its longest segment to the plight of Palestinian babies.

Television being a visual medium, the channel helpfully provided a kaleidoscope of most distressing images. Skeletal babies dying of hunger because no formulas are available, and their mothers can’t breastfeed because they themselves are undernourished. Old people barely able to stand up. Weeping and wailing everywhere.

All that is heart-rending, but Sky’s commentary is mind-numbing. Without saying outright it’s all Israel’s fault, the correspondents achieved the same effect by squeezing the word ‘access’ into every other sentence. Yes, access to any war zone is always difficult, but who created the war zone?

The most rudimentary analysis would have been welcome. Yes, the plight of Gaza residents is awful, and no decent person wants to see images of dying babies. But elementary integrity would have demanded a short statement saying that those people only have Hamas to blame for their misfortunes.

Moreover, what we see on our screens is exactly the effect Hamas counted on when launching its stomach-churning attack on Israel. The plan worked: the Israelis responded as any self-respecting country would, the consequences were blamed on Israel, and that heroic country is rapidly running out of friends.

Hamas monsters are gleefully rubbing their hands: every dead baby is a blow delivered to Israel. QED.

Another news item has caught my eye. On his visit to the Ukraine, Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán offered a peace plan to President Zelensky.

To smooth the path to peace, the Ukrainians should lay down their arms unilaterally and hope the Russians will do the same. Now, since Orbán is Putin’s staunchest supporter among European leaders, I’m surprised the Ukraine invited him to visit in the first place. So far he has tried to block every tranche of supplies flowing to that suffering country, and Zelensky correctly sees Orbán as nothing but Putin’s henchman.

It takes a staggering amount of naivety to believe that Orbán came up with that incendiary idea on his own. He is clearly but a conduit of Putin’s plans, which couldn’t be clearer. For Orbán-Putin’s proposal is nothing but a demand for surrender.

That’s how Zelensky took it and, after taking a second or two to catch his breath, he rejected the ultimatum out of hand. It’s that causality again: it was Putin, not Zelensky, who started the war. It’s up to Putin, not Zelensky, to lay down his arms and sue for peace.

But Orbán is relaxed about that. He has done his bit. Now every Putinversteher will scream that Zelensky is a warmonger who rejects peace. And Orbán’s hot air has been paid for by Putin’s gas.