LAST Friday marked the anniversary of Labour’s victory at the 2024 general election. I suspect I speak for many when I say that what’s unfolded over the last year has been a complete and utter disaster.
This has, put simply, been the worst government in my lifetime –an administration that has shown itself to be completely and utterly out of touch with the country it claims to represent and which has used its ‘loveless landslide’ to set about obliterating what remains of our once great country.
A Labour Party that anchored its mandate for power entirely in the pursuit of growth has instead shown the country, the markets, and the world that it has absolutely no idea what’s needed to build a growing economy.
The UK now has the highest tax burden since the late 1940s. The highest household and industrial energy prices in the Western world, thanks largely to the fanatical obsession with Net Zero. We are crippling businesses with a National Insurance tax rise that Labour said it would not deliver. And soon, mark my words, because of this disastrous start, there will soon be tax rises for every worker on these islands.
Labour’s record speaks for itself. This government has turned us into one of the slowest-growing economies in the advanced world and the largest exporter of millionaires, with a toxic cocktail of near-zero growth, petty class warfare against the affluent, and general incompetence pushing countless wealth-creators and major taxpayers to flee the country for good.
Along the way, Labour has consistently kicked the big challenges facing the country down the road, looking more like a student union than a serious party of government.
A reminder. Our country is currently spending £100billion every year just servicing the interest on our national debt. We are borrowing £150billion a year. And our debt is nearly 100 per cent of our overall income. Yet you would not know any of this were you to look at the decisions of this amateurish government.
Instead of trying to tackle this deep-rooted disease which, like an aggressive cancer, is rapidly metastasising across our society, Labour MPs even refused to pass a £5billion cut to welfare that goes nowhere near far enough but would at least have started to get some of the millions of working-age people in this country who are living on benefits back into work. Instead, we are still forecast to spend £100billion a year on sickness benefits by the end of the decade.
Our borders and territorial integrity, meanwhile, have been completely and consistently violated by a surge of illegal migration, which is not only making a mockery of Labour’s promise to secure the borders but our status as a sovereign, self-governing country that is able to look after its own people.
Under Labour’s hapless ‘smash the gangs’ strategy, which even the UK border chief now openly admits will not work, the number of illegal migrants who are crossing into the country on small boats has soared to a record high, up 50 per cent on the same time last year and up 80 per cent on two years ago.
As I’ve said before, a nation that cannot control its own borders is not a serious nation, and a country that cannot keep its people safe will not survive.
But this is precisely what Sir Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and Labour have reduced us to by prioritising the illegal migrants who break our laws over the hardworking British majority who uphold and respect our laws.
Even now, Labour refuse to declare a state of emergency despite this crisis delivering not just more illegal migrants than we have people in the British army but an assortment of rapists, murderers, ISIS sympathisers and alleged terrorists. Every time a boat is filmed arriving at our shores, the utter incompetence of the government and the UK state is laid bare for all to see.
Labour has even subjected the British people to the absurdity of having to watch the state use the British people’s money to outbid the British people in their own housing market, with private companies using taxpayers’ money to allow landlords to offer more favourable contracts to illegal migrants than they offer to the British people.
At the same time, Labour has remained stubbornly and dogmatically committed to an extreme policy of mass legal immigration, despite a large pile of evidence that makes it crystal clear this policy is further hollowing out our economy, exacerbating the housing crisis and fuelling crime, especially in London.
Like Starmer and his allies helping themselves to freebies from a Labour donor while the rest of the country struggle through the worst cost-of-living crisis since the Second World War, or the arrival of two-tier justice that is symbolised by Lucy Connolly being given a longer prison sentence for sending a tweet than members of the rape gangs, this Labour government has shown itself to have no understanding whatsoever of the sense of fair play that has long defined our culture and way of life.
A serious prime minister would look at the evidence and change course. Keir Starmer, instead, gave a speech about the issue before later saying he regretted giving the speech and then admitting he’d not even read it properly.
And a serious government, while we’re here, would not continue with the absurd lie that it can solve our country’s housing crisis while building 184,000 homes last year while adding 431,000 people, equivalent to a city the size of Coventry, to the population each year. The numbers simply do not make any sense.
Labour’s failing experiment with mass immigration hasn’t only contributed to the UK suffering the longest sustained slowdown in productivity in modern history and one of the weakest periods for GDP-per-capita on record; it is also now transplanting radically different, if not incompatible, cultures from the likes of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Eritrea, and Nigeria into these islands, undermining our much deeper sense of identity, history, values and way of life.
Tone-deaf and tin-eared, Starmer and his Labour MPs have consistently failed to grasp the mood of the nation, a failing that is symbolised by the fact it took the self-described party of the working class months to realise that holding an inquiry into the mass rape of white working-class children might be the right thing to do.
On this and other issues – from whom Labour Attorney General Lord Hermer chooses to defend, to how Keir Starmer suddenly decided to sell off our territory to a close ally of China – Labour has consistently and suspiciously appeared more interested in pleasing those who seek to hurt us than defending our own British people.
We saw this, too, in the speed at which Keir Starmer sold out British fisherman, British farmers, and British workers while offering an assortment of tax breaks and foreign aid to their counterparts in India and around the globe. No wonder a large majority of voters now say Labour does not understand ‘people like them’.
What many of these decisions reflect is a view of politics and power that Starmer himself made clear to Emily Maitlis in 2023, saying openly what everybody knows to be true: he prefers the elites in Davos over our democratically elected politics in Westminster. Implicit in this statement is what has come to define much of Labour’s premiership —a belief that elites are superior to the people.
Whether forcing us to return to unaccountable institutions in Brussels or defending a sprawling and highly political regime of ‘human rights’ conventions and laws that prevent us from deporting foreign nationals and controlling our borders, Starmer and Labour have routinely prioritised elites over the people who are forced to live with the consequences of these distant decisions.
And Labour’s done all this while undermining the traditions and traits that make these islands what they are. Over the last year, Labour has run roughshod over free speech, free expression and individual liberty, presiding over and expanding a regime of censorship that is completely alien on these islands.
Labour’s full-blown support for Orwellian non-crime hate incidents. The looming definition of ‘Islamophobia‘. Starmer’s casual use of smears like ‘far right’ to try to discredit public calls for a rape gang inquiry and, after the Southport atrocities, public protests over mass immigration. And the fact that, for the first time on record, the UK is no longer considered an ‘open’ country in a global ranking of free speech. All this reflects how Labour is, at root, an authoritarian regime that is instinctively more comfortable trying to shut down, rather than support, free expression.
One irony, common on today’s left, is that it is the very people who claim to be the most open of all who instead seek to close and control the supply of information and the public square. If Labour are not doing this, they are accusing people of ‘misinformation’ while refusing to give them the information they need to make sense of what is unfolding in their own country, as we saw after Southport.
On the world stage, too, our standing is in tatters, and not just because of how the Americans and others have asked openly what is becoming of the home of Magna Carta and individual liberty. No longer considered a ‘reliable ally’ by Israel, no longer given notice about major strikes by America, we have without question become less significant on the world stage on Labour’s watch.
Indeed, another irony is that it is the very same people, such as Keir Starmer and David Lammy who repeatedly proclaimed that Brexit has diminished our global power and influence, who have done more than the Brexiteers ever did to undermine our standing in international relations.
All this is why, one year on, only 16 per cent of British people say they feel satisfied with the performance of the Labour government. It is already one of the most unpopular governments in the history of polling, while Keir Starmer, with a net rating of minus54, is not only one of the most unpopular prime ministers we have ever had but is about as popular on these islands as Meghan Markle.
So, the United Kingdom and its people have just about managed to survive one year of this utterly incompetent, dismal and now openly divided Labour government. The question I would ask is: can we survive another four?
This article appeared in Matt Goodwin on July 4, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
