Labour will be awful in power - but there is one silver lining

Oh God, it’s going to happen. It really is. We really will have a Labour government in just over a month. It’s tough to accept. Tough to swallow. Tough to contemplate. But barring some sort

of biblical miracle, Keir Starmer will be prime minister on the morning of July 5. Oh no. Anyone who’s lived through a Labour government knows what this means. I’ve lived through two

stretches – the Wilson-Callaghan years of 1974-79, and then those 13 long years of Blair and Brown. The first was characterised by economic turmoil, rampant inflation, strikes so savage that

we still to this day recall the sheer squalor of the _Winter of Discontent _and a country in such decline that the rest of the continent labelled us Europe’s “sick man”. The second saw

irresponsible government spending, the start of mass immigration, a ruinous war in Iraq and finally the deepest economic recession that any of us had ever had the misfortune to experience.

You got it, Labour ends in disaster. Without fail. And this time will be even worse. There is, however, one silver lining to the catastrophe of a Keir Starmer victory. Simply, a whole

generation has grown up knowing only Tory government. You’d have to be at least 36 to have voted in the 2005 election, when Labour last won. Young people, in particular, have therefore,

understandably, equated the global turmoil of the last decade – with wars, pandemics, inflation, spiralling energy prices, mass immigration and a global cost-of-living crisis – with

Conservative rule. No wonder only 7% of people aged 18-24 say they’ll vote Tory, while a whopping 68% say they’ll vote Labour. No wonder only 14% of those aged 25-49 say they’ll vote for

Sunak, compared with more than half who say they’ll vote for Starmer. Many of them see a Labour government, even one led by a man who’s flip-flopped more than Tom Daley performing a high

dive, as some kind of saviour from evil. If only we can get rid of those evil Tories, they think, everything will be bright and sunny. You just watch them celebrate on July 5. But within a

couple of years, and after the inevitable gloating honeymoon period, the reality of a Starmer government will quickly disabuse them of that notion. Because Starmer will be at best a huge

disappointment, and at worse a complete disaster. There will still be a housing crisis, only worse. Still a migration crisis, only more intense. Still an absence of meaningful economic

growth, only more ingrained. Still public-sector strikes, only more of them. The economic recovery will be threatened, government spending will increase, taxes will rise still further, the

nanny state will spread its tentacles into yet more areas of our lives, Brexit will be jeopardised, the culture wars will be ghastlier than ever and the net-zero obsession will be ever more

damaging. In short, everything that voters dislike about Britain now will get even worse under Labour. It will be awful. We forget, as Cherie Blair once said in a different context, what an

ordeal labour can be. But that ordeal, will at least, allow the country to get real. It will force people away from the current crazy, blinkered narrative that Tories equal evil and Labour

represents goodness, purity and virtue. We can return, at last, to a more balanced, sensible view of centre-right politics. A Labour victory on July 4 will, in that sense, and that sense

alone, be something of a relief. David Cameron wisely said that each new generation must fight and win the battle against socialism. He was right. Never was a truer word spoken. It’s just

such a massive shame that to win that battle, we need to actually live through the reality of another Labour government.