National Insurance

It had become apparent by mid-2022, with the Partygate scandal in full swing, that the Conservatives would be going out and a Labour government would come in at the next election. But with potentially up to two and a half years until the next election, salting the earth was not the order of the day, not yet at least.

National Insurance rates had been on a bit of a rollercoaster by 2024. The rate most people were paying had been fixed at 12% for around ten years when Liz Truss rose it to 13.5% in her disaster of a mini-budget, before being returned to 12% in the aftermath of the chaos.

But salting the earth was back on the menu when the election appeared to be just a year away, when in the Autumn 2023 Budget, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced that National Insurance would be cut to 10% immediately then 8% in the March 2024 Budget if conditions allowed, which Hunt would go on to deem that they did, paid for partially with increased borrowing, and partially with promised but unspecified cuts to government expenditure after the election.[1]

The reason why salting the earth is an accurate description of this tax cut is because by the March 2024 budget it was already known that the UK had been in a recession in Q3 and Q4 of 2023, so imposing both higher borrowing and government spending cuts, both to the tune of several billion pounds, against that economic backdrop was a surefire way to kill off any thought of significant economic growth potentially until the end of the decade.

This created a headache for the new incoming government, but not a fatal issue, as to fix this economic problem they would have to put National Insurance back up to 12% essentially on day one in order to have the space to move on any sensible fiscal agenda, so the new government was forced to be tied immediately to an unpopular tax rise. This is a headache and not a fatal issue because new governments can get away with this kind of thing provided they deliver on it within the few years following such a tax rise, and people broadly expect Labour to be the tax and spend party anyway, so the National Insurance rise was essentially priced into Labour’s support going into the 2024 election.

Labour committed to keeping the National Insurance rate at 8%.[2]

So right off the bat in July 2024 the government is in massive trouble fiscally, committed to higher borrowing and finding spending cuts in order to make the numbers balance, against tiny or negative economic growth figures for the previous four quarters.

To this day the import of this decision, particularly on the long term forecasts of the nation’s finances, is absolutely dire, giving the government absolutely tiny margins with which they can make almost no policy movement except cuts at budget after budget. From this, almost all of the government’s economic woes follow. For starters, this has massively dampened the government’s ability to deliver on its manifesto commitments, with some commitments, such as recruiting 6,500 new teachers, appearing to have not got underway at all as of May 2025.[3] And in general, in areas of government where spending really needed to increase, such as the NHS or policing, while spending has increased a little, progress to fix these services has been marginal or even non-existent. It wouldn’t have to be this way if the government had just swallowed their hard pill in July 2024, giving them several billion pounds more headroom now, a year and a half later.

And even now a year and a half later it’s clear that tax rises could be necessary just for the government to meet their day-to-day spending commitments (unless they plan a substantial cutback in capital spending, which would again harm economic growth), except now enough time has passed that the government cannot point to the Conservative earth salting to blame, they would fully own any tax rise. The longer they wait the worse the fiscal outlook gets, their only option is to just take their medicine.

But in 2024 by committing to keep National Insurance where it was, the government had committed to spending cuts. And it is worth reiterating that this was a government who had come in after fourteen years of brutal Conservative austerity, which had shot the public realm to bits, and had just won an election on promising to fix public services and reverse the worst of devastating Conservative rule, committing immediately to spending cuts.

The only unknown was where the cuts were going to come from.

HS2

Britain is decades behind not only most of the developed world but also a lot of the developing world on its high speed rail network. The only high speed line in the UK is HS1, connecting London to the Channel Tunnel. The highest speeds attained on other lines, linking London to other major British cities, is 125mph, which while faster than driving, is not impressive compared to railway technology in common use in many other countries in 2025. Indeed, this speed is one mile per hour slower than what was achieved with a steam train on the East Coast Main Line back in the 1930s.

So the case for HS2 was obvious when it was first proposed in 2009, and the project was split into several phases. HS2 Phase 1 would link London with Birmingham, HS2 Phase 2a would link Birmingham with Crewe, and HS2 Phase 2b would link Birmingham with Leeds and Crewe with Manchester. In combination, these three high speed lines would allow direct high speed rail connections between all of the four largest cities in England. The cost would be large, but it was obvious that the potential for returns in the form of economic growth would be enormous, and so this quickly became a flagship capital expenditure project for the Conservative government after their election in 2010.

After numerous delays under Conservative austerity, in 2021 the plan was significantly scaled back after Boris Johnson’s government essentially decided they would rather have the cash to hand to do something else with it (although what else was done was never realised, despite a series of ever-changing, undelivered promises on other rail investments).[4] However, this plan still included linking London, Birmingham and Manchester with high speed rail. Given that these are the three largest cities in the UK, this is where the bulk of the clearly enormous economic benefit was stored. Indeed, by 2023, the government had purchased all of the land and construction had already started on many sections of this line.

So if you were Rishi Sunak, there is an obvious way to scupper an incoming government here: scrap all of HS2 past Birmingham and sell off a lot of the land on the cheap that the government had acquired. That means the next government will inherit a huge financial loss on the land purchases, and have economic growth they were expecting to realise before the end of their term evaporate without a substantial reinvestment. You won’t believe what he did.[5]

At the point Labour came to power, un-scrapping HS2 would have been more expensive than if the Conservatives hadn’t sold off lots of the land. However, the economic benefits of the scheme were significant, so much so that it was relatively difficult to picture a model of economic growth for the North West in particular without the scheme, so it was still widely expected that Labour would commit to re-starting the scheme.

However, their hands were tied - they already needed to make spending cuts essentially on day one because of their ridiculous National Insurance commitment. So they committed to keeping it scrapped, deciding that cash today was more important than economic growth tomorrow, just as the Conservatives had done time after time after time to bring about the very difficult economic situation in the first place. This might have improved the budgetary outlook for the next few quarters, but had a not insubstantial negative effect on the country’s economy in the long-term, making the government’s medium and long-term budgetary issues even worse. A decision that could easily have gone the other way if the government hadn’t tied their own hands fiscally.

Winter Fuel Allowance

The Winter Fuel Allowance was perhaps the only money to be saved in the whole of government, so it made sense that when in dire need of spending cuts the government focussed in on it relatively quickly. Specifically, pensioners are on average substantially wealthier than working age people in the UK.[6] So it made no sense, both economically and in terms of fairness, for wealthier, older people to receive a government grant to pay energy bills while younger generations, who were on average much poorer, received nothing.

Older people are, of course, at substantially more risk of health complications including fatalities than younger people if they cannot afford to heat their homes, so scrapping the Winter Fuel Allowance entirely would have been a major issue, so instead the government announced that it would be offered in a means tested way - as in pensioners whose income falls below a specific threshold would still receive the Winter Fuel Allowance.

While I perhaps would have set the income threshold for the receipt of the Winter Fuel Allowance higher than the government did, there was a case in principle to means test the Winter Fuel Allowance, so that in a time of economic turmoil the government wasn’t spending taxpayers’ money on heating the homes of millionaires. This, of course, didn’t stop the wealthiest people you ever heard complaining in the Telegraph that they would have to sell their second Aga for a full year.

Obviously any decision targeting older people, regardless of their wealth as a cohort overall, will come with a popularity hit in the UK, simply because there are a substantially higher number of older voters than younger voters. But taking a popularity hit at the start of their term in order to have enough fiscal room to get the economy going was obviously going to be necessary. But, unable to take the heat, the government changed course in the end, making the Winter Fuel Allowance universal again (but claiming it back through tax from the wealthiest quarter of pensioners, saving only £450m).[7]

This meant that they took the popularity hit as if they had gone through with the policy, without creating much of any fiscal headroom whatsoever. And, worse still, the year-long flip-flopping debacle killed off their fiscal credibility, leaving the government not only in a worse position than if they had committed to staying the course on the policy, but also in a worse position than if they hadn’t bothered at all.

Disability Benefits

The reason why the Winter Fuel Allowance was a possible cut to make was that it was a universal benefit given to an already very wealthy demographic that was not reliant on that specific benefit for 100% of their income.

None of those things apply to disabled people.

Disabled people have a significantly lower average income and average wealth than the general population, so any cut to disability benefit would already be a cut to a poorer demographic; and, because they have disabilities, they are likely to face limitations in which employment they can undertake, or may be unable to work at all, meaning that disability benefit is an absolute necessity because it may be a disabled person’s only source of income.[6] All of that sounds like stating the obvious, but it is important to state in order to set out why this cut is in a very different context to the proposed winter fuel allowance changes.

Obviously given this position, cutting the amount of disability benefit would be not only morally unconscionable but also extremely unpopular with the public, even at the height of the ridiculous moral panic over benefit scrounging in the early 2010s. And so it was that technically the literal amount of money that constitutes the enhanced rate of disability benefit has kept approximate pace with inflation for more than a decade now.[8][9]

However, disability benefits have been cut over the course of the Conservative government in a far more pernicious way - by restricting eligibility to disability benefit and by placing bureaucratic hurdles between disabled people and the income they are entitled to. Indeed, the bureaucratic hurdles are such that currently there are at least five different types of disability benefit, and depending on how you count it a lot more.[10] Moreover, with each such benefit having different eligibility requirements, a way for the government to avoid paying some people has been to move them onto a different benefit scheme.

In short, the vast majority of people who relied on disability benefit as a major part of their income were much worse off in real terms by 2024 compared to 2010. And when this group was a considerably more impoverished than average section of society to begin with, it was obviously unthinkable that an incoming left-wing party would choose to make further disability benefit cuts. What happened next will surprise you.

The government set out in the 2025 Spring Statement their plans to cut around £5bn from the disability benefits bill with some reforms that had two main prongs. First, the health element of Universal Credit was to be reduced for new claimants from 2026, which, while not affecting the income of anyone currently on disability benefits, meant that if you were to become disabled in the future and were to be eligible for, out of all the available disability benefits, Universal Credit, your income would be far too meagre to live on. I can only assume that since this cruelty was only to be applied to potential future people, the government believed that they could slip it under the radar amidst other reforms.

The second, and most controversial, aspect of the changes was substantially restricting the eligibility criteria for Personal Independence Payment, or PIP, the most common form of disability benefit in the UK.[11]

The crucial thing about these reforms is that they would only raise £5bn, small change for a government whose overall spending is approximately 200x that per year. But those who would no longer be eligible for PIP included a great deal of people who are quite severely disabled.

Despite £5bn being small change for the government, they had got themselves into a situation where, thanks to a combination of their commitment to not put up National Insurance and their very constrictory fiscal rules, finding an extra £5bn at this budget had become an absolute necessity to make their sums add up. However, cutting £5bn in a way that would leave a large number of severely disabled people with no income was probably the £5bn to cut that absolutely maximised suffering compared to other £5bn cuts. After all, consider the following: the Conservatives were known, with austerity, for cutting any and all benefits as much as they could, with the cruelty being the point in a lot of cases. If there was money to remove from the system, George Osborne would have done it. This was another £5bn removed from that system that this government inherited. Obviously there was no way to make such a cut in this area without causing immense suffering to those with disabilities. All of this from our alleged left-wing party in the two-party system we used to have too.

Naturally, outside of the isolated palace of Starmer’s Downing Street, the Parliamentary Labour Party were not happy. After all, having joined and stood as candidates for the left-wing party in our two party system, most of them were against benefit cuts more severe than the most pro-austerity government since the Second World War, and so when the bill was set to be voted on in Parliament, it was clear that, even with the Conservatives potentially on side, the government was set to lose.

Again, it bears repeating that these reforms were so bad that the government was set to win Conservative votes for the policy but not votes from their own party, leading to the possibility that the reforms would have passed on the back of Conservative votes. After 126 Labour MPs led by Rachael Maskell backed an amendment to essentially kill the reforms, the government made concessions, instead presenting to Parliament an essentially neutralised set of reforms, that they still only got through with a reduced Parliamentary majority.[12][13]

The consequences of this for the government were obvious. By staking their financial balancing agenda on such terribly destructive and unpopular reforms, then not being able to see it through owing to their destructive and unpopular nature, the government had lost control of their fiscal agenda. With £5bn being small change to government, this normally wouldn’t be an issue over this loss specifically, but the government had staked their entire financial credibility on this £5bn specifically, and so the gilt markets had a field day, which, because of how tightly the government was bound by their self-imposed fiscal rules, only made the financial situation for them that much worse. And so Downing Street lashed out.

Five labour MPs had the whip suspended in the aftermath of this fiasco. Some, it could be argued, were types that the government had been angling to get rid of for a while - those who were known trouble causers or likely to have a scandal. However, one of the suspended was Rachael Maskell, a loyal backbencher for ten years who represented one of the most solidly red constituencies in the country, whose only crime was trying to stop the government from removing disability benefit from disabled people who needed it. Given that the government had failed to get their disability cuts through anyway, turning around and punishing an MP whose position now reflected government policy after the U-turn was seen as nothing more than Starmer lashing out against his own party.[14]

The operation in Number 10, now even more isolated than before, had appeared to forget that you actually need MPs on side to pass laws, and was now actively pissing them off to satisfy the Prime Minister’s own ego. Will it come back to bite the Prime Minister that the Parliamentary Labour Party could no longer trust him? We’ll see.

Nationalisation

Progress on rail nationalisation has been made, and this is one of the handful of good things I will say about this government. Indeed, a good chunk of rail companies, such as Northern and Transpennine Express, are already in public ownership. But it’s not like you’d know that from watching the news. And, for once, that’s not the media’s fault. Rather, the government has chosen not to make noise about the very popular rail nationalisation,[15] but to shout a lot about immigration reforms that are relatively unpopular overall and extremely unpopular to their base.[16]

Given all of this, then, an obvious question arises. Why isn’t the government nationalising anything else? Well, while one answer is that Labour’s 2024 manifesto only made reference to nationalising rail, the more obvious reason is cost. I couldn’t find an exact figure on the cost of renationalising the railways, but the referenced Daily Mail article says it’s £400mn, the money for which apparently will come from a “surge” in rail fares.[17] Given that’s the figure in the Daily Mail, we can assume the actual cost is less than £400mn. This is quite cheap for nationalising an entire industry, so it makes sense that the government would go down this road for a quick and popular win.

However, it bears repeating that the financial mess that prevents the government from being able to raise the funds to nationalise other industries is of their own making. And so, to illustrate how much of an issue this is, I will focus on the water industry, and the absolute mess it is in due to private ownership.

So how much would it cost to nationalise water? Well, if you ask the government, they can’t do shit about the water industry because nationalisation would cost ONE HUNDRED BILLION POUNDS.[18] That’s right, ONE HUNDRED BILLION POUNDS. Two hundred and fifty times the upper bound on nationalising railways. Now this sounded, when I came across this figure while researching, ludicrously high. So where did it come from?

The figure comes from the Regulatory Capital Value (RCV) of all the water companies added together, a figure that Ofwat generates that is something of an estimate of the market value of a water company. The RCV is described by Defra as “the closest proxy for the total value of the sector’s debt and equity.” However, the way it is generated seems relatively opaque, so really we have only the government’s word for it that this is a useful figure at all.

Just because the means of calculation of such a figure is opaque, it’s still a bold claim for me to make that it’s dramatically inflated. But, I can back that claim up. Doing that here, however, would be an extremely boring stack of numbers. So please consult the appendices of this document.[Appendix 1]

The case for nationalising water, regardless of cost, is obvious. In the words of one Gerald Ratner, “because it’s total crap.”

Just in the past few years, here are some things we’ve seen in the water industry:

Thames Water raising bill prices by 40% in 2025.[22]
Yorkshire Water having such acute supply issues that they implemented a five month hosepipe ban even including wetter autumn and winter months.[25]
Massive increases in raw sewage discharge, which can pose a public health risk, reaching a record in 2024.[26]
No new reservoirs being built whatsoever since 1992, contributing to the supply crunch.[27]
Absurd, often record-breaking leakage rates, also contributing to the supply crunch.[28]

This is on top of a significant amount of localised incidents - where I live there was a water outage earlier in the year and there is literally a Wikipedia page called 2025 Tunbridge Wells Water Crisis.[29]

All of this points to the disturbing truth which is that without some action to change the way the industry is run, a major health crisis or a major water supply crisis is pretty much inevitable. Nationalisation can be a big piece of that puzzle, because the government would then be beholden to political pressure to deliver a functional service.

Moreover, let’s look at why privatisation is advocated for by conservatives in the first place. One major argument for privatisation is that it allows competition between different companies, which will then drive up quality and drive down prices. However, the way in which the water industry is set up deliberately stops competition. I can only get my water from Yorkshire Water. It doesn’t matter how bad their service is or how high their bills are, I cannot choose to get my water from a different company like I can with my energy. In the extreme case, if there were restrictions on what I could use my water for, or my water supply was cut off for a period of time, I would still have to pay as normal. And I say extreme case, but also that is exactly what has happened over the past year.

Obviously, having a private company be a monopoly that can set its own prices, where it is not possible to opt out of the service entirely, and there are very few legally enforced standards the service must deliver, is the exact perfect storm for offering a rubbish service at a massive price. And it’s not clear how the water industry in a given area could not be a monopoly given the nature of water infrastructure. Really this leaves only one option - water must become a government-operated service.

But, the government, by binding themselves fiscally, simply can’t nationalise water. And while this might be merely a political bugbear of mine, what happens when Thames Water, which has been circling the plughole of insolvency for years, does go bankrupt? The government has been quiet on it, presumably because they don’t think they have the money to actually take it over and run it if it goes into administration. But what is the alternative? Water must still be provided to these homes, so the government must step in and nationalise Thames Water at least, and the longer they put it off the worse the problem will be when their hand is forced anyway.

While nationalisation of water is an emblematic example, there are plenty of other things that I would argue are quite pressing for the government to sort but they won’t because they have tied their own hands fiscally. Local government, for example, is an absolute mess financially. Central government cashflow to local government essentially collapsed during austerity, and at the same time central government austerity massively increased the responsibilities of local authorities. The result was that local authorities across the country, by the time Labour came into power in 2024, were in complete financial disarray and in dire need of a cash injection to continue to offer even basic services - a cash injection that is not forthcoming because of the government’s own unforced error of keeping Jeremy Hunt’s unfunded £40bn tax cut!

Once you start looking out for this stuff it’s absolutely infuriating, but of course fiscal policy like welfare, taxation and nationalisation are only one part of what government is doing. So what if I told you they were fucking up everything else as well?

Immigration

In the weeks after the general election, there were far-right riots. These were, ostensibly, a result of the horrific Southport attack. However, the conservative right, being nastier than ever and out of power for the first time in near enough a generation, were always going to riot that summer, whether they could find an inciting incident or not. Indeed, lots of particularly the extreme right had been threatening riots in the event of a Labour victory since Spring 2024. And the government, quite rightly too, responded to the riots with a heavy hand. Remember that fact, that the government put down the 2024 riots by arresting the rioters and shooting down their political points in public. Because it will be relevant later.

Now I appreciate that the public in general are very anti-immigration, and me being a bleeding heart progressive on the issue is never going to change that. So the government, even if they were minded to, couldn’t openly be as progressive on immigration as I would like. So that’s not the issue I have with the government’s position. It is, if anything, more basic than that.

Let’s take a look at a road a hypothetical progressive government elected in 2024 could have taken on immigration. The main problems people had with immigration at the time were the overall number of immigrants and asylum hotel usage, with noise also about small boat crossings. Overall immigration was set to fall quite dramatically due to other trends in 2025 and 2026[30], something that has in fact come true so far, and asylum hotels was a crisis quite literally manufactured by the Conservatives that any new government would be sorting out anyway simply by starting to process asylum claims again, something that the Conservative government had paused in 2023.

So a progressive government has a clear throughline on immigration here without being conservative on the issue: let these issues resolve themselves and shout about how well you’re doing at controlling immigration because it’s fallen by half or two thirds, which would leave people who claimed that more conservative immigration policies were an absolute necessity with real egg on their faces. Did anyone expect, in 2024, that the government would take a different approach to this? It’s so obvious!

In April 2025, the government started making some noise about an incoming change to immigration, believed to be making the Conservatives’ relatively conservative immigration rules considerably more conservative. All of this culminated in an immigration white paper published on 12th May 2025, which did contain some relatively bad, although relatively minor changes to the immigration rules.[31]

Starmer announced these rule changes with a speech that appeared to paraphrase Enoch Powell.

In Powell’s infamous Rivers of Blood speech, he claimed that the British people risked becoming “strangers in their own country.”[32] Starmer claimed that Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers.”[33] No 10 insists that using the language of Enoch Powell was not deliberate. With the comparison I have set out here, I encourage the reader to make their own mind up.

In any case, the “Island of Strangers” speech, as it came to be known, was the most extremist position ever taken on immigration by a Prime Minister, and by a Labour Prime Minister no less! This was a real watershed moment in British politics, as a lot of the content of this speech, being lifted from Enoch Powell, was the kind of thing that might have gotten someone a visit from Prevent ten years earlier, and here it was being said by the Prime Minister!

This led to, predictably, an explosion of far-right rhetoric and action, that varied between being not commented on or endorsed by the government, culminating in another summer of far-right riots in 2025.

The lowest moment in the entire history of this sorry government came in early September when, after a summer of far-right riots which the government had continued to legitimise by saying that they were sympathetic to many concerns of the rioters and saying that new anti-immigration policies were considered by the government to be their “central issue”[34], there was a far-right protest through London with an attendance of between 110,000 and 150,000. This was the largest far-right protest in British history, larger even than anything the Blackshirts had been able to manage in the 1930s.[35]

So obviously when genuine fascists are able to mobilise crowds of that size, a strong response to condemn is needed from the government because if the fascists can mobilise like that then realistically democracy and freedom itself is at stake if there is not a robust response from pro-democracy politicians including the government. How did the government respond?

They sent the Business Secretary, Peter Kyle, out to the BBC and ITV to say that the protesters were demonstrating “English values” and that it showed that freedom of speech was “alive and well” and that the protest should be a “klaxon call” that the government must extremise further on the immigration issue.[36][37] So the government’s line was they basically agreed with the protestors. The far-right protestors. The far-right protestors led by Tommy Robinson. The government sent a spokesperson out to agree with their concerns and say that they were emblematic of our country’s values.

I remember hearing this response from Peter Kyle played out on the radio when I was in the car with my mother and we both got so angry we nearly had a car crash.

But, with this, it appears the government had gone too far, as within the day there was such a large backlash over Kyle’s comments from within the Parliamentary Labour Party and even from within cabinet that Starmer was forced to give a statement to the Guardian condemning far-right violence, something any democratic government should probably do without having to be forced into it in an embarrassing climbdown but here we are.[38]

Indeed, every time the government has found enough of a backbone to condemn far-right racism instead of borrowing its rhetoric to frolic with for the afternoon, it has come with some kind of caveat strong enough as to discredit the effort entirely. Revisiting the “island of strangers” comment, Starmer said that he “regrets” it in a statement to the Observer on 27th June 2025[39], only for him to say he “stands by” it on 11th July[40]. So clearly he didn’t mean a word of his diffusing comments to the Observer.

But rhetoric is only one part of the story of any policy area. How has the government been doing on immigration policy? Well, the government has been committing here a series of outrages too as they get led in circles by Reform.

In October 2025, Reform announced that if they were in government they would abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain entirely - a very extreme position but what else did you expect from Reform? The government, in a surprising move, went on the attack about this, condemning Reform’s announcement. But, in order to get the narrative back from Reform, announced changes to Indefinite Leave to Remain of their own, increasing the wait-time to be granted ILR from five years to ten years.[41] It’s hard to see this as anything other than a Reform victory - they announced something really extreme, and the government appeared to “compromise” by announcing a relatively significant change to immigration rules in a similar direction. The government doesn’t need to “compromise” with a party that only has five MPs compared to their over 400, but the government had just spent the summer saying that the far-right were right about everything so of course that means when they announce a policy the government is enthusiastic about aping it immediately.

I’ll circle back to this point because it is quite frankly unbelievable how extreme the current immigration reforms the government is floating are, but these will be covered later. For now, I want to point out that this immigration section hasn’t even included everything. There are innumerate incidents of e.g. Farage giving a speech containing some really abhorrent stuff including a plan to deport 600,000 people and the government having nothing bad to say about it except for Ellie Reeves claiming the plan lacks detail.[42] Is it any wonder that the government has completely lost the progressive or liberal vote?

Now what could make the government’s line on immigration even worse? Not much but this will do. On 21st April 2026, Shabana Mahmood was recording an episode of Matt Forde’s podcast during which she threatened to deport opposition leaders.[43]

At the time of writing, Mahmood has not had to resign over this, but if we accept that the government can threaten to deport key opposition figures, then do we even live in a democracy? Somehow, the government’s line on immigration, even if this was apparently meant as a joke, continues to shock. And so what if it was meant as a joke? I would block a random on Bluesky for making these threats as a joke, and this is the Home Secretary! She actually has the power to do it! I know I sound like a broken record here but this is really outrageous - it’s another moment where the government has sunk lower than any previous on immigration rhetoric.

Trans Rights

The government was already off to a very bad start on transgender rights, with new Health Secretary Wes Streeting restricting the already heavily restricted healthcare options for trans people, particularly those under the age of 18, before 2024 had even ended.[44] This restriction came off the back of the Cass Review, a review into NHS care for gender dysphoria in children, which received some criticism from LGBT+ groups, and on top of that was used by Streeting as a reason/excuse to restrict much further than recommended childrens’ transgender healthcare, forcing transgender teenagers to experience puberty as a gender that they are not, for no discernable benefit other than looking tough on the woke.[45]

However, it was believed at the time that Streeting, owing to his naked ambition for the top job, terrible decisions such as the above, and ties to private healthcare companies, would not be kept in cabinet by Starmer for very long, and that whoever came in as the next Health Secretary would have a clear mandate to reverse these decisions and allow transgender children to access the healthcare they need. This was before we knew how bad Starmer would be at managing his top team. Wes Streeting has continued to be a disaster in the office of Health Secretary in a variety of other ways since, but the nexus of transgender discrimination would move to No 10 in 2025.

So this next one requires a bit of context. In Scotland, there is a legal requirement for some public boards to have an aim to meet a gender representation objective of 50% women as members. For these purposes, a woman was considered to be anyone whose gender was female, regardless of sex assigned at birth. For Women Scotland, a transphobic campaign group, attempted to sue over this, stating that transgender women should not be included towards the gender representation objectives for these boards. And they lost almost every time they attempted to bring this to court in Scotland.[46]

However, they were somehow able to get this in front of the supreme court of the UK, who decided to attempt to settle the gender question in entirety, by ruling that for the purposes of the Equality Act a woman was only someone who had a “biological sex” of woman.[47]

Now there were many things in the judgement that led a lot of people to suggest that the decision may have been downstream of political considerations rather than strictly an attempt to interpret existing equality legislation.

Obviously that’s a pretty incendiary accusation, but the judgement said that “biological sex”, which as a legal concept had not existed prior to this judgement is “self-explanatory”, which since this concept had not previously been legally defined, it clearly was not. It is believed that the idea refers to sex assigned at birth, which is defined medically but not legally as far as I can tell, though this was not specified exactly in the judgement.[48] The judgment did not mention intersex people[49], some of whom do not have a clear sex assigned at birth.[50] So for intersex people who did not have a clear sex assigned at birth, it would appear that it’s open season for gender discrimination as far as the law is concerned.

Moreover, the judgement stated that a transgender woman with a gender recognition certificate is not legally a woman[51], which goes against the exact written text of the Gender Recognition Act 2004. So if even I can tell that the judgement had, even with a new, narrow definition of sex under the equality act, legalised discrimination even on that definition under some circumstances, and had directly contradicted some existing gender legislation, you can see why a lot of people thought this judgement might be an attempt to recharacterise equality law according to new political considerations rather than interpret it as written.

Now obviously if there is a court judgement on the interpretation of equality law that appears to contradict the written text of some legislation, it leads to a lot of confusion, and it may be the case that the government needs to use their huge Parliamentary majority to pass primary legislation to clear up the mess. Unsurprisingly, that is not what they did.

Instead, the government not merely wholeheartedly supported the supreme court judgement, but went further, having the ECHR issue statutory guidance that stated that single-sex spaces had to have their admission based only on biological sex, not gender, even if someone had a gender recognition certificate. This is already bad, forcing trans people to use facilities that don’t match their actual gender, but the ECHR had a solution to that - and it’s to ban them from facilities that match their sex assigned at birth too.[52]

So trans people cannot legally use any space that is segregated by gender according to the guidance as set out. Already that sounds bad enough when spelt out like that, and indeed this is probably one of the most draconian anti-trans laws in any Western democracy. But if you aren’t transgender you probably don’t realise the amount of time you’re in a single sex space: when you use a public toilet, or anywhere with changing rooms like the gym or the swimming pool or a hotel spa, or women’s only groups like the Women’s Institute, or even places like crisis centres for those fleeing domestic abuse. Saying trans people can’t use the gender split facility that matches their gender already makes these services considerably harder to access for transgender people - saying they can’t use them at all is a blatant attempt to entirely exclude trans people from public life.

Trans people, of course, exist in public anyway, despite the legality of it all, because you can’t just legislate away the existence of an entire demographic. Indeed, I think being so bigoted as to attempt to legislate away an entire marginalised people is the kind of thing that should cause a politician to feel so much shame as to never show their face in public life in Britain ever again. I once again ask: how can anyone who is a progressive at all vote for a Labour candidate in this environment?

An obvious caveat to all of this is that I am a cis straight white able-bodied man. So all the things I say about transgender people or immigrants or people with disabilities are certainly not derived from lived experience, but rather from progressive ideals and more importantly the fact that I know some transgender people, I know some disabled people, I know some immigrants. These people are my co-workers and friends and my family and the people who make up the community I live in. And in any discussion of discrimination, particularly when discussing discrimination that is handed down unto a given demographic directly from the government, the most important voice certainly isn’t mine. It has never been more important to listen to those who are facing discrimination and hatred day to day, and it has never been more important to campaign to stop the government from enabling and even being the perpetrators of such discrimination.

One final note on the terrible mess the government has made over their ridiculous attempt to erase transgender people from public life. The cover for their transphobia, and indeed almost all transphobia, is trying to claim it’s about women’s rights or feminism. But the Women’s Institute has been trans inclusive since basically forever (because trans people have, contrary to popular belief, always existed). Being an organisation for women only, the WI was legally compelled by the new legal position to restrict their membership to cisgender women only. But being open to all women is such an important tenet for the WI that many local WI organisations felt they couldn’t reasonably continue if they were legally required to exclude some women, so they very heroically, and very sadly, shut down.[53] So well done government, you’ve been so committed to feminism that you’re killing off the Women’s Institute.

Iran

This is just a quick section because the consensus on Bluesky is that Starmer has played an absolute blinder on Iran, and I’m afraid I disagree. Of course the government’s position on British involvement in the war is infinitely better than if we had wholeheartedly joined the Americans in direct action as in Iraq. But, at the end of the day, planes have still taken off from British RAF bases on British soil to bomb Iran.[54]

Under those circumstances, would an adversary as unpredictable as Iran really make the distinction that, well, they aren’t British service personnel flying the planes, so clearly Britain isn’t involved in the war? Those planes were coming from Gloucestershire so Iran responded by attempting, though unsuccessfully, to strike the British base at Diego Garcia. Who could have seen that coming?[55]

Moreover, I think almost everyone knew going in that the Iran war would be a disaster - indeed I remember watching a video by a history YouTuber that set out exactly how terrible utterly stupid a war between the US and Iran would be all the way back in 2019.[56] So making it easier for the Americans to conduct such a war by allowing the use of British bases was not necessarily the best move on that front either. And indeed now we are seeing a major global economic shock, the US government, who have throughout behaved despicably to ally and adversary alike, in a quagmire, and the ever-unstable Iranian regime with an outrageously strong bargaining position in negotiations, all, while not caused by this government, certainly helped along by the invisible hand of British assistance. An absolute disaster that we would have done much better to stay well away from.

The Mandelson Scandal

Prior to this point, a lot of what I have been saying is very much a subjective assessment based on my own progressive opinions of where the government has gone wrong. Of course, plenty of people think the government is doing a good job on any of the above issues I’ve set out the government as doing a bad job on. This is why none of those issues individually have been enough to sink the whole ship - because on immigration or LGBT+ rights the government has had an agenda and has stuck to it, even if it’s an agenda I not merely disagree with, but find shocking.

But scandals aren’t like that - they aren’t polarising or controversial or divisive, they are just flatly bad, whatever your political opinions, which is why they have such a power to sink an entire government. And my goodness is this a scandal that feels like it was lifted straight out of the era of Boris Johnson and supplanted unto Starmer and his top team.

When Peter Mandelson was appointed British ambassador to the United States, it already raised some eyebrows - the outgoing ambassador, Karen Pierce, was certainly far from being out of favour with the new Trump administration. But, I kind of get changing out the ambassador for someone who had already cut their teeth politically, because the kinds of skills you develop in the Foreign Office diplomatic service, while absolutely indispensable for international relations in general, might not necessarily be the same skills that you need to wrangle Donald Trump. But there were a near-infinite number of people that could have been chosen over Peter Mandelson who would have been better at wrangling Trump without having allegedly sold state secrets to a child trafficker.

Indeed, although the appointment of Peter Mandelson to the position of US ambassador was unusual at the time, and it was known he had some links to Jeffrey Epstein, the fact that they were close friends wasn’t widely known by the public until it was detailed in some of the Epstein files in September 2025.[57]

Starmer may have been forced to sack Mandelson in September, but the scandal continued in Winter 2026 as it emerged that some of Mandelson’s conduct concerning his relationship with Epstein might have been criminal.

With legal proceedings still ongoing, I can’t say that anything definitively happened, but more documentation relating to Epstein appeared to show that in 2009 and 2010, while Business Secretary, Mandelson had routinely passed on top secret government financial information to Epstein for a range of purposes, while possibly aware of Epstein’s criminal enterprises. At the time of writing it’s not clear exactly what Mandelson got out of this deal - while it’s been speculated there was a financial interest, I couldn’t find a source reporting that directly, although of course Mandelson must have got something out of it, or he wouldn’t have done it. In any case, once this became known publicly, Mandelson was arrested for misconduct in public office.[58]

This called into question the judgement of the government for appointing Mandelson to such an important position in the first place. Starmer, of course, insisted that his government was aware of none of this at the time of appointment, but it remains to be seen if that’s true. And even if it is - that the government missed this in the vetting process, or may have discovered concerns adjacent to this that were glossed over during vetting, was already absolutely absurd.

Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s Chief of Staff and the man alleged to be behind quite a lot of the government’s anti-progressive agenda, resigned, taking responsibility for the decision to appoint Mandelson.[59] This didn’t calm the storm that had engulfed the government at this point because, while McSweeney had been one of the strongest advocates for appointing Mandelson as ambassador, the decision to make the appointment had been Starmer’s. What his resignation did do was make clear that speculation that he had been behind the government’s anti-progressive moves was completely incorrect because the government has subsequently continued along that track with enthusiasm without his help.

In April, it emerged that Mandelson had actually failed security vetting, although it’s not certain whether this was over his connection to Epstein, but the government had chosen to appoint him anyway. Starmer, again, insisted he hadn’t known any of this prior to making the decision, and sacked Olly Robbins, blaming Robbins for having not told him that Mandelson did not pass vetting.[60]

Robbins was then compelled to appear at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee where he confirmed that yes, it was technically true that Mandelson had failed vetting and this had not been told to Starmer, but only because No 10 had put serious pressure on the Foreign Office to wave through Mandelson as an appointee for the ambassador job.[61] Essentially, Robbins was implying that No 10 wanted Mandelson so badly that if he had put his foot down about it there’s every chance he would have been replaced with someone who wouldn’t. Under those circumstances, he obviously couldn’t have been expected to deliver an honest assessment of Mandelson as part of security vetting. So when Starmer says he didn’t know anything about Mandelson’s possible deals for state secrets with Epstein, he may well be technically correct, but only in the sense that he had made clear in advance that he didn’t want to hear it from the people whose job it was to tell him.

Lots of analysis of how Mandelson became US Ambassador suggested that Starmer could be the kind of person to reward the loyalty of individuals with nice government jobs regardless of that individual’s personal conduct. And more evidence of this was the case of Matthew Doyle. Doyle had been a Labour Party political aide since the late 1990s,[62] and in 2017 campaigned for Sean Morton as an independent candidate in local elections. Morton, formerly a Labour councillor, had been suspended from the Labour Party after being charged with possessing indecent images of children.[63] Morton was convicted in 2018.

This was public at the time - Doyle made no attempt to conceal his support for Morton. But it wasn’t news because by this point Doyle was running his own company rather than being an employee of the Labour Party or the government. It was, however, obviously very damning on the record of Matthew Doyle, so a return to politics would be impossible, it would be a massive scandal. So he must have been astounded to be appointed Starmer’s director of communications in 2021.

Incredibly, this went largely unnoticed until Doyle was given a position in the House of Lords,[63] to which I only have to ask, what did the government think was going to happen? What a bizarre and avoidable error in judgement by Starmer. This stuff was already known! Did he just not care about it in order to reward someone who had been loyal to him for a few years? It again speaks to someone whose approach to interpersonal relations in a workplace setting are certainly not appropriate for running the country.

Amidst all of this, Chris Wormald, the Cabinet Secretary, resigned.[64] Whether his resignation was a direct consequence of the Mandelson scandal is not confirmed - it had been the case that Downing Street was unhappy with his performance for a while, but the timing of his resignation was right in the middle of the Mandelson scandal. There has been no suggestion of misconduct on Wormald’s part pertaining to the Mandelson scandal, but I also wouldn’t want to work in an office doing stuff like that, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Mandelson affected his decision to flee the sinking ship when he did.

In Starmer’s infinite wisdom, Wormald was replaced by someone who had already had a potentially career-ending scandal. New Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo’s conduct as the UK’s general consul in New York was so bad that the Civil Service received complaints about her from multiple members of her staff, with 47% of her staff in New York saying they had experienced workplace bullying in an internal survey. Moreover, there were complaints relating to expenses also raised concerning her time in New York. Starmer was so dead set on appointing Romeo anyway that the government lied about the whole thing, claiming that only one complaint was filed, when the BBC was aware of several.[65]

Although less serious than Doyle or Mandelson’s conduct, this appears once again to be a case of Starmer overlooking any suggestion of propriety or professionalism to make the appointment he wants. And in doing so he has set another ticking time bomb of scandal to engulf No 10, as the media could jump on this, or more information could come out about it, at any time. Once again it’s hard to look at this as the actions of someone who is good at the people management side of being Prime Minister.

Running Out of Road

So the government’s fiscal agenda is completely dead, right? By November 2025 the government’s headroom was coming down and a broad-based tax rise was needed to avoid a spike in borrowing in the short term. There were loads of leaks to the press about what might be in the budget, a lot of which were contradictory on whether such a tax rise was happening, which in the end created a position so confusing that the opposition accused, although falsely, Rachel Reeves of misleading the House of Commons over some of her comments pre-budget.[66]

Ultimately, the budget did not contain any such broad-based tax rise, which meant that to make ends meet lots of small taxation changes had to be made, most of which just came across as petty. One that stood out to me was the mileage tax on electric vehicles being introduced to help balance out a fuel duty freeze[67] - thereby massively disincentivising people from switching over to electric cars, completely contrary to all other government policy in the area. Prior to this point climate change was something the government had been doing reasonably well on, hastening the UK’s transition to green energy for electricity. While the exact impact is still to be measured, I wouldn’t be surprised if this offsets that entirely. And all to avoid that damn national insurance cut reversal while also avoiding war on motorist headlines (because you have to remember that the people writing the war on motorist headlines think that electric car drivers are too woke to count).

And then the government’s fiscal position got even worse!

The Spring Statement in March of this year came only three days after the US invasion of Iran, which led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Obviously the Iran war and the closure of the strait is going to have a massive negative impact on the economy, so I don’t know if the Spring Statement was only like this because it was hastily re-written in this light, but the content of it was essentially that we are still on for everything that was in the November budget and there’s nothing further at this time.[68]

Clearly, given the Iran situation, we are not on for everything in the November budget, which was already barely balanced according to the self-imposed fiscal rules, but I guess the government can keep their head in the sand about it until we actually do face a recession, and economic indicators do lag by a few months. But now it’s a few months later and we still haven’t seen an updated actually workable fiscal position from the government, so I’m not hopeful on their ability to deliver economic growth for the remainder of this Parliament.

On immigration, the government has also continued to extremise, announcing a policy of earned settlement, which essentially means that those who have moved to the UK will be eligible for Indefinite Leave to Remain not after five years, or even ten years as had been teased, but after a variable period up to 30 years instead, depending on a range of characteristics including earnings.[69]

It is already obscene to extend the waiting period for ILR like this, more so to extend the waiting period for those already here and on pathways to settlement, and more so to tie it to earnings, because it means that high earners don’t get affected at all while people running the NHS or care services or supermarkets or a whole host of other important jobs (we would have called them key workers at the start of the decade) face uncertain immigration statuses potentially into the 2050s.

And let us put this in the context of current opinion polling, where Reform has a reasonable chance of winning the next general election. Reform have committed to a programme of mass deportations, but even if they have a Parliamentary majority and pass primary legislation, there would be other legal barriers that would be difficult to overcome to deporting people who have already been granted the right to stay in the UK permanently. Such legal barriers do not exist for those whose immigration status is a lot more temporary and uncertain, a category the government is, with these changes, forcing a huge number of people into. So essentially these policies can be viewed through the lens of, whether inadvertently or not, collaboration with Reform on their agenda of mass deportations. Again the question arises: how can anyone who isn’t far-right vote for the government under these circumstances?

While I hope the moral case is clear, the electoral case for the points I have set out would only really hold water if Labour was losing votes to progressive parties and not Reform. And are they? Well, Reform are leading in the polls, but where those votes are coming from and where support for the Greens and the Lib Dems are coming from would suggest that Labour’s former voters have mostly split for progressive parties. This should not be surprising given that Labour was seen as a left-wing party as recently as 2024. Despite this, the government have been absolutely insistent that their voters are flowing to Reform en masse, and have based, by their own admission, essentially their entire policy agenda on this. However, the real test for this sort of thing would be if there was a three way election between Labour, Reform and a progressive party such as the Greens.

The Gorton and Denton by-election was a three way race between Labour, Reform and the Greens. Variously described as a three-way tie or a toss-up, the Green Party won in a landslide after voters abandoned Labour in droves.[70] This pretty much entirely defeated any notion whatsoever that former Labour voters were moving over to Reform instead of progressive parties. So, having spent a year telling Reform voters that their concerns and grievances are legitimate and that they are listening and learning and that they will do anything to win your vote, now faced with this surely the government will pivot and do anything to win back their progressive base. Nope, instead the government went absolutely nuclear.

Starmer released an absolutely incendiary open letter to all MPs, accusing Green Party voters of sectarian extremism, and saying that George Galloway won it for the Greens (I would argue that the number of people thinking about George Galloway when marking their cross on the ballot in an election he’s not even standing in is near zero).[71] Of course, releasing a letter accusing progressives, who were Labour’s main voter bloc in 2024, of being sectarian and extremist, isn’t going to win them back. And resultantly the government’s popularity has never been worse.

And so, having alienated absolutely everybody, the government faces possibly the worst defeat we may ever see at the local elections, and they will deserve it. Please don’t vote for them.

Appendices

Appendix 1

I was able to find from this website[19] an excel file listing the RCVs of all the water companies in 2025. If RCV is meant to be a substitute for market value, or how much it would cost to buy the company outright, then it is a similar metric to market cap. And thankfully, three water companies: Severn Trent Water, United Utilities and Pennon Group, are publicly traded, so have measurable market caps.

Before I go ahead with the comparison, I want to make the point that Ofwat’s own figures for RCV by company, numbers that are often in excess of £10bn, are given to a precision of one hundredth of a penny. What? Those who have a STEM degree will be familiar with the concept of false precision. Ofwat are, depending on the amount of cynicism applied, either completely unaware of it or very familiar with it indeed. For the purposes of the comparison I have rounded everything to the nearest £10,000, which I still think could be overly precise for figures this large.

For Severn Trent Water and United Utilities, the comparison is as follows.

Company	RCV (£)	Market Cap (£)
Severn Trent	13,517,960,000	9,565,620,000[20]
United Utilities	15,020,330,000	9,304,370,000[21]

It can be seen at a glance that the RCV is substantially greater than the market cap for these companies.

As for Pennon Group, they own a few water companies. The vast majority of their business is made from South West Water, Bristol Water and SES Water. Pennon has a market cap of £2,617,120,000. The sum of the RCVs of the three major water companies is £5,886,470,000 - more than double the market cap.

Obviously RCV and market cap are measures of completely different things when considering a company’s assets, equity and debt. But RCV is quite literally meant to be a proxy for the market value of a company, so it’s not unreasonable to expect such a metric to roughly track the market cap, even if from my research RCV would be a bit bigger in practice.

But for the sake of argument let’s ignore market cap and look at Thames Water, a company that has spent the past few years battling insolvency. Thames has £20bn of debt and raised customer bills by 40% in 2025.[22] Thames has had to undergo multiple debt restructurings to avoid administration over the past few years. Omers, a major investor in Thames Water, valued their 31.7% stake at £990mn in 2021 (suggesting Thames was worth £3.12bn in 2021), but has since written the value of their investment down to zero owing to Thames Water’s financial difficulties.[23]

Given all of this, how much would you value Thames at if you were a civil servant asked to price up how much it would cost for the government to buy it? Not much, right?

How about TWENTY ONE BILLION POUNDS?

Yes, the RCV for Thames Water, a company whose debt pile is bigger than the entire retailer Next, a company who has had major investors write off their shares as having zero value, has an RCV of £21,008,420,000.

And remember, RCV is not some abstract figure, it is the amount that, according to Defra, the government would need to pay today in order to buy a specific water company for the purposes of nationalisation. I don’t trust these figures one iota!

And the final nail in the coffin for RCV may be this: in 2006 a paper was written, now available to view on the Ofgem website, which describes “fundamental errors” with the RCV approach.[24] This was published by a utility regulator, there are already people at the regulators who know this doesn’t work!

So, what would be the real cost to nationalise water in the UK? Certainly a lot less than £100bn, but I think it would be very difficult to put an exact figure on it. One for industry experts to take further and not me.