Hungry Hungry Hippos

Prepare yourself for five years hard Labour.

Back in the old days, when TV was full of topical comedy shows which poked fun at all our politicians and bosses, and not just the ones that the ruling elites looked down on as too vulgar, racist, populist or democratic, we used to spend a good amount of time trawling through the tabloid press looking for silly things to write jokes about.

One story which used to come round every few months, especially in the Daily Mail, would feature some rich as Croesus Arab guy, showcasing his lavish lifestyle. A fleet of luxury cars, a house the size of a shopping mall, a private jet, and his most prized possession of all, his hippopotamus.

I say ‘possession’ but that is a little unfair, because the rich guy was always at pains to point out that the hippo wasn’t a pet as such. They were actually best friends. Soul mates whose bond had transcended the inter species divide. Constant companions who communicated on an almost telepathic level. And who shared a level of trust unique among humans and hippos.

There would be photos of the guy and the hippo rough housing in the hippo’s ‘purpose built enclosure’. There would be snaps of them cuddling up in the sun, catching some rays in blissful zoonotic harmony. And a comical shot of the hippo and the rich guy tucking into a sumptuous meal together, like the besties they undoubtedly were.

And then a couple of months later there would be a follow up article. Explaining that the rich guy was now a dead guy, because his BBF, the hippo, had killed him.

It turns out it wasn’t actually his best friend after all. It was a hippo, and one day it rolled on top of him. Or just got bored posing for Instagram, and bit him in half.

Of course it did. Because that’s what hippos do.

I keep thinking about this endless succession of dead rich guys and their BFF hippos/lions/tigers/bears when I hear people talk about how there’s nothing to fear from Keir Starmer’s new ‘moderate’ Labour Party.

How it has been neutered, rendered harmless, and made safe since the bad old days of Jeremy ‘Jew Lovin’ Corbyn, or when Keir Starmer knelt for BLM, and insisted that some women had a penis.

Now they point out how boring, dependable and ‘forensic’ Keir Starmer is, and how his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is ‘business friendly.’ How she plans to go for growth and has promised to stick to strict ‘fiscal rules’.

Whatever they are.

But just like our hippo, the Labour Party is not cuddly, friendly or harmless. It has not changed. And it definitely, 100%, most assuredly, is not your BFF.

And we’re all about to find this out on July 5th when Keir Starmer’s Labour sweeps away Rishi Sunak’s Tories in an unstoppable tsunami of popular disinterest and voter apathy.

Let’s be honest, after fourteen years of breathtakingly poor Tory government, Britain is in a right old mess.

There is a cost of living crisis, a housing crisis and an immigration crisis. There’s a crisis in our health service, a pension crisis, a crisis in the energy sector, a social care crisis, and a mental health crisis.

I could go on. But I don’t need to tell you the country is in dire straits. You live here.

Well the good news is the Labour Party is positively bursting with ideas about how to improve things.

The bad news, each and every one of them involves you giving up more of your money, and surrendering ever more of your freedoms, so they can make your life worse, our society more divided, and its people more miserable and impoverished.

Labour has ambitious plans, and ambitious plans cost money.

But it has promised, hand on heart, that it won’t be putting up taxes on hardworking families.

And it will continue to do so, right up until the moment it puts up taxes on hard working families.

Although I expect it will fudge that by calling them levies, charges, premiums and tariffs, in the hope that no one will notice. We will notice.

But in the meantime the money has to come from somewhere.

Labour claims it will snuffle up much of the cash it requires by ‘straight away’ adding VAT (a tax on hard working families) to private school fees.

This will have the twin benefits of punishing the rich for having the temerity of wanting to educate their children properly, and will also raise a whopping…..  Oh hang on.

The Treasury itself predicts that this pernicious policy could realistically force one in six of the country’s 650,000 private school pupils back into the public sector. You know, the schools we all have to pay for.

So instead of raising cash, the policy will likely cost the taxpayer an extra £650m a year.

Still, it’s popular with those who think that other people having more stuff than them is a violation of their human rights. So who cares if it works or not? 

It’s a statement of intent.

That Labour is going to war on aspiration, will take aim at achievement, annihilate success, and punish ambition.

Another policy Starmer has not been shy about announcing is his intention to scrap Sunak’s Rwanda plan, which he will ditch on Day One.

Personally I’m quite happy about this.

I know it has its supporters, but I maintain this is perhaps the most hare-brained government scheme since that time Boris Johnson suggested beating the French at their own game by building a rocket to the moon and stealing all the cheese.

If migrants arent going to be put off crossing the channel by the fear of drowning in Kent sewage, then they are hardly going to be deterred by the thought of spending a summer luxuriating in the the finest mid price accommodation the Rwandan tourist board has to offer.

But Sir Keir is no fool, (That’s David Lammy’s job) he knows that the mass importation of single Middle Eastern men is unpopular with the voters, so he has come up with a foolproof plan to stop Britain being swamped every summer by the biggest flotilla of ‘small boats’ since Dunkirk.

He’s going to ‘smash the gangs’.

Which frankly sounds so infantile it’s like a six year old dressed as a Wild West Sheriff saying he would easily stop crime by ‘locking up all the robbers.’

Starmer actually envisions a two pronged approach. He also plans to ‘do a deal with France.’

But we already have a deal with France. We have paid the French authorities £230m since 2014. And in return the gendarmes wander the beaches of Calais, helpfully pointing dinghies full of Albanian gangsters in the direction of Dover. It’s a proper bargain.

Always in the top three of voters concerns is the NHS. We have seven and half million people on the NHS waiting list. Which isn’t quite the combined populations of Scotland and Wales. But it’s getting there.

Still, not to worry.

Anneliese Dodds the shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, has got a brilliant new way to waste doctors’ time.

She will ensure that under Labour, GPs will be empowered not just to sign you off as sick, but also, to sign you off as transgender.

Which is great because those guys could really do with a break.

At least according to Keir Starmer,  who claims ‘the trans community are amongst the most marginalised and abused communities’.

Er….No they’re not. You just have to turn on the TV, open a newspaper, walk into a shop, look at an advert, mince across a rainbow crossing, tune into Eurovision, visit the Cannes Film Festival, listen, watch, or log onto the BBC, or simply glance out of your window during Pride month (month!!!!) to know that’s simply not true.

In fact the ‘trans community’ is perhaps the most over indulged, excessively feted, coddled, cosseted, pampered and spoiled bunch of eternally angry, permanently entitled, narcissists to have ever forced a female athlete off a First Place podium.

If underprivileged working class white boys were given half the help and attention afforded the ‘trans community’. Then Gateshead would have its own space programme by now.

Dodds goes on, with a straight face, to claim

‘Labour is the party of equality. We believe everyone should be treated with dignity and respect.’

Yup everyone. Just not ladies in female changing rooms, girls on sports teams, and women in rape crisis centres. But apart from them, yeah everyone.

Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting has been making waves by suggesting that only Labour has got the credibility with voters to reform the NHS.

And maybe there’s actually something to this.

The NHS is no longer fit for purpose. Created to serve Britain’s post war health needs, it was actually expected to become smaller over time, as the health of the nation improved, and its services were no longer required.

How’s that working out for you Clement?

Something definitely needs to change. But what form will Wes Streeting’s mould breaking reforms actually take?

Maybe he will propose a deregulation of the health industry, and dismantle the NHS monopoly, so that people can create their own hybrid system using a combination of private health insurance and public provision.

Moving us slowly and cautiously to the sort of system which works well in Europe, where it seems to have the added benefit of being better than ‘Our’ NHS (cf ‘Our’ Democracy) at keeping cancer patients alive, and is much less prone to killing babies, or infecting haemophiliacs with AIDS.

So perhaps Wes will grasp the nettle, put the patient first, and introduce something like that.

Or maybe he will just hand over billions and billions in extra cash to the ever ravenous NHS and stand by helplessly as it disappears into a bottomless money pit of wage increases, management restructuring, and DEI initiatives, without even touching the sides.

Yeah, it’ll be that last one. Because it’s always that last one.

Rishi Sunak recently retreated from the worst excesses of his government’s ridiculous Net Zero policy. But the direction of travel remains the same.

And it’s only going to get worse. Because Labour has a brilliant plan to save the planet. Which it will singlehandedly achieve by destroying the very last remnants of British business.

Soon Net Zero targets will be mandated in law.

According to the Daily Telegraph

‘Ed Miliband, the shadow Climate and Net Zero Secretary, has confirmed plans for a new crackdown that would force bosses to ensure their companies are aligned with the goal of keeping global temperature rises below 1.5C this century.’

The sheer hubris of this statement is genuinely beyond me. There is nothing Britain could do, no action we could take, no policy we could adopt, no mission we could undertake which could possibly influence global temperatures in any way whatsoever.

We are irrelevant.

Ultimately we are being lead to believe that a man who could not even eat a bacon sandwich convincingly in 2014 is going to change the world’s weather in fifty years time, by making British firms fill out some forms.

Yes. That’ll work.

Something else Starmer has been upfront about is his intention to ‘renegotiate’ (ie overturn) Brexit.

It doesn’t matter if you are a committed Leaver like me, or a grumpy Remainer, ever cursing the low information electorate, it’s clear that every step since the 2016 vote has been botched.

Every opportunity missed. Every advantage dodged.

I’m currently reading No Way Out, Tim Shipman’s brilliantly forensic and balanced new book on parliament’s hissy fit response to the wrong-vote, and the Tory government’s subsequent negotiations with the EU.

It makes grim reading. The Tories under May bungled every single move. Flat footed, supine, slow and useless. Conceding every point, from the ‘sequencing’ of the negotiations, to the £40bn ‘divorce fee’, to the humiliating betrayal and surrender of Northern Ireland.

The EU treated Theresa May like a bad dog that had been sick on a new sofa, and she just sat there and took it.

I’m not saying that we could have got the Brexit I personally wanted, but frankly this was pathetic.

Starmer may have announced his intention to renegotiate Brexit. But the EU has countered by announcing it is not interested.

Of course it isn’t. Why should it offer any concessions, fresh deals or new arrangements, when true to form, our next British prime minister will bend over backwards to hand over everything the EU wants anyway? Ready to acquiesce to every demand, and surrender every advantage with no strings attached.

Starmer is like a straying husband, skulking home after a whirlwind fling with Daphne from Accounts.

Sure, come back home says his missus. But there’s no negotiation.

From now on, it’s my way or the highway. What I say goes, and when I get back from work on a Wednesday, you better have already taken the bins out. Oh. And you know that new conservatory I’ve been wanting? You’re paying for that too. Also, hand over your North Sea fishing rights.

There are many, many other reasons to dread the next five years of a Labour government which we don’t have time to go into here.

But expect wealth taxes, pension raids, internet censorship, rent caps, increased immigration, both illegal and legal, smoking bans, votes for children, minimum alcohol pricing, gambling bans, 20mph zones, nationwide ULEZ schemes, and road pricing.

Prepare for lucrative government contracts awarded on the basis of race, the further ceding of sovereignty from elected politicians to unelected quangos. Cancerous critical race theory taught as part of the curriculum. The return of the Elgin (sorry Parthenon) Marbles. And the introduction of initially voluntary, then positively ‘nudged’, and finally mandatory, euthanasia.

And that’s just the first week.

I expect we’ll soon come to look back on a time when the government only took 46% of the country’s GDP. When merely 2.8 million Britons were signed off as too sick to work. When we paid just 15% in stamp duty on buying an (albeit expensive) second home. And liking a Tweet by JK Rowling only earned you a stern talking to from a policeman, and not a stint in an actual prison, as ‘the good old days’.

Don’t get me wrong this is not a defence of the Tories. I definitely won’t be voting for them.

Even faced with the calamity of a Labour landslide, the Tories don’t deserve my vote.

It’s up to you to decide, whether they deserve yours.

The opinion among many right wing commentators is that a Labour government will become very unpopular very quickly. And that a chastened electorate will be begging for the return of a resurgent Tory party in 2029.

I’m not so sure. I think socialist governments like the one we are about to unleash upon ourselves can prove themselves perfectly popular, at least until, as Mrs Thatcher noted, they eventually run out of other people’s money.

And there is a lot of ruin in a nation.

In short I expect Labour will spend the next five years bribing the poor with the rich’s cash.

And by the time the next election rolls around it will have chased away the wealth creators, and impoverished the middle classes, to the extent that so many of our once proud people have become dependent on the largess of the bloated, all-consuming state for their basic needs, that the voters will recoil in terror at the idea of meaningful market reforms and ‘a fresh round of Tory cuts’.

That’s essentially what happened to Scotland.

Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves might be attempting to exude an aura of grown up professionalism, common sense pragmatism and financial prudence.

But don’t be fooled. They are socialists. What you have they want. What you have earned they will take. What you have built they will destroy.

They don’t believe in free markets, they don’t believe in free speech, and they certainly don’t believe in free, autonomous people.

Until recently Britain has been a conservative country run by socialists.

But as the Overton window shifts ever leftward, get used to living in a socialist country run by communists.

Perhaps we should not get ahead of ourselves. The election is not until July 4th.

And until then, Sunak fights on. He fights to lose.

********************

Thank you so much for taking the time to read Low Status Opinions.

I hope you enjoyed this article. If you did please share it, I’m always looking for new subscribers, and only you can help me build this Substack by sharing my work.

If you’re new here please consider becoming a Subscriber. It’s free unless you’d like to show your appreciation for the work I put in to these articles by becoming a paid subscriber.

I’m currently reducing my prices in a pre election sale. Because I appreciate how tight money is going to be for all of us under Labour.

I’ve also added a ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ button just above here. A few readers have suggested they would rather show their appreciation this way, rather than committing to a paid subscription, so here it is, let’s see how it goes. Many thanks to all who press my button.

Thanks again for your support. And I’ll see you in the comments.

LSO