Why Labour’s honeymoon is already over

This week’s Labour conference was supposed to be a victory lap, celebrating the first Labour government in 14 years, following a General Election victory that delivered a huge parliamentary majority. But within less than three months in power, more than half of Brits already disapprove of the new government. Keir Starmer’s personal approval ratings have fallen below those of the defeated Rishi Sunak. So how did things go so wrong, so quickly?

Liam Halligan – columnist for the Sunday Telegraph, co-host of Planet Normal and author of Home Truths – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss why the Labour government isn’t working. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can listen to the whole thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: The Starmer government seems to have had an extraordinarily short honeymoon period, even in comparison with other governments. Why is that?

Liam Halligan: The honeymoon was always going to be short, because the landslide was loveless. Starmer’s government won a majority of 174 seats. Blair got a 179-seat majority in 1997. But the underlying psephology between the results could not be more different.

When I covered Blair’s first election, there was a genuine wave of enthusiasm for New Labour. There were also many people on those front benches who were already well known to the public and quite respected. Not just Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, but also people like Jack Straw, Alistair Darling and Mo Mowlam. Starmer has none of that.

Just look at the popular vote. The Starmer government got fewer votes in the most recent General Election than Jeremy Corbyn got in 2019 and 2017. Starmer got 34 per cent of the vote on a 60 per cent turnout, which means about 20 per cent of the electorate backed Starmer and Labour. Four out of five voters did not vote for them.

Labour has only made this situation worse for itself. It caved into trade unions’ demands on public-sector pay immediately. There are signs we should expect punitive taxation in the next budget. And it has reversed the work the Tories did to try to guarantee free speech in universities.

O’Neill: I’m not a fan of Tony Blair or New Labour, but they did have some heavy-hitting politicians – something we’re lacking today. Do you think there’s a broader crisis of politics here?

Halligan: Labour still thinks it’s in opposition. Keir Starmer even keeps calling Rishi Sunak the prime minister. More than that, almost every answer to every difficult issue from a frontbencher has been, ‘it’s the Tories’ fault’. That isn’t going to wash.

A couple of weeks after the election, I wrote in my Telegraph column that I thought the Labour honeymoon could be short. It could even be a one-term government. I’m just sensing the public mood here. The support for the government is broad, but extremely shallow and fickle.

Blair and Brown, to their credit, did things that at least made sense. They brought in a minimum wage. As it turned out, that caused the Tories to reverse their policy. Now it’s part of our institutional landscape. They made the Bank of England independent. They thought through the windfall tax on privatised utilities. Everyone in the industry could see it was coming. Compare that approach with Labour’s tax on North Sea oil, which is just going to destroy an industry that employs tens of thousands of people.

The VAT on private-school fees is another example of an ill-thought-out Labour policy. It’s completely performative. It’s certainly not going to raise much money, if any. I also think the way it’s been brought in has been beyond ideological. It’s been nasty – in particular how the date was dragged forward to January 2025 rather than September 2025, to introduce it in the middle of the school year.

The exodus from independent schools is going to be much worse than the government thinks. Most people who send their kids to independent schools are not sending them to grand schools like Eton, Winchester, Rugby or Harrow. Most people’s experience of independent education is a local school that might have previously been a grammar school, offering a grammar-school-style education. Or it could be a special-needs school or a specialised school.

These schools are running tiny surpluses, if any. Around 80 or 90 per cent of their cost base is staff. So the idea they can absorb 20 per cent VAT and not have to increase fees, as Labour has suggested, is completely wrong.

To introduce this in a massive, one-off hit has parents scared. They’re sitting at kitchen tables around the country with their spreadsheets, stressing about how they’ll have to pull their kids out of school. And a lot of independent schools, unfortunately, are going to close down. These are schools that are hugely important in their local communities, providing all kinds of jobs, outreach and collaboration with state schools.

O’Neill: What do you think are the prospects of the Tories sorting themselves out and becoming a solid opposition party?

Halligan: Firstly, I think the leadership contest is taking far too long. We’re not due to have a leader of the opposition until early November. That will be four months since Labour won the General Election.

This country desperately needs an opposition leader. The fact that we won’t have one by the October budget is a bad look – not least because the leader of the opposition traditionally responds to it. That is a huge mistake.

The question is, do the Conservatives need a One Nation leader or a more centre-right leader now? UK elections are won on the centre ground. But the question is, where is the centre ground? Does Starmer represent the centre ground?

The centre ground, according to the political and media class, is not where the country thinks the centre ground is. I think there’s a huge silent tribe of people waiting for a Tory leader who can claim the centre-right ground. These people are more concerned about immigration than Labour is, more concerned about fiscal irresponsibility and more concerned about high taxation.

Those kinds of hard-working people aren’t dogmatic or party-political in any way. They just want their politicians to stop doing stupid things that make it harder for them to provide for themselves and their families.

Liam Halligan was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: