¹⁸Pride goes before disaster, and arrogance before a fall

Proverbs 16: 18 – The Revised English Bible

¹²We should not dare to class ourselves or compare ourselves with any of those who commend themselves. What fools they are to measure themselves on their own, to find in themselves their standard of comparison!

2 Corinthians 10: 12 – The Revised English Bible

We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude and certitude begets hubris. (Bret Stephens)

Cartoon courtesy of Bob Moran

Now that some of the initial responses to the election outcome have passed, commentators seem to have turned to speculating about what the new government will try to do, and how it will achieve it. By the time you read this, the State Opening of Parliament will have happened, and we may, or may not, have a slightly clearer idea.

After the election, I found myself looking at a photo of the new Cabinet, sitting around the table. I found myself wondering whether it was conceivable that this Cabinet could be even more incompetent than the disastrous Conservative one that it’s replaced. Look at the faces and names, do your own research, and you may reach the conclusion that, as unlikely as it sounds, in view of the catastrophe of the last few years, it might well be.

I’ve also found myself wondering what might be the issues that will potentially cause them problems.

It’s difficult assessing this, because their pledges have so far been so vague, that one of the problems is that we haven’t got much idea of what they’re planning.

But I’ve found myself making a list. It’s rather a long one. So, in addition to the possible glaring lack of competence among the new crew, I think they may have set themselves some absolutely impossible challenges. Here are just a few of the banana skins that they’ve laid for themselves:

• Wes Streeting has pledged to ‘fix’ the broken NHS. No-one would be more delighted than me if he achieves this aim, which has beaten more or less every single government during my lifetime. I fear that the organisation is, actually, way beyond ‘fixing’ in any conventional sense. Might Streeting be revolutionary in his approach, in a way that the Conservatives didn’t dare to be? If he is, the Unions and left wing in his own party will be ruthless, and he won’t last long.
• Starmer is the latest in the long line of Prime Ministers who’ve promised to reduce immigration. So far, he has scrapped the Rwanda scheme and said that he wants to get closer to the EU. I can’t see, for the life of me, how either of these things will reduce the arrivals. In addition, if he starts to reduce the list of those waiting for their existing asylum claims to be heard, this will simply add to the numbers who come here, legally and illegally, won’t it? And I suspect that the Civil Service would be quite happy to give more people ‘leave to remain,’ even in the case of those who’ve arrived illegally. I can see the possibility of massive increases in legal and illegal migration, visible well within one year. How will the voting public react, when this happens? I think we all know.
• What do we know about the new Labour backbenchers, many of whom will have received scant assessment, as they would have been considered to have been contesting unwinnable seats? I can easily see that Starmer may have a very large potential for backbench revolt and would think that the issue of Gaza and Palestine might cause no end of problems in double-quick time?
• I’m not the only one who’s wondering about David Lammy, our new Foreign Secretary describing Donald Trump this way: ‘not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath, he is also a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of western progress for so long’. Great diplomatic language towards someone who looks likely to become the next President, particularly after the events of the last few days! Lammy is not the only name in the new Cabinet who seems capable of throwing multiple banana skins in the path of the new government, and who doesn’t know when to shut his mouth.
• The potential economic challenges are enormous. But, genuinely, where is the money going to come from, to pay for the pledges to Ukraine, the NHS, the cost of Net Zero, and a raft of smaller issues like 7,500 promised new teachers, improved access to dental care, fixing potholes etc, etc, etc? My guess is that there will be a raid on pensions, investments and possibly even ‘free equity’ in houses. I also suspect that it lies deep in the Labour party’s soul to try to get away with ‘stealth taxes’; a tactic much beloved of the last Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Unfortunately his stealth taxes were never stealthy enough to escape notice. It’s one of the ways that they tend to look down on the public, which could easily result in very rapid loss of support, in view of the fact that they’ve come into government with a huge majority, no real enthusiasm or support and, to be fair to them, a dreadful legacy from the Conservatives.
• It’s suggested in some quarters that the government, when economic reality eventually catches up with them, may go for a ‘wealth tax’ along the lines of Francois Mitterrand’s 1988 ‘Signes Extérieurs de Richesse’ (Exterior signs of wealth). The way this worked was that the French government looked at what people owned and how they spent their money, and then more or less arbitrarily taxed them on what they found. Do you have a holiday home? An expensive car? A boat? A large house? Do you take lots of expensive holidays? Are your children privately educated? People in these situations in France were forced into paying sometimes eyewatering amounts of tax. Some of my French friends were treated atrociously at this time, and taxed heavily on non-existent income.   
• It seems the UK government is going to treat the re-nationalisation of the railways as a priority. They seem to have forgotten that the primary driver of privatisation was the need to get investment like new rolling stock off the government’s books and into that of private industry, where the costs could be amortised over several years. Even forgetting the need to compensate the shareholders (it’s not obviously legal for even a government with such a large majority to steal people’s property) how are they going to deal with the massive sums involved in writing off the costs of infrastructure in one year, as they move from commercial accounting standards, to the public requirement to write everything off in one year?
• The story about the re-nationalisation of the railways underlines that a great many Labour policies are based not on facts or data, but on ideology. Politics is an adversarial business, I understand that. But when the policies are not worked out in cold blood, but simply adopted because they are the opposite of what the Conservatives did, there will be some serious mistakes made. I’ve been a regular railway user throughout my life, and still am. The current, privatised, service is of course open to criticism. However, those calling for re-nationalisation are mostly too young to remember how utterly appalling the old, nationally-owned service was. There is, quite simply, no comparison; the current service is 100% better. This could also bite the government hard, if the Unions see it as an opportunity to extract more money for their members (which they most certainly will).
• The government intends, so they tell us, to legalise Euthanasia, now known as Assisted Dying. This is such a slippery slope, that in no time at all, people will be asking their doctors for this, because they’re suffering from depression. I’m hugely in favour of the current system. It’s a muddle, because it’s never clear whether prosecution will follow a relative helping a loved one to die, but sometimes a muddle is a good idea, allowing action to be taken where it’s obviously in the interests of the individual and the family, but also to avoid the elderly queueing up because they consider themselves to be a burden to their families. When bad stories hit the press, there will be hell to pay.
• We’ve been told that Starmer favours changing our Constitution, in a way that will be designed to be irreversible. What could possibly go wrong?
• With 63% of MPs sitting on the Labour benches, there will be by-elections, and they’re bound to be weighted towards seats held by Labour. When the party has tripped over a few of its own banana skins, the public will be brutal. And with the percentage of Labour MPs holding slim majorities now at a record high, the vast army of people who will not be able to find alternative jobs for even half of the pay of an MP, the troops will, believe me, get restless very quickly. They have a short honeymoon – the local elections next May could be a crucial point at which it all starts to unravel.
• At least one news outlet has suggested that it may be Ed Miliband’s fanaticism for ‘Net Zero’ that could bring down the government. Not only is this yet another ideological issue, where nobody seems interested in the facts or the data or the statistics or the science, but the outcome could be vastly more expensive energy prices and the serious risk of routine power cuts. If this happens, the sparks will really fly. And if people are forced into unwanted, very expensive electric vehicles, or expensive, inefficient heat pumps, it will not play well.

The above list is far from definitive. Education, ‘Woke’ issues, the politicisation of the Police, the replacement of the shrinking pool of Doctors by less qualified ‘Physician Associates’, an attempt to rejoin the EU via the ‘back door’ and any number of other issues could easily become things that bring this government to an end, long before their term is up in 2029.  

Heavenly Father, you hate arrogance and hubris, and love humility. Guide the government to realise that their huge majority could become a liability. And help them to avoid those policies that will make the lives of ordinary people harder. Amen