Yet for all his radical talk of fixing problems at their foundation Starmer is reluctant to tackle them at that level. Instead his approach is semi-reactive, for example reaching agreements with European partners to catch and prosecute people-smugglers - Yvette Cooper made a ministerial statement about this straight after PMQs. Kemi noted that this issue was not even one of Sir Keir’s priorities in his new ‘Plan For Change.’ Yet other countries are dealing with the problem more directly - Sweden, for one.
By the way, again it seems that Starmer’s SpAds have a tin ear for propaganda: in his 28 November migration speech he said ‘mark my words – this government will turn the page,’ using a Kamala slogan just after she rode it into the biggest electoral failure in recent US political history.
Also in passing, there is another aspect that is not receiving much attention: net emigration by British nationals; 787,000 in the decade to 2021. These are likely to be people with marketable skills and initiative. Is there a 1960s-style ‘brain drain’ in progress? How will that impact our prospects for growth?
Immigration is merely one Jumbo in the room. The biggest one, the Mama Tembo, is energy.
Labour’s Noah Law soothed his boss’s nerves after the spat with the Opposition leader by pitching an easy question on how Starmer could ‘help Britain become a clean energy superpower.’
Here is a quiz for Ed Miliband: place the following adjectives for Britain’s energy policy in order of importance - ‘cheap, plentiful, reliable, clean.’ Anyone in his right mind - like India, China, the USA, Russia - has to put ‘clean’ at Number Four. Fortunately with nuclear reactors and an abandonment of Net Zero all may be achievable, as Reform’s Nigel Farage told Question Time last week.
It will be needed so we can earn a living in the world. GDP is a hopeless yardstick of national prosperity, since all it does is measure economic activity. Spend money like a sailor on shore leave and it will go up; but if you do it by increasing the population of dependant low-skilled and unemployed people the GDP per capita will decline.
What counts is energy use per capita. There has to be enough to house, feed and clothe everyone with more left over to produce goods and services for them but also for export, to keep our international trade in some sort of balance. How, with the most expensive electricity in the world, are our industries supposed to compete? What happens if they can’t? We import half our food as it is; how shall we pay for it? Is that not a sustainability question too, you Greens?
Which brings us back to another neglected pachyderm: farming. When Jerome Mayhew (Con) spoke of farms being lost and irreplaceable the PM responded as usual, with an undetailed claim about the IHT threshold for the ‘ordinary family case’ being £3 million. He also boasted that Labour will be investing £5 billion in farming over two years - the expected revenue from the new IHT rules is only 20% of that, so why do it? Why bring the tractors out in York over it?
Look more closely into that five billion pounds and see that little of it is to do with making our farmers produce more food for us. A lot is to do with Greenery, but not the kind we can eat. No wonder Mayhew called Sir Keir ‘duplicitous.’ Meanwhile, as well as the soaring costs of fertiliser and fuel for their machinery, Ed Davey noted that farmers have been undercut by the last administration’s Oz/NZ trade deals.
Starmer was also confronted with the usual queue of begging bowls for good causes and ticklish issues of diplomacy - post-Assad Syria, picking sides in Gaza, arming against Russia, freeing a Brit long imprisoned in Dubai. Somehow we have to stay out of more of the wars that have nearly eviscerated us since 1914 and keep the home fires burning.
We are in crisis. If Labour goes on playing at Johnny Head-In-Air, indulging itself in back-to-Eden crazes, fantasising about punching above our weight on the global stage and thinking other countries will always meet our needs because all we require is international law and fiat money, we are headed for a fall.
If the elephants don’t trample us first.
