A common political misrepresentation is to describe those plotting to take over from Sir Keir Starmer as being of the 'soft Left'. Angela Rayner, Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband are said to belong to this grouping, which is predominant in the modern parliamentary Labour Party and among the wider membership.
The term 'soft Left' is intended to conjure up reasonableness and moderation. How could we be frightened of people who advertise their lack of hardness? But there's nothing soft about Rayner, Burnham and Miliband or their supporters. A glance at their policies confirms they are doctrinaire socialists intent on transforming society.
In truth, we already have a government that can be described as soft Left. It has raised taxes to record peacetime levels. It has slapped VAT on school fees, precipitating the closure of dozens of private schools. It has extended the rights of workers and, only last week, of renters, with the certain outcome that the rental market will collapse. A mansion tax for houses worth more than £2 million was announced not long ago. Welfare is soaring to unprecedented levels after the Government scrapped the two-child benefit limit at an annual cost of £3.5 billion.
The Labour administrations of 1997 to 2010 resisted all these policies with the exception of lifting the two-child limit, which was not then in force, and of higher taxes for the better off, which were raised slightly in the dying days of the Gordon Brown government. Blair and Brown sidelined the soft Left. Starmer and Rachel Reeves embody it. Yet they may both be swept aside by people who claim to be soft Left but are by any rational definition, fully-fledged socialists scarcely distinguishable from Jeremy Corbyn.
How should those of us who abominate Starmer and Reeves react? I've often said in these pages that Starmer should go. He has executed countless U-turns, and is untrustworthy to boot. I couldn't bear his sucking up to Trump. His attempts to give away the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, and to pay its government £35 billion for snaffling them, is one of the stupidest acts in political history. As for the Chancellor, she is hopelessly out of her depth, and congenitally unable to accept that she is the chief author of Britain's economic woes. If a mouse ran across her desk in the Treasury it would be the Tories' fault.
There is a natural tendency, which I freely admit to having been part of, to want to see the back of both of them as soon as possible, and therefore to relish every story about plots against them. We must be careful what we hope for. One contender, Wes Streeting, might be preferable to Starmer. He is said already to have the necessary endorsements from 81 Labour MPs, 20 per cent of the parliamentary party. But as a Blairite in a Left-wing party, he has little chance of prevailing. A Survation poll for the LabourList website in February suggested that Starmer would easily defeat Streeting in a leadership showdown. It found that the only challengers the PM wouldn't beat are Rayner and Burnham.
Remember that it's not Labour MPs who will determine the outcome of the contest but an electorate comprising hundreds of thousands of members of the party and of affiliated trade unions. Whether Angela Rayner or Andy Burnham will emerge as the main contender is still impossible to predict since neither of them has yet got their ducks in a row. Rayner is still being investigated by HMRC for failing to pay £40,000 in stamp duty on the purchase of a flat in Hove. Perhaps she or her Corbynista boyfriend Sam Tarry spend hours every day on hold to the HMRC hotline in hope of a resolution. Burnham hasn't even got a parliamentary seat, though he's said to be confident that an obliging Labour MP will stand aside. But with the party so deeply unpopular, he couldn't be sure of winning the safest Labour constituency in the land.
Which of the two would be worse? Angela is a party girl who doesn't mind cutting the odd corner. Last week she managed to stagger into a door after a long evening of socialising in the Commons. Andy is a more sober figure who may have a vague idea of how the economy works. Both are irremediably Left-wing. Angela Rayner would extend workers' rights further and smile on the rocketing welfare budget. Having criticised Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood's attempts to curb immigration as 'unBritish', Rayner would doubtless sack her and kill off her reforms. According to The Guardian, Andy Burnham's prospective policies include an increase in inheritance tax, which is already far higher in real terms than it was 20 years ago.
Angela might emerge as PM with Andy as her deputy, or the other way around. In either event, there is plausible speculation that they would seek the services of Ed Miliband as Chancellor. It would be his reward for not having run for the top job himself. Ed can add up better than Angela but not in a way that would benefit the British people. The man who last week described BP's admittedly hefty profits as 'morally and economically wrong' has been an advocate of opportunistic levies on banks and eye-popping windfall taxes on oil companies. While Labour leader, he championed a mansion tax, and would probably continue where Rachel Reeves left off. He is equally likely to double down on the hairshirt Net Zero policies he has been shoving down our throats as Energy Secretary.
What is certain is that the hard-Left measures that would come after Starmer and Reeves would cripple the economy and send bond markets into a spin. Our ability to borrow money on the markets is keeping the British economy afloat. Yet last September, Burnham airily said that 'we've got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond market'. This is first-form economics. Last week the interest on ten-year UK bonds breached 5.1 per cent, significantly higher than the 4.6 per cent briefly notched up under Liz Truss, who Labour never tires of deriding. Things are bad now, but they will be far worse under whichever supposedly 'soft Left' replacement sidles into Downing Street.
And whoever we are talking about – Rayner, Burnham or Miliband – would have absolutely no mandate from the British people for their extremism. Nigel Farage has just told The Telegraph that Starmer's successor would enact such radical policies that there would be a 'breakdown of order' leading to pressure for an early general election, perhaps as soon as next year. Reform UK's leader joked: 'In some ways, the Rayner thing would be the most fun. It would give us the earliest election.' Like Farage, I'd like an early election, but I don't think the breakdown of order that he envisages – probably correctly – would be much fun. Starmer and Reeves may have been a disaster. But the hard-Left schemers plotting to take over our country would bring about a horrendous national catastrophe.
