DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Perils of pandering to sectarian politics

No prizes for guessing the most compelling political message delivered in last week's council elections. Unfortunately, it was also a lie.

This was an image of the Prime Minister, next to his signature, accompanied by the words: 'Do you think working people deserve a retirement? Rishi Sunak doesn't. Want to keep your pension? Don't risk it with Rishi Sunak. Vote Labour.'

And many millions did (though for plenty of other reasons, besides).

This cruel fiction was justified by Labour on the grounds that the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, said the Conservatives have a long-term plan to remove the tax known as National Insurance. And many people imagine that the money raised by this goes directly and solely to provide the state pension.

In fact, as Alex Brummer pointed out in the Mail: 'The cash raised on payroll from employers and employees goes straight into the Exchequer; it is just another form of income tax, imposed exclusively on workers. In the UK there is no tradition of ring-fenced taxes.'

Moreover, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, £138 billion will be spent on the state pension this year, over three times more than the total raised by National Insurance contributions.

Keir Starmer and his team understand all this, which is why I described their claim as a lie — defined as a false statement known to be untrue by the person saying it.

The best that can be said is that this deliberately dishonest social media campaign was less lurid than the 'attack ad' Labour put out during the local election campaign last year. 

That used exactly the same image of Rishi Sunak, with his signature, next to the words: 'Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn't.'

This attempt to portray Sunak as the paedophiles' pal was based on the numbers of such offenders who did not serve jail-time since 2010 (when the Conservatives have been in office).

In fact, Sunak was not even an MP for part of that period and, as it happens, Sir Keir Starmer, as the former Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), was on the sentencing council for a number of those years.

The former Labour Home Secretary Lord (David) Blunkett was one of a number of the party's most experienced figures to express their revulsion. Blunkett said he had been left 'close to despair' by what he termed the 'deeply offensive' advertisements.

But as the Sunday Times noted at the time: 'Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first [of these ads put out on Twitter] has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory.'

Starmer is a man who, by all accounts, behaves with decency and kindness in his personal life. But he is also a football fanatic, and applies to politics the ethics of professional football — which is that the dirtiest of tricks can be excused if it brings victory to your side. But if the other side does the same, that is outrageous and unacceptable.

And it seems the Labour leader is still furious at the way, during a Commons debate in February 2022, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that, as DPP, Starmer had spent the majority of his time 'prosecuting journalists and not prosecuting Jimmy Savile, as far as I can make out'. 

In fact, Starmer, while head of the DPP, was not involved in the (non) charging decisions in 2009 over Savile, though later he apologised for the organisation's 'shortcomings'.

One result of Johnson's jibe across the despatch box was that Starmer, by his own account, encountered 'people calling me a paedophile protector in the street'. But the then Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, explicitly distanced himself from Johnson's remark, telling a press conference the same day: 'I wouldn't have said it.'

Johnson himself later told broadcasters: 'Let's be absolutely clear, I'm not talking about the Leader of the Opposition's personal record when he was DPP. I totally understand that he had nothing to do personally with those decisions.'

By contrast, Labour's claims that Sunak 'doesn't think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison' were part of a coldly calculated strategy, not blurted out once in the heat of a parliamentary debate: and Starmer's team, unlike Johnson, have never suggested the slightest contrition.

Sunak himself is not completely averse to dishing it out. For example, when raising the fact that, in his career as 'a lefty lawyer' (to quote the PM), Starmer had represented the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which the Government has since proscribed as a terrorist organisation. 

And when in an interview with Piers Morgan, he was asked if he was saying that Starmer is a 'terrorist sympathiser', the PM refused to deny it: 'The facts speak for themselves. These things speak to people's values.'

But what are Starmer's values, politically? Since being elected Labour leader on a platform which might be described as 'Corbynism without Corbyn', he has consistently discarded all the policies he had promised he would pursue if in government.

Nationalising the big six energy companies, dropped. Abandoning private sector 'outsourcing' by the NHS, dropped. Abolishing university tuition fees, dropped.

Increasing income tax for the highest earners, dropped. Scrapping the Conservatives 'heinous' two-child benefit cap, dropped. The taxpayer-funded £28 billion 'Green growth' plan, dropped.

Next? Well, as the Rwanda scheme for deporting illegally trafficked migrants, which Starmer said he would scrap, seems actually to have some deterrent value, the Labour-supporting New Statesman reports that the party might now retain it.

The point is this: the more Starmer scraps all the Left-wing pledges which radically differed from the programme of the Conservative government, the more Labour relies on making things up to suggest a gulf in values which no longer exists at the level of real policies.

And by claiming that the evil Tories are about to cancel the state pension, Labour can create an imaginary schism in which they are still on the side of the working man (or woman) in a way the Conservatives aren't.

It is not coincidental that the last time Labour tried this tactic was during the 1997 general election, under Tony Blair, who, as the then Conservative PM John Major wistfully put it, had left him feeling as though he had gone swimming in the River Thames, left his clothes on the bank, and found that Blair was wearing them.

In the final weeks of that campaign, too, Labour claimed the Conservatives would 'abolish the state pension'. An outraged Major declared: 'I'd leave politics rather than abolish the state pension'.

Then, as now, Labour perpetuated this lie when miles ahead in the opinion polls. And then, as now, you'd think that it was only necessary to keep reminding the public about the division and decay within a Conservative Party that had turned to devouring itself, for Labour to achieve victory. It raises the question: if Labour fights this dirty when more than 20 points ahead in the opinion polls, how will it behave if things get squeaky?