Ross Clark

Could Labour, under a new leader, go into the next election with a manifesto promising to start negotiations to rejoin the EU? It is beginning to look like a real possibility given Wes Streeting’s assertion that Britain should rejoin the customs union. If Britain were to become part of the customs union, it would make questionable sense to remain outside the single market, and if Britain were to rejoin the single market, it could be sold as little more than a tidying-up exercise to apply for full membership of the EU.   Streeting’s remarks have left Keir Starmer – who spent months in opposition calling for a second referendum which he hoped would overturn the result of the first – in the odd position of looking (relatively) like a Eurosceptic.

Until Rachel Reeves tightened the rules in last month’s Budget, Motability customers were able to sink into the leather seats of a top-of-the-range Mercedes. But however luxurious the upholstery, it can’t have been as thick and durable as the rhinoceros skin of Motability boss Andrew Miller. He has just been awarded a 23 per cent pay rise to £924,000. There are no prizes for guessing who is contributing to the largesse shown to him by his board. Nearly half of Motability’s £8.1 billion spending last year was covered by the government’s exploding welfare budget. Motability has been under the spotlight Just how impervious to public opinion do you have to be to accept such a rise when you know your organisation is under close public scrutiny?

Imagine you are a keen Brexiteer and opponent of net zero plans, especially of the idea of being forced to buy an electric vehicle (EV). There are plenty of people like you; there is much evidence to suggest that the two things go together. But you must now be feeling a little confused. It must be dawning on you that, in terms of your freedom to buy the vehicle that you want, you would have been better off had Britain remained in the EU. Europe has just made the decision to relax the ban on petrol vehicles from 2035 to 2040 – while in Britain it is still planned to take effect from 2030. It is not hard to see why the EU has changed its mind. For one thing, the market for EVs has not just stalled; it has started to roll backwards.

A psychoanalyst might have some ideas as to why Keir Starmer’s thoughts have suddenly turned to the subject of unfair dismissal. But on the face of it, the government’s U-turn on giving workers the right to sue their employers for unfair dismissal from day one of their employment does seem to mark a change in its relations with business. The Employment Rights Bill had become bogged down in the House of Lords as peers and business leaders warned of the bizarre consequences of the legislation. The ability to sue for unfair dismissal would have provided a field day for job applicants who managed to land themselves a role for which they were wholly unsuitable – and who would find themselves unsackable.

One moral of the Budget is to beware of governments offering you incentives to buy a particular kind of car. On the advice of the then EU Transport Commissioner Lord Kinnock 25 years ago, the Blair government encouraged us all to buy diesel vehicles on the grounds they did more miles to the gallon and were therefore better for the environment. A few years later those who fell for the bait – including me – suddenly found ourselves treated like antisocial thugs, destroying kids’ lungs, and had our cars driven off the road by ULEZ zones. But at least we got the chance to drive around for a few years before officialdom turned against us.

I know doctors have a long training and have to absorb a lot of knowledge before they are let loose in a surgery or a hospital ward, but still there is one extra module which needs to be inserted into their schedule: one on the public finances. In fact, maybe just give them an afternoon off to read the papers. For the past couple of months we have had almost daily briefings from Number 11 floating the ever-more desperate ways in which Rachel Reeves is flirting with raising taxes to fill her fiscal black hole. The bond markets are flickering at every suggestion, weighing up the risk that Britain is thrown headlong into a fiscal crisis if it doesn’t seek to reduce £160 billion a year in public spending.

If Rachel Reeves was hoping for a glimmer of good news in today’s GDP figures, she has been left disappointed. We now have a whole year of data since she delivered her first Budget, and it does not look good. Labour’s promise to put ‘growth, growth, growth” at the heart of the economy looks increasingly forlorn. She may have to rethink her standard attack line of accusing Liz Truss of ‘crashing the economy’, on the grounds that it could equally well apply to her. When Labour came to power in July 2024, economic growth was enjoying a fillip – GDP had increased by 0.6 per cent over the previous quarter. The long shadow of Covid seemed finally to be passing. That has all gone now. In the three months to September, the ONS reports, GDP grew by just 0.1 per cent.

If nothing else, the government is providing us with a masterclass in how to lose control of public spending. A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, as Ronald Reagan once said, and soon it begins to add up to some serious money. Work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden has announced that he intends to take another look at one of the few good decisions Labour has taken since it came to office last year: to refuse compensation to nearly three million ‘Waspi’ women who have bleated that they weren’t given sufficient warning that their pension age was to be increased from 60 to 65, ruining their delicately-laid retirement plans. When the decision was made last year, the government argued that handing out £10.

Just how much more desperate can Rachel Reeves get? Giving an even heftier clue to Radio 5 listeners on Monday that she is going to break Labour’s manifesto promise and raise income tax, the Chancellor explained that this is necessary in order to raise Britain’s lousy productivity record. Sticking to the manifesto commitments, Reeves said: Would require things like deep cuts to capital spending. The reason why our productivity and our growth has been so poor these last few years is because governments have always taken the easy option to cut investment in rail and road projects, in energy projects, in digital infrastructure. As a result, we’ve never managed to get our productivity back to where it was before the financial crisis.

Like the John Lewis Partnership he used to run, Sir Charlie Mayfield, who has just completed the government’s ‘Keep Britain Working’ review, comes across as terribly nice and civilised. It’s just a shame he can’t quite bring himself to put the boot in and deal properly with the problem of mass worklessness he correctly identifies. Had the job been given to a more ruthless business operator – perhaps someone from Amazon, Aldi or one of the other businesses which is steadily devouring John Lewis’s lunch – government might actually have a hope of a workable solution. Mayfield all but ignores the real problem: it has become far too easy to claim out-of-work benefits Mayfield is not wrong in his diagnosis.