The British people are not just giving up on Labour; they’re giving up on everybody
Thoughts on today’s Spring Statement
MATT GOODWIN
Britain’s economy, in case you haven’t noticed, is in the toilet. Growth has collapsed. Productivity is poor. Living standards have suffered one of the sharpest declines in recent history. Confidence has slumped. And prosperity feels like a distant dream.
I don’t know about you but when I walk around the streets of Britain these days I feel a mix of depression and embarrassment. The streets are dirty. Public transport rarely works and when it does arrive it’s worn down. Petty crime has basically been legalised, leaving a mood of fear and anxiety hanging the air. Public services are a joke. London is dead. People are visibly struggling.
And why would they? Just look at the latest numbers. While Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, and the new Labour government promised us at the general election last year they would fix this by ‘going for growth’, this year the Bank of England forecasts growth of just 0.7 per cent while inflation looks set to run at around 3 per cent. Britain is now trapped in a toxic combination of poor growth, stubbornly persistent inflation, low productivity, and a huge pile of incredibly expensive national debt.
Here’s just one statistic that reflects how bad things really are.
While much of the nation was recently, understandably, furious about a decision to take winter fuel payments from British pensioners to save £1.5 billion, this year alone the British taxpayer will pay £105 BILLION, or £9 billion every month, just servicing our national credit card —just paying off the interest on our national debt. We now spend considerably more each year servicing our debt than defending our country.
Which is partly why, today, in the Spring Statement, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the Labour government find themselves with zero room for manoeuvre. Having already presided over massive spending increases and tax rises in the budget last autumn, including clobbering British businesses with higher taxes and smashing any confidence that remained, Rachel Reeves today looks set to announce further drastic cuts to spending to try and shore up our national finances, including additional cuts to welfare and the civil service. Everything, in short, looks set to get worse.
And the British people have noticed. When it comes to the economy, which is the top issue for voters, the Labour government and Rachel Reeves have already lost the room. Today, as she delivers her Spring Statement, just 11 per cent of voters think Rachel Reeves is doing a ‘good job’ while, last week, pollsters Opinium put her net rating at minus 37. This makes her the least popular cabinet minister by some way and puts her where Meghan Markle is in the national polls —which is definitely a good thing.
Nor are voters impressed with Labour. Nearly three-quarters —73 per cent—think Keir Starmer’s party is managing the economy ‘badly’, while two-thirds think Labour is failing to manage inflation, which it is. Only small minorities support them.
There have been other big shifts since Labour came to power, too. The share of voters who think Labour ‘taxes and spends too much’ has rocketed, from just 28 per cent last year to 41 per cent. Only 12 per cent think Labour has the balance between tax and spend ‘about right’. With further stealth taxes and spending increases en route, Labour look set to become further out-of-touch with the country.
And when Ipsos-MORI asked the British people how they have felt since Labour took office, just 14 per cent said they feel ‘better off’. Only one in four say they are living ‘comfortably’, down 6-points on last year, while most people either say they are ‘finding it difficult’ or, at best, are merely ‘coping’. Indeed, ‘coping’ seems to be the best one can hope for in modern Britain. Most of us are merely existing, not living.
But here’s the thing.
It’s not just the Labour Party that people are convinced does not have the answers to Britain’s growing pile of serious problems. It’s everybody. What I see when I look out there at the country, when I look at the polls, is a much wider, deeper, and systemic collapse of public trust and public faith in the entire system. The British people simply do not believe that anybody can fix this mess.
When the British people were recently asked what they think will happen to Britain’s economy in the year ahead, not even one in five people, just 17 per cent, said things will get better. Like me, it seems, most people appear convinced that the future will be worse than the present and so they are buckling in, putting on their seat-belt and hunkering down, turning away from their leaders in Westminster and, more importantly, the idea that Britain will deliver them a good, prosperous life.
And when YouGov asked voters this week whether they think the Tories would do a better job than Labour most just shrugged their shoulders and said ‘not really’.
In fact, consistently, on everything from reducing poverty to providing jobs, from helping people get onto the housing ladder to improving living standards, from tackling the deficit to keeping prices down, the most popular answer when people are asked who would do best is neither Labour nor the Tories. It is ‘none of them’.
Once again, only small minorities of people back one of the two big parties to fix this disaster. Look, too, at the net ratings of every frontline politician in Westminster. They are all sitting in ‘net negative’ territory, disliked by a larger number of voters than the number they are keeping on side. Nobody is popular. Nobody is capturing the public imagination. SW1 just looks completely remote from people’s lives.
And this total sense of apathy and estrangement from the political class is not just visible on everything to do with the economy but runs through people’s reactions to many other issues that are dominating the agenda, too. Whether the people are asked who will lower legal immigration, stop the small boats, or reduce spiralling crime, a large swathe of the country simply no longer have faith in the idea there is somebody within the establishment, on the left or right, who can solve these problems.
Instead, there is a widespread sense out there in the country that the people are now trapped in a flimsy, disintegrating boat on stormy seas, with no captain and enormous, terrifying waves pushing them all around.
And you know what? This is my big concern. It’s not just about the dire direction of the economy or what Rachel Reeves and the Labour government say today. It’s something much deeper and potentially far more disruptive.
It’s this overwhelming, palpable, stifling feeling out there in the country, among the British people, that nobody in power really knows what they are doing anymore.
Nobody knows how to get us out of this big tax, big spending, big welfare, big state, big Net Zero, and big immigration economy that is making us poorer and further pushing our country into managed decline.
Nobody can stop the boats. Nobody can lower immigration. Nobody can reverse the de facto legalisation of crime, symbolised by online videos of marauding armed gangs and the fact that in London last year some 70,000 smartphones were stolen.
Nobody can fix the health service. Nobody can stop the cultural rot and sense of malaise that has descended across these islands. And nobody seems able to stop and reverse the very visible, managed decline of our once great nation.
And it’s this, I think, more than anything else, that is now pushing us into a very dangerous place indeed.
This article (The British people are not just giving up on Labour; they’re giving up on everybody) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”
See Related Article Below
Rachel Reeves proves that faking your CV to land a job you’re woefully unqualified for is a very, very bad idea
Rachel Reeves is now the walking, talking, spreadsheet-waving embodiment of why puffing up your CV to land a job you’re not remotely qualified for is a very, very bad idea.
JOHN BULL
Just like that guy who once claimed to be “proficient in Excel” and ended up crash-landing his company’s accounts into a smoking crater, Reeves has faked it till she broke it.
Yes, we’ve all seen it before. People who embellish a few qualifications, inflate a job title or two, drop “Bank of England” into their cover letter like a confetti bomb — and lo, some unfortunate soul gives them the job. But unlike your average fibbing applicant, Rachel Reeves didn’t just blag her way into middle management. She bluffed her way to the controls of the entire British economy.
And now she’s driving it straight off a cliff.
In what was supposed to be a Spring Statement but turned out to be more of a fiscal faceplant, Reeves delivered the economic equivalent of releasing a beta product riddled with bugs — and then blaming the entire internet for the mess. Growth halved. Business confidence evaporated. The pound tumbling faster than a crypto scam.
Every time she opens her mouth to announce “certainty” and “stability,” the markets respond like she’s announced she’s pegging the pound to Dogecoin.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the audacity. Here’s a Chancellor who campaigned as the great economic grown-up, someone who pretended to understand the numbers and all those clever things in the Economist. And yet, here we are, barely into 2025, and she’s managed to halve the growth forecast, ignite a tax inferno, and somehow convince the OBR that the way forward is to slash welfare, kill entrepreneurship, punish businesses, and shovel money into “AI transformation funds” like she’s rebooting The Matrix on a Whitehall budget.
Frankly, it’s a failed emergency budget from a failed Chancellor, and no amount of spreadsheets or “net zero” word salads can disguise the smell of burning ambition.
Ms Reeves would have us believe that it’s all the fault of Donald Trump, global instability, solar flares, alien invasions — anything but her own economic decisions. As though a tax raid, a confidence bonfire, and a planning free-for-all weren’t her doing. As if the markets simply woke up one day and decided to nosedive out of boredom.
We were promised an “active government”. What we got was a flailing one. A government of cost-cutters with no plan for growth. A Chancellor who boasts of no new tax rises while ushering in the most punishing fiscal raid in memory — a £40bn wallop to the face of working people and businesses.
This isn’t leadership. This isn’t vision. This is what happens when someone lies in the interview, talks like a technocrat, and then governs like a student who’s just discovered macroeconomics and is trying to balance the nation’s books with a pub quiz answer sheet.
We can laugh, we can sigh, we can update our LinkedIn profiles to say “not responsible for this mess” — but what we can’t do is ignore the fact that the UK economy is now being steered by someone who doesn’t even understand the Laffer Curve.
In the end, Reeves’ Spring Statement will be remembered not as a moment of action, but of exposure. The mask has slipped. The numbers don’t lie.
And if this is the best Labour’s “economic brains” can deliver, we are doomed. Roll on 2029.
If Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher were to forge a pen-wielding crusader for the 21st century, the result would be none other than John Bull. The nation’s most patriotic voice, John Bull stands as a beacon of British grit and tenacity, blending Churchillian wit with the Iron Lady’s resolve. Armed with unyielding conviction and a sharp eye for the political landscape, he delivers the latest insights and observations from Westminster and beyond for the Conservative Post. Whether rallying against bureaucratic bungling or championing the timeless values of Britain’s great heritage, John Bull is the columnist who reminds us what it means to be unapologetically British.
This article (Rachel Reeves proves that faking your CV to land a job you’re woefully unqualified for is a very, very bad idea) was created and published by Conservative Post and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author CP
••••
The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)
••••
Comment Policy: As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. This also applies to trolling, the use of more than one alias, or just intentional mischief. Enforcement of this policy is at the discretion of this websites administrators. Repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without prior warning.
••••
Disclaimer: TLB websites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, health, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.
••••
Disclaimer: The information and opinions shared are for informational purposes only including, but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material are not intended as medical advice or instruction. Nothing mentioned is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Liberty Beacon Project.
Leave a Reply