Does the new government actually know whose side it’s on? In the first few months its already waged war on pensioners, farmers and health workers - David Behrens

The police had to be called in last weekend when shoppers in a four-hour queue for cut-price Le Creuset cookware spilled onto the highway and threatened to cause an obstruction. Have you ever heard of a more middle-class disturbance?

There is nothing wrong with upwardly mobile people aspiring to own desirable consumer goods they think will make their lives better. But the spectacle did rather expose the disparity at opposite ends of the food chain. Because a cast-iron roasting dish is no use if you can’t buy a joint of meat to put inside it.

It’s simple economics: the relative affordability of food at the moment is dependent on there being enough farmers to produce it. And there won’t be if they’re driven out of business by crippling taxes. Even Liz Truss could work that out. Remember her? She spoke of little else but pork markets.

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Yet it’s a fact that seems to have escaped a government whose imposition of a 20 per cent inheritance tax on land worth more than £1m threatens to destroy the family farms that make up around two thirds of the country’s agricultural base.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer speaking during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, London. PIC: House of Commons/UK Parliament/PA WirePrime Minister Sir Keir Starmer speaking during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, London. PIC: House of Commons/UK Parliament/PA Wire
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer speaking during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, London. PIC: House of Commons/UK Parliament/PA Wire

It’s a curious target, especially given the simultaneous revelation that the estate of the well-known farmer King Charles III is hungrily raking in rent from the public purse while remaining exempt from having to pay corporation or capital gains tax.

But far from rowing back on its intentions, Labour has fanned the flames of dissent. Tony Blair’s former political advisor John McTernan went so far as to suggest small family farms were an “industry we could do without” and that Keir Starmer should do battle with them in the way Margaret Thatcher did with striking miners.

It’s astonishing for a Labour policymaker to imply that the treatment of miners in the 1980s was somehow desirable. But if it’s a battle he wants, he will get his way on Tuesday when farmers demonstrate on the streets of London in numbers that will likely make the Le Creuset event look like a tea party in a tent.

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And while McTernan is an anachronism as embarrassing to Labour as Truss is to the Tories, his intervention does beg the question: does the new government actually know whose side it’s on?

Let’s take an audit of the last few months: it has pretty much waged war on pensioners, farmers and – with Wes Streeting’s threat to name and shame under-performing NHS managers – health workers. But it has declared solidarity with train drivers and public sector employees (not counting those in the NHS).

At the same time, Starmer – who entered office promising to tread more lightly on our lives – has returned from the COP29 climate summit with targets that might require us to stop eating meat or flying off on holiday.

If we drill down beneath the headlines, we find the Transport Secretary Louise Haigh admitting to the Commons that Britain doesn’t have a “workforce able to deliver modern and efficient railways” only weeks after she made them even less efficient by throwing money at the unions with no concessions to show for it.

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We also see the deputy PM Angela Rayner rubbing salt in the wounds of the extra £25bn tax burden placed on employers by withdrawing Whitehall opposition to four-day weeks for council workers, among others. (Four days? That will be quite a step up for some of them.)

Meanwhile in the health sector we find Streeting supercharging the Blair-era performance tables that created so much unnecessary rivalry between NHS ‘trusts’. He is quite right to name and shame poorly performing hospitals and remove managers who fail to improve patient care and cut costs – but surely the route to better efficiency lies in removing bureaucracy, not adding yet more ‘targets’ as if you were trying to motivate a team of salespeople.

Meanwhile, there is still no policy that will deliver social care to our ageing population. That’s a ticking timebomb the government, like those before it, seems content to kick into the long grass.

The mixed messages from Downing Street since July speak to a lack of coordination at the heart of government which is reflected in the opinion polls. The Tories – barely five months after their worst showing in modern history – are now ahead of Labour and Starmer’s personal approval rating has dropped to minus 25 points.

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To put that last figure in perspective, it’s almost as low as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s popularity even before he resigned in ignominy.

What a rudderless nation we are. Bereft of political or spiritual leadership it’s no wonder our moral compass points only towards getting our hands on some cut-price French cookware.

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