Starmer must sack lunatic Miliband to save Britain

Here’s a suggestion for Keir Starmer. If he wants us to take his professed conversion to pro-growth capitalism seriously, he should immediately sack Ed Miliband.

The Secretary of State for Energy is the author of the dreadful Climate Change Act, a supporter of wealth taxes, and the pro-growth agenda’s public enemy number one.

Kicking out Miliband, who more than any other politician symbolises Labour’s pathological hatred of free markets, would do more to rekindle the economy’s animal spirits than any gimmick dreamt up by the Treasury.

The former Labour leader, who once threatened to resign from government if Heathrow was expanded, didn’t bother to attend Rachel Reeves’s pro-third runway speech: his vision for Britain is incompatible with the Chancellor’s desperate need to boost GDP.

‘Net zero’ fanatics, of which he is the honorary leader, want fewer of us to travel by plane. They hate cars, and oppose building the Lower Thames Crossing, another good idea that Reeves now claims to support.

Miliband’s plan to ‘green’ the grid by 2030, which will lead to even pricier and scarcer energy, will cripple Reeves’s Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor.

High-tech firms require cheap and plentiful energy, especially in the pursuit of AI (and this remains true even in the post- DeepSeek era), and they are not going to find any in Miliband’s Britain. Even increased house-building and new towns are a problem for the reactionary de‑growthers, as real-world homes are ‘carbon’-intensive.

Starmer has a massive problem. Even he must occasionally realise his policies are ruining the economy, not least his extension to workers’ “rights”, the phasing out of North Sea oil and gas, the higher taxes on working people, the deranged profligacy, the war on private schools, the wanton destruction of standards in the state sector, and the obsession with tying everything that moves in red tape, even football clubs.

Reeves is obviously panicking, and could take him down with her: lower gilt yields have granted Britain a temporary respite, but the Chancellor is staring into the abyss.

The policies she is proposing this week, if they eventually materialise, would all be positive for the economy over the next decade, though they would not be as transformative as some seem to think, given the scale of the economy’s woes.

The Prime Minister desperately needs Reeves’s new-found agenda to be implemented, if only to shift vibes, but he also needs some shorter term, more urgent wins.

This will require choosing between his increasingly panicky Chancellor and his Energy Secretary. While the nonsensical official line remains that “there is no trade-off between economic growth and net zero”, it is obvious that diluting the latter would be the easiest way to eek out gains.

We need more roads and runways. We can’t ban new petrol cars in four years and 11 months. The five-year ‘carbon’ budgets that govern all of British economic activity and legislation are too tough.

The Climate Change Committee should no longer wield this much power. It would be better to get rid of Miliband now, even at the cost of a massive rift within the Labour party.

Thanks in large part to ‘net zero’, our industrial sector has been plunged into a Great Depression-style crisis. Manufacturing output in September 2024 was down around eight percent from its level in 2021, and there were further monthly decreases in eight of its 13 subsectors.

Energy production has crashed 28.5 percent since 2020.

Climate levies designed to cut factory emissions are forecast to almost triple by 2030, and what is left of industry won’t be able to cope.

The implosion of the production industries will more than cancel out any progress made on house-building or the erection of infrastructure for the remainder of this decade, ruining Reeves’s GDP forecasts.

The only reason we are ‘decarbonising’ faster than other rich economies is because we are terminating economic activity, even in areas in which we should have a comparative advantage.

Combined with extreme levels of often lowish-skilled migrants, GDP per capita is falling, the ultimate indictment of a failing society.

Yet it is not just the radical environmentalist mind virus and absurdly restrictive anti-development, anti-housing planning rules that are dragging down growth.

Public spending at 44.5 percent of GDP in 2023-24 is an almost insurmountable obstacle: the greater the state’s share, the less growth, as numerous studies have shown.

A sensible government would announce targets to slash spending as a share of national income (while simultaneously growing defence); in a parallel universe, Reeves would also read and adopt Jon Moynihan’s manifesto, as set out in his brilliant two-volume Return to Growth.

Our insanely complicated and punitive tax system is another drag. The overall burden, close to its highest level since the Second World War, is getting even worse under Reeves, making a mockery of her supposed pro-growth conversion.

Marginal tax rates are too high, the 40 percent band kicks in too early, professionals are hammered by the removal of the personal allowance and the loss of child care benefits. The 45 percent rate should be abolished.

Working hard or seeking a promotion no longer makes sense in Britain.

The throttling of the City of London, one of the UK’s central engines of growth between 1987 and 2007, is another reason for our paltry performance. The financial services industry was turned into a ludicrously over-taxed, over-regulated quasi-utility by George Osborne after the financial crisis.

Investment banking required careful reform, but was neutered instead by a pseudo-Tory government desperate to pander to banker-bashers and egged on by Miliband. Osborne’s bank ring-fencing plan was a disaster, the endless shake-downs of the industry a disgrace, and regulatory idiocy has encouraged concentration and risk-aversion.

The stock market is in terminal crisis, with start-ups leaving for America. The only hope would be to turn Britain into a tax haven for start-ups and their senior staff, but that isn’t on the cards.

There is no hope of Reeves cutting tax or spend, or rescuing the City, but the Prime Minister has one last card to play on growth: he should fire Miliband, explain that Donald Trump’s election requires a pause to ‘net zero’, and attempt to save Britain’s manufacturers.

It’s either that, or guaranteed oblivion.

See more here telegraph.co.uk

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Header image: Channel 4

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