If there’s an art to lying, the PM hasn’t bothered to master it. He lies and lies again, and there’s no art in it at all. He just says whatever suits him at the time.
I’ve been running through the PM Keir Starmer’s broken promises, u-turns and pledges, and it’s exhausting. If I tried listing them all here I’d quickly run out of space.
He started by lying to his own party, winning support for the Labour leadership with 10 key pledges that included abolishing student tuition fees and the two-child benefit cap, and nationalising public services. All quickly dropped.
Having secured the support of the Corbynite left he stepped up his efforts by lying to the rest of us to win this year’s general election.
Starmer led us to believe that Labour would retain the Winter Fuel Payment, and said nothing about scrapping the £86,000 cap on social care costs for elderly and disabled.
He also claimed he would “reshape” Labour’s relationships with businesses only for chancellor Rachel Reeves to shaft them in her first Budget.
Starmer made a manifesto pledge to not increase taxes on working people. Yet the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) reckons 80% of Labour’s employer’s national insurance hike will be passed onto workers in the form of lower wages, the rest to consumers via higher prices.
This week he was exposed in an even more blatant mistruth.
While seeking power, Starmer publicly backed 1950s Waspi women’s fight for “fair and fast compensation” after the state pension age for women was hiked by five years.
Last week, he dropped them like a stone. As did every other cabinet minister who took the Waspi pledge: Rachel Reeves, Liz Kendall and Angela Rayner. Lying is infectious.
In 2023, Starmer lied to farmers, promising a new relationship and “certainty”. Instead, he’s walloped them with inheritance tax (IHT), bringing families a lifetime of uncertainty.
During the election, Starmer and Reeves pretended to have no knowledge of the £22billion “black hole” in the government’s finances until the OBR told him about it.
But as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) repeatedly pointed out, the black hole “was obvious to anyone who dared to look”.
The IFS said in August that Labour “cannot honestly announce a series of tax rises in the October budget [and] blame them on this hole that she has just discovered”.
Reeves still announced the hikes. Just not honestly.
If I get stuck into her evasions and fabrications, I’ll be here all day. So back to Sir Keir.
He doesn’t seem to have a single point of view that he can stick to. He’s flip-flopped on everything from EU freedom of movement, to banning outsourcing in the NHS and whether women have penises (apparently 99.9% don’t, but that’s subject to change like every other view he holds).
Starmer has pledged to put human rights at the heart of foreign policy, but is now cosying up to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
Many on the left defend Starmer by saying former Tory PM Boris Johnson was worse. That’s not a great benchmark. Boris has been described as someone who couldn’t recognise the truth if confronted with it in an identity parade.
The same applies to Sir Keir. The difference is we knew Boris was a rogue all along. Starmer presented himself as honest and upright, which makes him an abject hypocrite as well. He has no shame and he’s not going to stop.
