Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are making one huge mistake (Image: PA)

The yawning chasm between lofty rhetoric and grubby reality is a prime reason for the public’s disillusionment with our political system. With shameless professional ease, ministers regularly adopt policies that directly contradict promises that they have made on the platform and across the airwaves.

That corrosive inconsistency can be clearly seen on the economic front. During the General Election, Sir Keir Starmer posed as the champion of “wealth creation”, even claiming this was his top priority. As Prime Minister, he has continued to sing the same tune. At the launch of the International Investment Summit at the Guildhall in London earlier this week, he unblushingly proclaimed his determination to “rip out the bureaucracy” and “the red tape” that is holding back business.

Yet such language is hardly matched by his government’s actions which reveal a worship of expensive officialdom. At the very moment when Starmer was extolling free enterprise in the Guildhall, his Chancellor Rachel Reeves was finalising brutal tax increases in her forthcoming Budget, worth perhaps as much as £35billion. That colossal sum would represent the largest tax rise in British history. Among her likely measures are raids on pension pots, dividends and inheritances, as well as hikes in capital gains tax and the National Insurance contributions paid by employers.

These huge new financial burdens would amount to a disastrous charge on job creation. Other Labour proposals could have the same deterrent effect on employment, like the new charter of workers’ rights that includes enhanced powers for the trade unions to take strike action, more protection for employees from their first day in a job, and more generous entitlements to flexible working, parental leave and sick pay.

This week, the leading businessman Hugh Osmond warned that Labour’s plan represents “an existential threat” to small and medium-sized firms. with the result that “unemployment will rise and productivity will fall”. Indeed, according to the British Chambers of Commerce, the number of businesses seeking to recruit staff has dropped to only 56 percent, the lowest level since the pandemic.

Sir Keir’s language about taking an axe to the jungle of state bureaucracy could hardly be more hollow. In fact, he is pouring industrial-strength fertiliser on the vegetation, driven by his credulous faith in organisational change.

So the answer to problems with vocational training is the creation of a Skills England agency, just as a new Great British Railway company will aim to ensure that the trains run on time and a Great British Energy Company will intensify the ideological push for green power. Under Starmer, the relentless expansion of the state will see the establishment of an Industrial Strategy Council, an Armed Forces Commissioner, a Regulatory Innovation Office, a National Infrastructure Authority, an Ethics and Integrity Commission, and a National Wealth Fund. The list goes on. Laughably, even the quest for fiscal restraint is now overseen by a new quango called the Office of Value for Money.

When the last Labour Government passed the Equality Act in 2010, the party’s then deputy leader Harriet Harman proclaimed “We will shine a spotlight in every workplace” on the mission “to create a new social order”. It was this legislation that promoted Orwellian groupthink of diversity, equality and inclusion. In response, much of our civic leadership became keener on social engineering and indoctrination than improving services. That interventionist, dogmatic spirit will now be dramatically reinforced as Labour threatens businesses with yet more heavy-handed wokery, such as demands for ethnic pay audits, positive action programmes, racial monitoring and contract compliance, whereby any firms bidding for work in the public sector have to prove their adherence to the fashionable orthodoxy. Equally onerous is Ed Miliband’s net zero agenda, especially in how it undermines competitiveness by pushing up energy bills.

Few Labour politicians have been entrepreneurs, most of them having spent their careers in the trade unions, pressure groups, public sector or party hierarchies.

Only a blinkered socialist would think it right to lavish huge pay increases on state employees without any reforms in working practices. Despite the recent platitudes from the Prime Minister, the relationship between enterprise and officialdom is all wrong. The state should be supporting the wealth creators rather than bullying and fleecing them.

Warm tributes have been paid to Alex Salmond (Image: PA)

Warm tributes were paid in the House of Commons this week to the late Alex Salmond, the giant of Scottish nationalism. It cannot be denied that he was a divisive figure with a tawdry private life, but I wish more English politicians had the same kind of instinctive patriotism that inspired him.

Instead, the ruling elite at Westminster seems to despise our heritage and our identity. Left-wing lawyer and ardent Remain campaigner Sir Keir Starmer is typical of this breed. He occasionally wraps himself in the Union Jack but never unconvincingly. His true feelings about our past have been revealed in his decision to remove from the walls of No. 10 Downing Street a number of portraits of great figures from British history, including Queen Elizabeth the First, the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh and the towering Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone. Gesture politics like that belong in the student union rather than the heart of Government.

Still wedded to gloomy left-wing economics, BBC Radio Four’s lunchtime news on Wednesday performed the remarkable feat of turning the welcome drop in inflation into a source of anguish. According to the Corporation, always keen to deepen the grievance culture and dependency on the state, the fall to just 1.7% is a grim development because it means welfare benefits will not rise as much as many claimants hoped.

To support this argument, the BBC gave extended airtime to the hard-left Labour MP Nadia Whittome who burbled about the need for a wealth tax so that more can be spent on social security. There is, however, an alternative. More claimants could go out and look for work.

The 19th century historian Thomas Babington Macaulay once said that there is “no spectacle as ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality”.

Those words could be applied to the sporadic bouts of concern over drinks spiking. This week police in Plymouth have urged people to be vigilant after multiple reports of spiking in nightclubs, while my local paper in Kent claimed that since 2018 there have been more than 1000 incidents in the county.

“Predators are spiking women and getting away with it,” claimed the alarmist headline. But I talked to a top doctor about this supposed menace and he was deeply sceptical, pointing out that toxicology tests taken when alleged victims present themselves at A&E units rarely show any evidence of date rape drugs. There are enough real crimes occurring in Britain without inventing more.

Thomas Tuchel has been appointed England manager (Image: PA)

The appointment of German tactical genius Thomas Tuchel as England football coach is good news for our national side, especially given his excellent record in Europe. But isn’t it an indictment of our home grown managerial talent that no Englishman either wanted the job or was considered good enough?

The Care Quality Commission, the independent regulator for health and social care, is in urgent need of reform. But there is no sign that the watchdog – which spends £263million a year – is up to the challenge.

Management is poor, expertise inadequate. Reading the Commission’s latest annual report, I came across this example of its befuddled, circular thinking: “We improved our approach to understanding and assessing a safety culture, following a research project that explored current understanding of safety cultures and the contributions required to develop a good safety culture.” Change cannot come soon enough.