Mark Dolan: Thanks to Starmer, Boris might have already pocketed another election win

Keir Starmer’s speech to the Labour Party conference felt longer than the latest James Bond movie.

This ninety minute address, which made Fidel Castro look like a master of brevity, was full of eye watering spending commitments to solve Britain's many problems.

You might not have noticed the spending commitments, because they were dressed up in snake-oil, political terminology like “investment”.

Investment in industry, investment in the green economy, investment in mental and physical health, investment in public services. Except that it's not investment folks. It's spending money. Your money. And it's not like there's a huge pot of available cash, waiting to be distributed, to the most deserving cause.

Given that Britain will be running a budget deficit for many years to come, which means more money goes out than comes in, this “investment” will be borrowed billions, to be dealt with by future generations. The national debt has already swollen, to over 2 trillion quid, and almost 100% of the size of the economy itself. Much of this caused by ruinous Covid measures, enthusiastically backed by Labour. They arguably wanted more.

Labour has done good things in the past, and I want a strong opposition, that threatens the current administration with being unseated. The last thing we need is for Boris Johnson, to get any more self-confident. Particularly given the damage that he has done to this country, through a year and a half of, in my view, failed Covid policies.

37 billion quid wasted on test and trace, and three national lockdowns, the case for which crumbles by the day. And he’s still talking about vaccine passports and jabbing kids. Some libertarian.

But if you think things are bad under Johnson, at least he granted us freedom day on 19 July and was vindicated by falling cases, and an economy and society, that was able to get back on its feet.

Lockdown-loving Keir Starmer called freedom day reckless. How much money would we have cost the economy if we had taken his approach? We might still have covid measures now. Instead, we are on a path to recovery - an important win for Bojo.

There were some positives in Sir Keir’s speech. He talked about the NHS, and creating a culture of preventing illness, rather than dealing with the consequences. And he has clearly picked a much-needed fight with the hard left of his party, and he shouted down hecklers during his speech with wit and grace.

But Tony Blair he ain't. Blair was far from perfect, courting Brussels throughout his tenure, pushing for UK membership of the Euro and needlessly opening borders to the east which killed wages in the North, as well as pursuing the disastrous Iraq war. But Blair won three elections, by uniting the country around a pro business, pro aspiration message.

Tony Blair made no secret of his admiration for Margaret Thatcher; and for the first year of office, he kept the Tory spending plans in place and his success was sustained by never venturing far from the centre ground. In the end, polished though his performance was, the leader of the opposition Sir Keir Starmer spent a long time, telling us nothing.

In fact it was what happened outside of his keynote speech, that told us everything we needed to know, about this current labour party. They call their opponents scum, they say it's not only women that have cervixes, they tell people in the hall not to talk or make a contribution based on their skin colour, and bizarrely Keir Starmer’s only compelling policy announcement was on breakfast TV, saying that James Bond should be a woman.

Why does that matter? Because a Labour government, would mean five years of this woke bollocks, so effusively rejected by the public, in December 2019. That’s before you get to bonkers spending the country can't afford and higher taxes that would send businesses and private individuals running for the hills. We know about the saying go woke, go broke.

Well Keir Starmer is going to have to get used to a new catchphrase, of his own making. Go woke, no vote. At this rate, the next election is already in Boris’s pocket. And I say that with no pleasure at all.

The only real winner here, is Carrie Johnson, who is doubtless ordering more of that expensive wallpaper, as we speak.