#5 2025 – A Year of Labour Lies & Deceit.

As I sit here on a deathly quiet New Year’s Day afternoon, Julie Andrews chirping away from The Sound of Music like the world is still a fundamentally decent place, I find myself a good three, maybe four, pounds heavier than I was back in mid-December 2025. Which is impressive, really, given that I’m doing absolutely nothing except sitting on my arse and contemplating the consequences of poor life choices. Again, a theme that dovetails beautifully with Labour’s last twelve months of so-called political leadership.

Stuffed from glorious festive food supplied by family and good friends, swollen with festive regret, and staring down a waistband that’s formally requested early retirement, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on a year of Labour at the helm (and I use the word “helm” generously, this has felt more like a drunk groping for the steering wheel while the car’s already in the hedge).

And immediately, I hit a problem. Where the fuck do you even begin?

I honestly cannot think of a single decision, policy, initiative, announcement, trial balloon, or half-arsed wheeze that hasn’t been greeted with instant scepticism, open mockery, or the kind of stunned disbelief normally reserved for someone announcing they’ve reinvented fire, by making it wetter.

Not one. Not a single solitary moment of “well, that’s sensible.” Just an unbroken conveyor belt of shite ideas, launched badly, explained worse, and then defended with the straight-faced confidence of someone who hasn’t yet realised the room is laughing at them.

Every rollout follows the same tired script: loud announcement, immediate backlash, frantic clarification, quiet retreat, solemn insistence that this was always the plan and that anyone confused simply doesn’t understand the nuance. If gaslighting were a renewable energy source, Labour could have powered the entire country by now.

What’s truly breathtaking isn’t just the incompetence, we’ve come to expect that, no, it’s the commitment to it. The way they stride from one fuck-up to the next, convinced that this time will be different, even as the smoke from the last disaster is still curling around their ankles. It’s less government, more slapstick. Less leadership, more ongoing experiment in how much bullshit the public can swallow before choking.

The public response, understandably, has ranged from hollow laughter, soul-level exhaustion to abject anger. That look people get when they realise they’re watching adults in charge who clearly have no idea what they’re doing but absolutely refuse to admit it.

So here I sit, the von Trapps skipping joyfully across the Alps, while my expectations of political competence lie beaten to death in a roadside ditch, asking myself not what went wrong, but how it managed to go wrong every single time, and still be sold to us as progress with a grin and a laminated briefing note.

Because when everything is a shambles, when every policy is a car crash and every explanation somehow makes it worse, the hardest question isn’t why it failed.

It’s where the hell you start counting the bodies.

Without the need for a forensic post-mortem on every single blunder, let’s just sample a few highlights from the Labour government’s greatest hits album of cock-ups and contradictions from the last twelve months.

• A “rise” in the National Insurance threshold, which somehow manages to be a tax hike for millions while being sold as a favour. Alchemy at its finest.

• A screeching U-turn on winter fuel payments for pensioners. Apparently keeping the elderly warm was only a manifesto promise, not a plan.

• A U-turn on day-one unfair dismissal protections. When you realise your much more controlling Employment Rights Bill is too important to delay.

• A U-turn on the proposed inheritance tax on farms. Lesson learnt, don’t piss off the people that put food on the table of No10

• A U-turn on the two-child benefit cap. Consistency remains strictly optional.

Spot the pattern yet?

• An unemployment rate rising month after month for the last ten months, a statistical achievement if nothing else.

• Welfare reforms that generously reward the workshy and feckless, while those who graft are left footing the bill.

• A pre-budget “£20 billion fiscal black hole”, loudly trumpeted, widely panicked over, and later sheepishly admitted being entirely fictional.

• Bold claims of “smashing the gangs” and reducing illegal migration, delivered with straight faces and zero supporting evidence.

• Scandal after scandal, tumbling out with such regularity they may as well be scheduled.

• A solemn pledge to end the use of hotels for housing illegal migrants, followed by the small inconvenience of hotel use rising to a record high.

• Seven cabinet level ministers have either resigned or been replaced.

  
  

And that’s just the abridged version. I could go on, but frankly the list is so long it’s starting to look less like a record of governance and more like a farce in instalments.

So yes, here we are. Trapped in the wreckage of a Government I loathe, watching a shit show unfold at breakneck speed. I did warn, repeatedly, smugly, and often that Starmer’s Britain would be a masterclass in managed Socialist decline. But even I didn’t expect the mask to slip quite this quickly, or for our ideals, culture, and values to be tossed aside with such casual contempt. Turns out “it can’t be that bad” was wildly optimistic.

So, what can we realistically expect in 2026? Realistically being the operative word here, this is Britain, after all, where disappointment is practically a national sport. To my mind, there are only three plausible scenarios, none of them remotely cheerful, and all of them depressingly on brand.

Scenario one:

Hot on the heels of the May local council elections, the Labour massacre, because let’s not insult the English language by calling it anything else, Starmer finally discovers that loyalty in politics lasts precisely as long as you’re useful. His own cabinet and backbenchers, sensing blood in the water and votes draining faster than a pub on free-pint night, turn on him and shove him unceremoniously out of the door. He is, of course, replaced by the only person the unions and party hardliners have ever wanted in the first place: Angela Rayner. Should that horror show come to pass, we can safely assume it will be more of the same, only louder, clumsier, and even more openly hostile to our way of life. Same ideology, same contempt, new face, worse delivery.

Scenario two:

Against all logic, evidence, and basic human perception, Shit Show Starmer somehow clings on after May. He ploughs forward regardless, eyes firmly shut, ears stuffed with ideological cotton wool, continuing to ignore the absolute carnage his policies are inflicting up and down what was once a functional country. Communities hollowed out, public confidence shredded, national cohesion treated as an inconvenience, none of it matters as long as the script is followed and the right noises are made in Westminster.

Scenario three:

By some political miracle bordering on science fiction, a late 2026 or early 2027 general election is called. The polls finally mean something. And Nigel Farage, to the horror of the political class and the media-industrial complex, starts measuring up the curtains in No.10, regardless of whether they’re ready and competent or not.

Now, personally, and I hate to spoil the fantasy, I don’t think scenario three has a cat in hell’s chance of ever happening. Not in 2026. Not in 2027. Not ever. Even if Starmer and Labour limp their way to the next official general election in August 2029, the establishment, the ruling elite of the cosy two-party cartel, aided and abetted by an unelected and untouchable civil service, will never allow anyone to derail the gravy train that’s been chugging along quite happily for the past century or so. Democracy is all well and good, provided the public don’t get any funny ideas about actually changing anything.

What we want, what we vote for, what we scream into the void, it’s all just background noise. The machine rolls on regardless.

And that's about it. I really wish I could be more cheerful and optimistic about what I see as coming down the pipe for us all in the near future but I can't, and believe me I am trying.

A shame I've taken on dry January. I could murder a swift Bourbon & coke right now.

Happy New Year.