‘Labour thinks we’re all stupid and bigoted’

The UK is in crisis. The economy is stagnating, public services no longer work and there is chaos at the border. There is a palpable sense of decline and a loss of confidence in the future. Keir Starmer’s Labour government has promised to turn things around. But his brand of drab technocracy, and his party’s commitment to wokeness and eco-zealotry, have only added to Britain’s woes.

Julia Hartley-Brewer, Talk presenter and Sun columnist, joined Brendan O’Neill for a special live edition of The Brendan O’Neill Show last week. They discussed the mess Labour has made in government, the state of the culture war and much more. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the whole thing here. This event was exclusive for spiked supporters, members of our online donor community. Become a supporter here to join us at future events.

Brendan O’Neill: We’re almost a year into Keir Starmer’s Labour government. What’s your assessment so far?

Julia Hartley-Brewer: It feels like it was both yesterday and five years ago when he got into power. I’m trying to wish those five years away.

There have been a few moments where I thought Starmer wasn’t as completely awful and useless as I expected him to be. For example, he’s not been bad at dealing with Donald Trump. But largely, I thought Labour would be absolutely awful in power, and it has lived down to my expectations. So, well done everybody.

O’Neill: It seems to me that there are interlocking economic and cultural crises in the UK at the moment. Do you think Labour is suited to either task?

Hartley-Brewer: The trouble with this government is that we are talking about a whole lot of people who have been in the public sector their entire careers.

Ministers talk about boosting the economy, yet they are completely wedded to Net Zero. You can have energy security, you can have growth, you can have prosperity – or you can have Net Zero. They are mutually exclusive.

Starmer also promised to tackle immigration. Even Labour had to get to grips with the idea that people were not happy with the level of legal, let alone illegal, immigration. But it was recently confirmed that we’ve had more than 8,000 illegal immigrants arrive so far this year. These are new arrivals who will cost us millions of pounds every day to house, and who we will probably never get rid of.

On a cultural level, fundamentally, Labour has no faith in the British people. It thinks we’re stupid and it thinks we’re bigots because we voted for Brexit and then voted to ‘get Brexit done’ in 2019. It thinks that everything in our country’s past is something to be ashamed of and something to be atoned for. It doesn’t trust us to do the right thing – ever.

O’Neill: Do you think we’re reaching a point where it might become mainstream to question Net Zero?

Hartley-Brewer: I’ve always said that Net Zero, whether we’re talking about policies on boilers to electric-car mandates, would never survive contact with reality. You’re not going to tell a load of people that they have to spend £20,000 on a new heating system that doesn’t work. You’re not going to be able to persuade people to buy a car they don’t want.

I don’t see Ed Miliband lasting as energy secretary. At some point, Labour is going to have to say, we can either build and make things – say, a new runway at Heathrow or virgin steel in Scunthorpe – or we can have Net Zero. Net Zero is unachievable, unpopular and unaffordable.

In the end, I think the excuse for abandoning Net Zero will be on defence grounds. Fundamentally, we need the steelworks for national security – that’s why British Steel was saved recently. We also need a reliable source of energy. We can’t afford to be importing gas, even from friendly countries, through pipelines that could be damaged by Russia. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years, which will be very uncertain times internationally.

O’Neill: What about Donald Trump? How do you think Trump 2.0 is going?

Hartley-Brewer: I always knew there was going to be good and bad aspects. DOGE – love the whole thing. The US cannot simply continue to remain that many trillions of dollars in debt. I support what he’s doing on immigration, too. If you’re not in a country legally, then you should be deported. I don’t know why we’re not doing that here. I find it utterly bizarre that anyone would query that. Trump has also been great on the woke question – for example, getting men out of women’s sports and sacking everyone involved in the DEI industry. On Israel, he’s absolutely sound as well.

On the other hand, you have his tariff wars and his treatment of Ukraine. Again, in the past week or so, you had Trump blaming Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war. That aspect of his presidency has been an utter disaster.

You have to take the good with the bad. There wasn’t much good with Joe Biden. There was certainly not going to be much good with Kamala Harris. With Trump, I was hoping there would be some more sensible souls there to guide him away from something like the madness of the tariff wars.

Still, overall, given the choices that were available to the American people at the time, Trump was the best option.

Brendan O’Neill was talking to Julia Hartley-Brewer. Watch the full conversation here: