Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages and long suffering taxpayers everywhere. Welcome back to another breathtaking chapter inside Britain’s most disastrous show, the great Labour Circus, now entering its seventy first consecutive week of national embarrassment.
Prepare for contortionists of truth, tightrope walkers wobbling over the ruins of public trust and clown troupes that seem to multiply faster than the national debt. The lights are flickering, the sawdust reeks and the ringmaster has misplaced the plot. Once again, the audience is you and the joke is on the country.
We begin with the opening act, David Lammy’s first Prime Ministers Questions, a performance so chaotic it deserves its own circus tent. The exchanges were combative, the answers confused and the poppy fiasco the sort of slapstick mishap that would make a silent film star blush. Instead of gravitas, Britain got an unprepared juggler dropping every ball, tripping over the podium and hoping nobody noticed.
Then came the government’s latest money making sideshow, a new pay per mile charge for electric vehicle motorists. Under Labour, if you own it they will tax it, and if you use it they will tax it again. The great green promise has become a travelling carnival toll booth where every road becomes a revenue trap. Balloon animals would be more useful than this energy policy.
Meanwhile the Bank of England held interest rates out of sheer concern for Labours economic direction. That is the diplomatic equivalent of the circus safety officer quietly tiptoeing backstage to check whether the human cannon has been loaded with dynamite or an intern.
Moving over to the immigration tent, Britain now records the largest rise in asylum claims in Europe. As the crowds rush in, Labour is still selling tickets and dismantling the turnstiles. Thank goodness for Conservative MPs like Priti Patel who is demanding answers after Labour chose to de proscribe a group with Al Qaeda links. In any normal show this would be the point where the ringmaster calls security, but in Clowning Street security itself appears to be part of the freak show.
And if you thought justice might offer some grip on reality, think again. Straight after Lammy failed to admit the first, a second prisoner was wrongly released and police launched yet another manhunt. Under Labour the prison gates appear to be operated by a clown with an oversized key ring and no sense of direction.
Next came Rachel Reeves, bursting into the nation’s morning this week with an eight o clock scare alert that sounded like a foghorn in a haunted fairground. She claims it was essential. Most of the country thought someone had accidentally sat on the big red button labelled do not press unless absolutely necessary. Is she just pre-warning us of all her new taxes in the budget? Can someone please explain to her the Laffer Curve?
Then over in another dark corner of the circus lurks something very sinister. The Lennon verdict, where political beliefs were treated as if they were terrorism, has shocked lawyers and civil liberty groups. The idea that the state now toys with terror powers as if they were props in a cheap pantomime should chill every spectator.
Not to be outdone, Birmingham Labour Council unveiled its own astonishing feat of fiscal gymnastics again this week. While slashing essential services and leaving residents abandoned, it somehow found one hundred and twenty nine million pounds to pour into staff pensions. They’re paying some of their own £150,000 gold-plated pensions, but of course they can’t afford to pick up the rubbish. A financial contortionist could not bend the numbers that far without snapping in half.
And through it all, the shadow of Labour foreign policy hangs overhead like a sagging circus canopy. Britain is somehow both drifting toward Brussels, wobbling before Beijing and sleepwalking through rising threats at home. The ringmaster smiles, the clowns clap, the tightrope sags and the crowd looks nervously toward the exit.
So ends another week under the travelling carnival of misrule. What have we seen. A government that trips over its own props. A justice system run by escape artists. An immigration tent with no walls. A tax troupe inflating bills like balloon animals. And an economic act so grim it should come with a parental warning.
Britain deserves better than this circus of folly. But until the curtain falls, the chaos continues, the clowns remain centre stage and the audience is still paying for the ticket.
How much longer will the people take until the ringleader has to go?
READ ALL ABOUT IT: Links to this week’s top Labour circus acts below:
