100 Days in Government.

One hundred days in, many of us are probably wondering why they voted Labour. The answer is that they voted against the incompetent bumbling of the last Conservative government, or in many cases stayed at home. Yet what Keir Starmer and his merry band do has a major impact on all our daily lives.

There have been some major blunders ranging from the handling of the Winter Fuel Payments for pensioners to criticising P&O using intemperate language leading to the potential cancellation of a £1 billion investment. My biggest worry is that the chancellor, a former treasury official, will behave more like a former treasury official than a chancellor. The models used by the treasury stifle investment and lead to cost overruns. The Prime Minister, his popularity hitting new lows, has made some howlers. Taking thousands of pounds and freebies for clothes and specs is a donation too far. True, it is not the millions of pounds received by Tories from property developers where local planning authority decisions were overturned.

Looking forward I suspect that we will see more centralised control of our country. We will move from a belief that the market knows best to one where the state or rather Labour knows best. Both approaches gouge us. The latest indicator of this is a mandated requirement for Test Valley to increase its housing allocation by 75% leading us to build 1000 new houses every year without considering the practicalities including infrastructure and construction capacity. A similar situation applies to Basingstoke and Deane.

What does this all mean? The old adage of judging people by what they do rather than what they say comes to mind. Past performance is a good indicator of future behaviour, and we really need to challenge more.

Cllr. Luigi Gregori