Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer

OPEN LETTER TO SIR KEIR STARMER FROM PHILIP KEMP

• I UNDERSTAND you’re preparing your manifesto.

I’m one of your constituents and, apart from a brief flirtation with the Liberals in the late 1960s, have been a Labour voter all my life.

Barring unforeseen disasters, it’s evident that you have the forthcoming election in the bag; yet in recent months I’ve become increasingly impatient with your excessive caution, your broken “pledges” and your repeated assertions that “there’s no money” for this, that, or the other.

There are in fact vast quantities of money, if you have the courage to go for them.

I have three suggestions.

And don’t worry, I’m not going to mention Br*x*t or your praise of the late unlamented “Demon Goddess of Privatisation”.

Two I think you may concur with; the third – well let’s see…

• 1. A Land Tax.

Affluent Tories will always find ways to weasel out of paying financial taxes, slick lawyers, residency scams in tax havens, and so forth. But vast estates can’t be hidden.

I suggest that all those owning acreages of land – grouse moors and the like – that are unproductive (farmers would, of course, be exempt) be heavily taxed on them.

Most of them, after all, were stolen from the peasants in the first place. And if, panic-stricken, they sell them off to the state? Good; less room for killing of birds and animals and all the more places for us plebs to stroll in!

• 2. Immigration.

The present system is idiotic, cruel, and costs us £8million a day for crap hotels and disease-ridden ships.

Give all immigrants and refugees legitimate routes of access – no more small boats sinking in the Channel – let anyone come to the United Kingdom who wants, let them find work as soon as they arrive. Heaven knows the National Health Service needs them.

They’ll be buying stuff, paying taxes, contributing to the economy… far less work for immigration, the home office and the RNLI.

And if it turns out a tiny percentage arrived illegally, OK, send them back. But the rest will be enriching our country.

We are, after all, a mongrel race, and immigrants have been arriving here for thousands of years.

Let ’em all come!

• 3. Drugs.

This, I suspect, may be more than you will wear, but I propose that you legalise drugs. All drugs, hard, soft, every class of drug.

Legalise them, regulate them, control them, and tax them, just like alcohol. Sure, some people will get ill, some will die, as they do from booze. But probably fewer.

Drugs will no longer be excitingly, illegally, dangerous. And druggies will know what they’re getting, no more cocaine spiked with fentanyl… huge financial savings to the police, the courts, the prison service, the doctors, the hospitals, and a massive blow to organised crime.

And a vast tax intake for the UK. Just in case you’re assuming, no, I don’t take drugs, unless you count whisky.

So that’s what I’d love to see in the Labour manifesto.

Sure, you’d get exaggerated shrieks of horror from the Mail, the Express, the Sun, the Telegraph, but you wouldn’t have got many of their readers’ votes anyway, would you?

And I could be wrong, but I suspect that a lot more people will think, “Ah, that’s what the Labour Party should be doing”, and they will vote for you.

And there will be no shortage of extra cash for what’s needed.

That is, if you have the courage, Sir Keir.

• Philip Kemp is a freelance writer who lives in NW1.