Labour’s policy choices are beyond irrational

What do you do about a government that tells you it has no money and so must raise your taxes even higher to avoid borrowing more, only for it to spend huge sums on people from other countries and then not only raises taxes to record levels but borrows more too?

Why am I asking these questions? Labour has now been in power for 18 months. It should be able to stay in power for another three-and-a-half years – until August 2029 – and yet it is behaving so irrationally as if it has already reached the end of its days. Its decisions are like a scorched earth policy deployed by retreating generals with the aim of making any country ungovernable in the future.

One minute the Chancellor is telling us we will all have to tighten our belts and pay more taxes because the public finances are so precarious and then the next minute she is literally giving away billions and billions of pounds she does not have?

So far Rachel Reeves has talked up the existence of not one but two black holes – huge, cavernous gaps in the region of £20bn between revenues and spending – both around the time of her budget statement. Strangely, however, the independent OBR has on both occasions demurred from confirming their existence.

Yet Starmer’s Labour Government is committed to handing over £34.7bn to Mauritius for it to take the Chagos islands off our hands, against the wishes of the Chagos islanders who were forced to resettle in the UK during the 1960s. They have now taken the unusual but entirely justifiable step of creating a government in exile as they have no wish to be ruled by the Mauritius government. Ironically, the United Nations is concerned about the mistreatment of the Chagos islanders by Starmer’s deal.

On a similar theme Starmer’s prized EU-UK reset has already given the EU rights to access the UK’s fishing grounds until 2038 (valued at £6bn) in return for nothing other than being able to start talks where more costly concessions will be made. And they will be made, at a high price. It’s rather like paying an entrance fee to climb into a boxing ring to take a punishment beating and then paying again on the way to A&E.

The latest concession is the announcement that Labour is closing down the UK Government’s Turing student support scheme that for £83m last year provided financial backing for 43,000 British students to study in 162 countries around the whole world. It was an example of Global Britain made real. It replaced the EU’s Erasmus+ scheme that cost significantly more, helped fewer UK students and limited help to only those attending universities at 33 European countries.

The Turing scheme is undeniably superior to Erasmus+ – it funds more British students because it does not carry the cost of funding EU students coming to the UK – that responsibility is for overseas governments to meet. It is also focused in helping financially disadvantaged students; of the 35,248 British students Turing supported in 2025-26, 61 per cent (21,411) were disadvantaged participants.

Nick Thomas-Symonds MP, the Labour Government’s EU minister – or should that be the EU’s man in the Labour Government – has defended the policy announcement by saying that the first year of operation – at a cost £570m is receiving a 30 per cent discount, meaning that if it is continued it will then be in the region of £810m a year thereafter.

We know that figure because the share of any country’s annual Erasmus+ bill is calculated by national GDP and that would put the UK on a 16 per cent share of £5.7 billion.

If there has been a criticism of Turing worth considering it is that it could provide greater support for students. Fair enough, but the current Turing scheme could be expanded by ten times using that money and still be less than the full cost of Erasmus+.

Ellie Reeves, Labour MP and sister of Chancellor Rachel Reeves took to social media to defend spending more money on EU students at the expense of British ones saying, “Studying in Italy was one of the best things I did when I was younger. But under the Tories, young people were denied this opportunity when they scrapped the Erasmus scheme.” Unfortunately the claim about closing access to studying in Italy or anywhere else in the EU is not true. It is a lie.

The Turing scheme continued to support British students attending European universities and the numbers to Italy more than doubled.

The huge financial commitments of Labour, announced by cabinet ministers, signed off by the Chancellor and defended by the prime minister as “the change we need” are no mere unforced errors – they have been carefully planned and negotiated as if we were clamouring for them and they were the reason Labour was elected. Yet neither the fishing, Chagos nor Turing sell-outs were mentioned by Labour in the election.

So, going back to my questions, what do you do when politicians spend money they don’t have, on people and other countries they don’t have a responsibility for, limiting the futures of our own people – and then tax and borrow more in order to betray their own kin?

Why you vote against them repeatedly and regularly until they recant and change their ways. Labour’s Brexit betrayals – for that is what they are – deserve not only our contempt but its consignment to Trotsky’s famous dustbin of history.

Brian Monteith is a former member of the Scottish and European parliaments and editor of ThinkScotland.org