Who can forget Keir Starmer’s Six Milestones? Who can remember them? Were there even six?

It’s barely a fortnight since the latest Government Reset, and I’ve already forgotten what happened. It was a case of cold reboot and the start screen showing something substantially similar to what went on before: it was still broken.

If I had to take a stab, I’d have to say there were in fact six of the Milestones. One of them was “Cleanish” energy by 2030. The other five? I’m guessing that we had an NHS waiting list target. Stop the boats? Something on stop the boats? Net immigration in the “tens of thousands”? Fastest growth in the G7? An army? Less stab stab stab on the streets?

Nope, I’m going to have to check. According to Sky,

The milestones cover six policy areas – healthcare, policing, education, housebuilding, energy and the economy.

Here’s the list:

Raise living standards and aim at the highest growth in the G7.

A 92% target for a shorter than 18-week wait for NHS treatment.

1.5 million new homes.

“Cleanish” power by 2030.

More cops. 13,000.

75% of 5-year-olds ready to learn when they start school.

The first is what ought to be a trivial task in “ordinary” times. Two, three and four won’t happen. Five is trivial. Six is a joke.

Milestones come and go. Who can forget Rishi Sunak’s? Well, me for one. They’re not quite as faint a memory as the list of concessions that David Cameron came back from Europe with. Stop the boats! That’s the ticket. Actually, it’s the most expensive ferry to Britain you can take. Don’t worry, we don’t check your passport before embarkation.

Why is Jit rambling about milestones, you might wonder?

Well, it occurred to me that the UK might be in a doom loop. A doom loop is, or at least I think of it as, a damaging, indeed dooming, cycle in which actions taken to address a problem only make matters worse. A classic example is the fine British pub, which responds to a lack of customers by putting up the price of a pint of beer, resulting in fewer customers, and the need to raise prices further, unto doom, windows covered in oriented strand board, and eventually a couple of nice flats.

On the back of a fag packet – I don’t smoke, I just happened to have one handy – I wrote a list of what I decided to call “Starmer’s Millstones.” You see what I did there?

Starmer’s Millstones

Here is my list.

1. The green electricity crap.

2. The Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate.

3. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

4. Employer’s NI.

5. War on the rich.

6. Grocery tax.

Will these measures make things better for Britain?

1. The green electricity crap.

Aficionados of this site are well aware that if your electricity generator has to have three qualities – cheap, reliable, and no carbon dioxide emissions – it belongs in the pages of a book by Douglas Adams. It is quite obvious to everyone, except the people who matter, that pushing the UK into a renewables future is going to end up with electricity costing twice as much, or more, and finally going off with a sad little fizzle, probably permanently. It also has a number of other disadvantages, like the fact that carpeting good English land with solar panels means it cannot be used to grow crops, which will increasingly have to be imported. Oh, it also needs to compete with the fantasy-land 1.5 million houses that are (not) going to get built in the next 5 years. And having extension leads trailing all over the North Sea does wonders for energy security. Vlad probably doesn’t even want to sabotage offshore wind farms anyway. Why interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake? Doubling electricity bills? Make the poor, poorer. And from Vlad’s point of view, make it impossible for the UK to afford to have an armed forces to speak of. Of course, I should point out that the Government want to borrow on the open market to pay for all the green electricity crap. And the markets are just throwing money at the Government like guests hurling confetti over the bride and groom, knowing how much growth the green electricity crap is going to generate. Or are they? In fact, the numbers seem to show that our lenders think we are just going to burn the money. Which is probably fairly accurate.

2. The Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate.

If you wanted to boost the UK’s vehicle manufacturing industry – one of the few that remains here – then forcing manufacturers to build cars that they can’t sell is quite the doom loop move. And they will try to patch things together by making the better cars more expensive, or making the VED on older cars as much as they are worth. Making it harder to own or use a car… makes the poor, poorer.

3. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

I happened to notice that our carbon is leaking. Places around the world like to do things cheaply. Like growing crops with fertiliser made using methane. Of course, in the doom loop world, you have to raise a tax on imports of food grown in those conditions. So on the one hand we’re carving out chunks of farmland and using them for other purposes. Then we’re making food imports more expensive. This makes poor people poorer: everyone has to eat.

4. Employer’s NI.

Not strictly a climate matter, but there is an angle here, and it’s a perfect example of a doom loop move. Not getting enough taxes in to pay for all those green crap intermittent power thingies? Slap a tax on jobs. That way, you’ll raise tonnes of dosh. Oh wait. No, you won’t. You’ll cause companies to fire employees because they can’t afford to keep them on. They won’t hire new employees. They’ll bang up their prices – just like the pub – and spiral down into the doom loop. As you know, all I know about economics I learnt from “Economics for Dummies.” But throttling the horse that you want to pull the cart has to be the dumbest move you can take as a government, unless you really want the doom loop. Those newly-unemployed people will need subsistence pay, enforcing yet another doom loop. People afraid of losing their jobs won’t change jobs. They won’t move house. They won’t spend money. They won’t buy a shiny new EV. If you want to boost the economy, this is stupid. Part-timers? Low paid? Your jobs are the first in line. It’s a great way to make the poor… even poorer.

5. War on the rich.

Tax the rich! That’ll show ’em. Will it? Will it really? Or will they just naff off elsewhere, and take their wealth-creation mojo with them? It will raise taxes! No, not if the rich have naffed off. It will reduce taxes. But at least Britain will be a fairer country? Yes, we’ll all be poorer together.

6. Grocery tax.

(Yes; this is a trivial example.) Taxing packaging is a seductive idea, except when you realise that supermarkets already try to minimise packaging – who wants to pay for something they don’t need? I look forward to the day that eggs are laid out loose, like apples used to be, when the UK still had orchards. (It is eminently possible to re-use egg boxes.) Can’t see any wastage going on there, can you? Who will pay this tax? Shoppers. Making poor people poorer.

Editorial

This is not a party-political point. Yes, Labour is awful. I can’t even think of a suitable adjective for how awful they are. But the Conservatives started this doom loop. They started Net Zero, and the Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate, and the Boiler Tax (which I haven’t even mentioned above!). They have only recently begun to whistle a slightly different tune. And that is as infuriating as anything else, because the obvious facts were right there under their noses, and all it took was for them to be booted out of power – to have the ability to do anything useful removed from them – for them to suddenly realise that they themselves had doggedly steered us down this ruinous path in defiance of all good sense, and in pursuit of the shallow appearance of virtue, that they had tipped the UK into a doom loop.

Conclusion

Everything is terrible, and it’s getting worse, and the worseness is getting worse faster and fasterer; in short, we’re in a doom loop.

A wise man once proposed to “cut the green crap.” If a government wanted to achieve something useful – like improving living standards – it would do well to heed that call. I think it might be a good shout for getting out of the doom loop, too.

I always warn against despair, but right now, rivers of hope are flowing out of the UK. We need to stem that flow.