April Fools’ Day has passed. Yet here we are in 2026, with a Labour government that campaigned on hope and renewal, reduced to celebrating a measly £117 energy bill cut like it’s the second coming — while warning us things might get worse again in just three months because of the Epstein war on the other side of the world that was started by a pair of narcissistic pound shop dictators.
It’s a bit like throwing a tea towel over a leaking roof and calling it “resilience building”.
The National Living Wage is up to £12.71; already, eye-watering prescription costs have been frozen, and a shiny new £1 billion Crisis and Resilience Fund for the truly desperate has been rolled out with the fanfare of a slightly damp firework.
Rachel Reeves probably stayed up all night practising her victory lap in the mirror, but this is the political equivalent of offering a couple of paracetamol to someone with a severed artery and then wondering why they’re still bleeding out.
Don’t get me wrong, a piddly pay rise for the precariat is better than a kick in the teeth. If you’re one of the 2.4 million scraping by on the old rate, that extra £18 or so a week might just cover the difference between choosing between heating and eating.
But let’s be honest here. This is a cheap sticking plaster on a gaping gunshot wound, and the gun is still smoking thanks to years of Tory wreckage, Brexit self-harm, and now the lovely gift of rising oil prices courtesy of the Zionist-incited chaos in the Middle East.
Labour is fiddling
Labour’s timid fiscal rules — choking public investment, an obsession with “stability” over justice, and a foreign policy that talks peace whilst facilitating the fucking great big child-killing US bombers flying above me every day and night — are guaranteed to leave poor and working people exposed to global shocks.
If I can get my head around this, it should be a breeze for a Labour government that promises so very little of worth and somehow still manages to deliver even less.
While Labour fiddles with meaningless incremental crumbs, Britain burns through its last reserves of patience, prosperity and public trust.
The Starmer project was always about making Labour safe for Middle England dinner parties rather than dangerous to the interests of the powerful.
Labour’s April Fools’ package is emblematic: modest, reversible, and fundamentally unambitious.
Starmer, Reeves, and the rest of the bland beige brigade can keep talking about “realistic” and “responsible” politics.
The rest of us will keep pointing out that realism, right now, demands radicalism. The house is on fire. Handing out cups of water and calling it a strategy isn’t strong leadership, it’s absolute surrender.
If this government doesn’t start delivering the scale of change the country desperately needs — and I see no evidence that it ever will — 2026 won’t be remembered as the year living standards turned a corner. It will be remembered as the year the promise of a Labour government quietly died of caution.
Outflanked
Labour campaigned in 2024 as the party of “change”. Now they’re being outflanked on the left by the Greens — the party once dismissed as sandal-wearing tree-huggers — and on the right by Reform’s hateful populist circus.
Polling in the teens while Reform and Greens carve up the disaffected vote isn’t just a temporary blip for the Labour Party. It’s the bill arriving for years of triangulation, purged Corbynites, broken pledges, and the failures of capitalism.
The Greens aren’t perfect, of course. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
The recent anti-Zionism motion has resulted in an internal battle between a largely pro-Palestine base and concerns about an antisemitism spillover.
Does this sound vaguely familiar, Corbynites? Surely the crucifixion of JC serves as a brutal reminder of what happens if you dance to the tune of pro-Israel lobbyists and fold to the concerns of barely-left-of-centre do-gooders that socialism means nationalised gulags.
The Greens also still face the brutal arithmetic of first-past-the-post — brilliant in small pockets, but so much harder to scale nationally without tactical voting or serious reform.
And yes, some of the Green appeal is protest — people venting frustration rather than signing up for every single policy detail.
A mess of their own making
The rise of Zack Polanski and the Greens isn’t despite Labour’s failures. It’s because of them.
When a government elected on a ticket of hope delivers cautious continuity with slightly kinder rhetoric, disillusioned progressives don’t just stay home. They go looking for fire.
The Green Party really is providing it — huge membership surges, historic by-election shocks, and a message that actually sounds like it believes in something bigger than not being the Tories.
The Green surge shows there is a genuine hunger for radicalism on climate justice, economic fairness, and genuine public investment. It proves voters will reward boldness, even with an utter clusterfuck of an electoral system like ours.
But it also highlights how quickly a weak Labour government can squander a huge mandate by governing like ever-so-slightly embarrassed social democrats in a neoliberal straitjacket.
Starmer can keep muttering about focus groups and fiscal credibility, and I am absolutely sure he will.
The rest of us can sit back and watch the Greens hoover up the energy, ideas, and young voters his government has so carelessly alienated.
Featured image via the Canary
From Canary via This RSS Feed.