LBC Presenter Roasts 'Woefully Unpopular' Labour Government Over Latest U-Turn

LBC presenter Ben Kentish has roasted the “wildly unpopular” Labour government after Keir Starmer’s latest major U-turn.

Environment secretary Emma Reynolds announced on Tuesday that plans to forced farmers to pay inheritance tax were being unexpectedly watered down.

That followed a year of angry protests from farmers and in the face of a mounting rebellion by Labour MPs opposed to the move.

Opposition parties have also condemned the time it has taken for the prime minister to reverse course, and for the decision to sneak out the announcement two days before Christmas.

The latest climbdown follows previous U-turns on scrapping winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners and plans to cut the welfare bill by £5 billion.

In a monologue on his LBC show on Tuesday night, Kentish said it had been driven by the government’s desperation to turn around its dire poll ratings.

He said: “Every time this government announces anything, take it with a pinch of salt because give it another six months or so and there’s a pretty decent chance that they’ll have completely changed their minds on it by then.

“So much so that it almost feels like everything substantive that Rachel Reeves tried to do in her first few months in office has either been completely undone or is in the process of being reversed.”

He added: “If they really were listening in the way that Emma Reynolds insists, then they wouldn’t have taken well over a year to make the change that people in autumn 2024 were urging them to make.

“The way I see it, I’m afraid, is a bit less generous to them. They thought they could weather the storm, but they’ve realised how woefully unpopular they have become, and now they’re scrabbling around desperately trying to find ways to make themselves a bit less unpopular.”

Kentish said that “largely seems to involve them reversing quite a lot of the things that made them unpopular in the first place”.