RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Welcome to the nightmare. The hangover from Hell starts here. It is day one of Starmer's socialist utopia, comrades...

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Welcome to the nightmare. The hangover from Hell starts here.

It will take more than a couple of paracetamol and a hair of the dog to get over the extraordinary result of this General Election.

The British people have just ushered in the most extreme hard-Left government in history. This isn't 1997, after Labour's last historic landslide victory, when Tony Blair was able to declare: 'A new dawn has broken.'

Back then, there was a genuine sense of optimism. Today, as the dour socialist Keir Starmer is set to enter No 10, there is only foreboding.

Nobody, outside the confines of committed Labour supporters, seriously believes things are going to get better in a hurry. No one is dancing in the street at the prospect of Martha Reeves becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer.

As the dour socialist Keir Starmer enters No 10, there is only foreboding, writes Richard Littlejohn

The millions who put their cross in the Labour column are in for a rude awakening. Things can, and will, only get worse.

Strap yourselves in for Starmer's Socialist Utopia, comrades. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

A terrifying future of soaring taxes, uncontrolled immigration, net zero lunacy and rampant wokery, detailed on this newspaper's front page wasn't Project Fear.

It was your Starter For Ten.

As former U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said: 'There are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.'

Starmer's few known knowns are well documented — scrapping the Rwanda scheme, an amnesty for illegals already here, votes at 16 to rig future elections, closer ties with Europe, more power to the unions, etc.

So are his known unknowns — ie, what he wouldn't admit publicly during the campaign: higher inheritance, capital gains and council taxes. We can probably add slapping VAT on private health insurance, too, as a basis for negotiation.

But the unknown unknowns are anybody's guess. With a majority this large, Starmer has carte blanche to do whatever he likes.

My hunch is that if he wins another term in four or five years' time, or even sooner, we'll be back in the EU without a referendum.

After all, we've just elected as Prime Minister the man who worked tirelessly and cynically to overturn the result of the Brexit referendum — the biggest vote for anything in British history.

So why would so many of us vote for this nightmare vision, asks Richard Littlejohn 

The comparisons with 1997 are wholly misleading. Blair branded Labour 'the political arm of the British people as a whole'.

Starmer's New Model Labour Party is the political wing of the public sector, Left-wing judges and yuman rites lawyers, the trades unions, the burgeoning 'HR' industry, trans fanatics, Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion.

Peter Mandelson was quoted as saying that New Labour was intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich (especially P. Mandelson and T. Blair), provided they paid their taxes.

Starmer's Labour gives the impression that it not only hates the filthy rich, it hasn't got much time for the moderately wealthy, either. (Unless he's a former DPP living in a £3 million home in North London and with a gold-plated pension protected by a special Act of Parliament.)

When Reeves talks about 'redistribution', what she really means is 'confiscation'. Tax for tax's sake, money for God's sake.

Soon, the trickle of non-doms who have fled already will be joined by mere multi-millionaire British citizens seeking more hospitable tax regimes abroad.

The scenes at private airports will resemble the chaotic evacuation of Kabul, with tax exiles hanging from the wings of planes, tenners tumbling out of their Louis Vuitton hand luggage.

This exodus will be exceeded by the flotilla of small boats heading towards Kent in a kind of reverse of the D-Day landings. Nowhere was Starmer's victory more enthusiastically received than in the 'refugee' departure lounges on the French coast.

This time next week, the only 'non-doms' left in Britain will be the Albanian people-smuggling gangsters holed up in London, Manchester and beyond. And they won't be paying taxes, anyway.

Starmer's Labour gives the impression that it not only hates the filthy rich, it hasn't got much time for the moderately wealthy, either

So what of the millions who are left behind, the middle-class strivers and savers who don't fall into Starmer's definition of the 'working people'?

We're into 'known unknown' territory here — another raid on private pensions, probably, capital gains tax on home sales, some kind of 'wealth tax' and even a more punitive inheritance tax.

Semi-detached, surburban Mr Singh will have to bear the brunt of Labour's plans to spend, spend, spend.

The younger Starmer believed that all property is theft. Today, he sees it as a seriously untapped source of spondulicks for the Treasury.

His activists don't even seem to like most of the British people, particularly in the Red Wall, who have just handed him an unassailable mandate, regarding them as racist gammons.

Never mind the economy, stupid, this is where the real impact of Starmer's New Model Labour will be felt.

The British people will have to be 're-educated' to fall into line behind the woke agenda. If they won't do it voluntarily, they will be forced to comply by law.

Harriet Harman's likely return as head of a beefed-up Equalities Commission, with enhanced powers to enforce draconian diversity diktats, indicates the direction of travel.

For instance, employers will have to swallow a rigidly policed quota system when it comes to hiring and promoting staff.

In a perverse inversion of Martin Luther King's dream, in Starmer's Britain people will be hired on the basis of the colour of their skin, not the content of their character or their ability to do the job.

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And if you think strikes are bad now, wait until Ange Rayner repeals all the Tories' trades union laws, which even Blair decided to leave in place.

She won't get any thanks from the unions, even though Labour will shovel excessive pay rises and four-day weeks in their direction. The unions will just keep demanding more.

Soon, we'll be back to the industrial anarchy of the 1970s. Don't forget that it was Labour that brought you the Winter of Discontent, with the dead unburied and rubbish piled high in the streets.

Perhaps most worrying is the looming threat to democracy. Where Starmer will complete the Blair revolution is in handing even more power to unelected judges and quangocrats, emasculating Parliament. And for the next five years there won't be an effective Opposition to stop him.

So why would so many of us vote for this nightmare vision? My view is that ever since Covid, the electorate has been infantilised. Furlough and Rishi's Money For Nothing And Your Chips For Free scheme ingrained a sense of entitlement which hasn't gone away.

Yes, the Tories have screwed up, on taxes and immigration. So instead of clinging to nurse, Britain has voted for something worse. How else to explain rock-solid Conservative constituencies returning vacuous Lib Dems led by a ludicrous circus act who spent the campaign playing It's A Knockout, and when he was in government helped bring you Mr Bates v The Post Office?

Maybe people have been brainwashed by those reality shows which let you throw out the baddies via your TV remote.

This time Britain has pressed the red button. We will all repent at our leisure. Although, trust me, there's going to be nothing leisurely about what comes next.

So pour yourself a large Bloody Mary and swallow a couple of paracetamol while you can.

This hangover from Hell is going to last at least five years.