In his new weekly column, PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, looks back at the last few weeks since Labour came into power.  

I think we all expected this Labour government to be bad, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad this fast. 

The conventional wisdom is that Starmer was propelled to office not because there was any great enthusiasm for him and his party but simply because the electorate were determined to kick out the Conservatives. Buyer’s remorse may already be kicking in. 

Concerns about two-tier policing have been hand waved away. There seems little recognition that such concern goes back many years. It's not just a question of comparing footage from riots in Leeds and Southport. The Rotherham sex abuse scandal would not have developed on such an horrific scale if the authorities had done their job rather than obsessing about political correctness. Police officers taking the knee at Black Lives Matter protests was wholly unacceptable and not just because BLM is a Marxist organisation - we also wouldn't allow those who are charged with running our elections to show favour by wearing party rosettes, for example. 

This two-tier approach is not confined to policing. We now appear to have two-tier justice as well. Those involved in recent disorder appear, on the face of it, to be receiving very heavy sentences whilst we also pursue an approach of early release for others convicted of serious criminal offences. 

On economic policy, we now have two-tier budgeting. The government makes absurd claims about the state of the public finances being far worse than they could ever have imagined. But this doesn't appear to impact public sector workers who are being rewarded with enormous pay rises. I am not against people earning more money for their efforts but it needs to be attached to gains in productivity. Public sector productivity has been falling, so we are now paying more to receive less. 

All of this means that the Conservative Party needs to get its act together. 

I am rather worried that the leadership campaign so far has been marked by craven caution rather than truly bold and imaginative thinking. Early results from the PopCon opinion panel suggest many of you share my feelings (more on that next week). 

These are grim days for our country and testing times for our party but with clear thinking and perseverance we can turn things around.  

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More from me next week. Over and out.