The current Labour administration has been obliged to raise taxes because spending can no longer be avoided. They have done this reluctantly. They are the most economically leftwing govt of the past 5 decades in the same sense that Churchill's wartime govt was. Needs must.

There is a general consensus among economists that austerity & Brexit were self-defeating, that the UK's public infrastructure is falling apart, and that the welfare safety net is dangerously frayed. Sooner or later a govt was going to have to address these facts.

You might want to read John Quiggan's piece as it directly addresses that.

The % of racists in the population probably hasn't changed over time. What has changed is the social acceptability of crass language ("paki" etc.) The "language of the far right" has not "seeped into the mainstream". It has been deliberately injected.
observer.co.uk/news/columni...

This was a point that Hannah Arendt famously made in The Origins of Totalitarianism re antisemitism. "Scientific racism" was an upper/middle-class attempt to justify imperialism. Today, Le Grand Remplacement is not the product of "working class anger" but of rich white men.

To view the pandemic response in party political terms is fruitless, given that the root problem is systemic and the entire political class is culpable, but you can at least have some fun wondering what would have hapened if Labour had won in 2019.
fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-...

And that issue is how weak the UK state has become over the last 40 years. It's preparedness and resilience in the face of "whole-system civil emergencies" is the consequence. A point that could have been (and was) made at the time.
fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2021/01/brea...

There are many reasons why the public increasingly despises Starmer, but I suspect one is that this supposed "human rights lawyer" has proved to have no sympathy for the concept of rights, which just reaffirms the suspicion that he was a cynical careerist all along.