Politics
Starmer’s ‘make or break’ speech just broke him
In a critical speech delivered today, Keir Starmer addressed the massive losses Labour sustained in the English local, Scottish Parliament, and Welsh Senedd elections. As the PM is now facing calls to quit not just from opponents but within his own party, his response may prove critical to his political future.
Somehow, he managed more two-faced, half-truths than what we’ve come to expect. The PM kicked off with an acknowledgement that his party lost hard in the elections:
The election results last week were tough. Very tough. We lost some brilliant labour representatives. That hurts. And it should hurt. I get it. I feel it. And I take responsibility. […]
This hurts not just because Labour has done badly, but because if we don’t get this right, our country will go down a very dark path.
So just as I take responsibility for the results, I also take responsibility for delivering the change that we promised for a stronger and fairer Britain that we must build. I take responsibility for navigating through a world that is more dangerous than at any time in my life. And I take responsibility for not walking away, not plunging our country into chaos, as the Tories did, time and again, chaos, but did lasting damage to this country.
Barrelling down a dark path
First of all, warning that the country will go “down a very dark path” is fucking rich coming from a Labour Party that’s cribbing its immigration policy from the Reform handbook. Or did Starmer think we’d forgotten about his policy to nick asylum seekers’ jewellery already?
Second, taking responsibility for delivering change is a very fancy way of saying ‘I won’t listen to leadership challenges from my own party.’
Claiming that it’s not enough merely to address the “frustration the voters feel”, he stated that:
We’re battling Reform and the Greens, but at a deeper level.
We’re battling the despair on which they prey. Despair that they exploit and amplify. And so analysis matters, but argument matters more. Evidence matters, but so, too, does emotion. Stories beat spreadsheets, people need hope.
Ah yes, the ‘Greens are just like Reform, if you don’t think about it at all’ chestnut. We also love “stories beat spreadsheets” from the guy who famously only has one story. Also, did you know Starmer’s dad was a toolmaker?
Gaslight, gatekeep, government strikes again
Anyway, speaking of despair, the PM demonstrated exactly what “taking responsibility” means to him:
Of course, like every government, we’ve made mistakes. But we got the big political choices right. I mean, if we’d listened to the advice of other parties, right now, we’d be stuck in a stand-off with Iran.
Having been dragged into a war that is not in our interest, and I will never do that. We have invested in our public services, in people, in the pride of Britain’s communities. Difficult decisions funded that. But now, NHS waiting lists are coming down.
Child poverty is coming down. Immigration is coming down. And we are rebuilding from the ground up. They were the right course and most of all we stabilised the economy.
‘Actually, we’re doing really well’..sure buddy…it’s the voters who are wrong. Also, while we’re on the subject, the UK is involved in Trump-Netanyahu’s war on Iran. We’re letting the pricks launch their bombers from our airbases.
Starmer then listed the 2008 financial crash, austerity, Brexit, Covid, and the Ukraine war, to say:
And the response is always the same. A desperate attempt to get back to the status quo. A status quo that failed working people time and again. Our response this time must be different.
Magnificent, and completely true. But what could Starmer’s vision of a “complete break” from the status quo look like?
Nationalise steel, but don’t mention the sewage
As an example of his bold new vision (har har), the Labour leader used the example of a steel plant in Scunthorpe that was on the verge of closure. Instead, Labour passed emergency legislation and “took control” in Starmer’s words. The government couldn’t negotiate a commercial sale of the plant, but the PM stated that:
I can announce that legislation will be brought forward this week to give the Government powers subject to that public interest test, to take full national ownership of British Steel.
Public ownership in the public interest. Urgent government on the side of working people, making Britain stronger with the hope of industrial renewal, that is a Labour choice.
That’s great news for the steel workers, and we’ll bear it in mind the next time we want to build a railway. However, maybe we could extend that same logic of nationalisation to the railway network itself?
Or, better yet, we could even talk about nationalising our environmentally ruinous water supply. But of course, that would involve Labour betraying its buddies in the water industry, wouldn’t it?
The other guy’s worse
The other example Starmer held up as a token of his ‘new politics’ is a plan to renew the country’s relationship with Europe. Of course, this quickly devolved into the standard Labour tactic of bashing political enemies:
I want to remind you what Nigel Farage said about Brexit. He said it would make us richer, wrong. It made us poorer. He said it would reduce migration, wrong. Migration went through the roof. He said it would make us more secure, wrong again. It made us weaker.
He took Britain for a ride, and unlike the Tories, who actually at least had to face up to it, he just fled the scene. And now he’ll talk about almost anything other than the consequences of the one policy he actually delivered. Because he’s not just a grifter, he is a chancer.
You know what, he can have that one…all true. No notes from us.
Coming to the end (thank God) of his speech, the PM continued in the same vein, claiming that the other parties:
want more grievance politics, more division, more pointing at Britain’s problems. Looking not for solutions but for someone to blame. Now, that’s fine, if it’s me, if it’s politicians, that’s the job. But increasingly, it’s not. It’s other people in this country. And I don’t think that’s British.
That is not the decency and respect that we are known for. But it’s here. That politics is with us now. And you’ll see it again on Saturday at a march designed to confront and intimidate this diverse city and this diverse country.
That is why this labour government will block far right agitators from travelling to Britain for that event. Because we will not allow people to come to the UK and spread hate on our streets.
This comes from a Labour Party that actively fought to get racist, Islamophobic Maccabees fans into the country. It’s like they think the public suffers from amnesia.
He concluded his speech with the following remarks:
This is nothing less than a battle for the soul of our nation. And I want to be crystal clear about how we will win it. Because we cannot win as a weaker version of Reform or the Greens, we can only win as a stronger version of Labour, a mainstream party of power, not protest.
‘We must become the best damn Centrists we can be’ — what a fucking vision this man has. God help us all.
Featured image via the Canary
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