Keir Starmer

What’s the point?

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

My previous post on McSweeney and Starmer was full of anger towards both. Principally, this is because they have betrayed a zillion solid Labour values. Specifically, they cynically and deliberately weaponised ‘feeling’ against immigrants, in a way that was shamefully reactionary and should have no part in the thinking or activity of any reasonable or progressive political party. (And that particular approach goes on, through the hostile language used in government socials accounts and through Shabana Mahmood’s calculatedly weighted grandstanding on these issues). McSweeney plainly ordered them to shift hard right… Starmer utterly capitulated… and it really stinks.

Interestingly – or not – there’s been a lot of stuff in the political ether around how votes are won or cast because of feeling rather than understanding or fact. So maybe, by roaring my opposition, I’ve just fallen into that Modern Way. Government People (or their advisors) might recommend a ‘time for reflection’ before the issue of an ‘I could do better’ statement: and yes, they might have a point. Calling our Reform-voting friends ‘neanderthals’ was neither wise nor fair. It smacks of pomp and maybe even contempt for The Working Classes. But I can promise you I am not guilty of the latter: I just really don’t like racism.

The fella Ratcliffe’s recent intervention makes it clear that people *do have* opinions about immigration. But I would argue that most of these opinions are either racist to their core, or those propounding such notions have been coached towards xenophobia (+) by (what I would view as) our appalling and bigoted press. Ratcliffe is a special (and an especially foul) case because of his obscene wealth. Private-jetting-it waaay above all economic plight and yet scapegoating the most vulnerable. On the one hand to further empower and bejewel himself, and on the other out of sheer and obvious prejudice. Find your own four-letter word.

Starmer has, I believe, *actually called-out* Ratcliffe over his offensive, Reformist nonsense. Hoo-rah! Tiny steps?

I wrote in my last blog that I cannot abide the Prime Minister, for his spinelessness and the HUGE (MORAL) FAILURES around immigration/Gaza/abetting Trump/Mandelson/Palantir etc etc. For the general failure to bring back honesty and decency. Finding ourselves with this or any Labour leader being even remotely in the frame of comparison with Johnson for duplicity and corruption is an astonishing failure for a party predicated upon social justice.

Starmer is not as wildly amoral as Johnson. And he palpably doesn’t drive agendas in the way Alexander Boris de Pfeffel did. But the more we find out the more it seems that his failures of judgement have been contingent upon being ‘won over’ by lobbyists, influencers or multinationals.

Weirdly, I think maybe Starmer should stay – for now. There is merit in those making ‘politically-mature’ arguments around both the unfairness of coverage of Labour – no question! – and the need for ‘some stability’. Give the PM a little time… but don’t necessarily forgive, or forget. Despite his feeble protestations, he is not a Labour Man – or perhaps more exactly, he has drifted, shockingly but perhaps not surprisingly, from core, progressive views. (As I write this I can hear the voices calling out from the List of Good Things ticked-off, which I acknowledge. But you know as well as I do that Blue Labour is not Labour and not right).

So. In the face of billionaire ignoramuses, a mostly diabolical media and a Labour government absconding from the very decencies it was founded for and upon, what’s the point? Where do we go or look? In terms of voting (obvs), we get tactical. In terms of political philosophy, surely we either literally follow Polanski and the Greens, or we follow what they do with interest and maybe even some hope.

Zack Polanski has barely put a foot wrong, since becoming leader of his party. He is bold and real and he cuts the bullshit. He has been overwhelmingly right on immigration, Gaza, Trump and the whole repulsive White Supremacist Project – so across Musk, Thiel, Bannon and the rest. He is all over the Epstein thing and all over the umbilical links between that and the privileged, untouchable few. At home he has been in a different league in terms of compelling narratives and calling-out the economic injustices and imbalances the Labour Party was set up to address. He is killing it on necessary monopolies and progressive state intervention. His plausibility, manner and willingness to speak are different league. The Powers That Be – and they really are out there – will be looking to crush him. Don’t let them.

You had one job.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

McSweeney’s gone and even those of us who’d never been in the man’s orbit are punching the air. We didn’t need to be in those eight zillion meetings where he flew his poisonous kites or ‘took account’ of the murderously stupid or prejudiced and then ‘made policy reflect their concerns’. The world is better for his going. If we could believe this was somehow a turning-point towards widespread intelligence and fairness in the public domain then we might expect *things* to actually get better. But we know, do we not, there’s almost no chance of that?

Labour came in on a huge wave of nothing; meaning there was no real enthusiasm for Starmer but the universe had at least, at last understood that the Tories were unelectable, either for their incompetence or their contempt for decency, fairness and respect for the law. Starmer and McSweeney had a huge opportunity, a playing-field to frolic in, with just the one job – to restore some faith. They could have been radical: they could have really done some good.

Their failure lift us, at a moment of such opportunity, is an affront on so-o many levels, it’s hard to know where to start. It speaks to a remarkable level of soullessness and even cowardice. (And, of course, a pitiful narrowness – the sole ambition being to stay in power. Career politics of the most repulsive kind).

The longer the McSweeney-Starmer together-thing endured, the more wrapped in clingfilm they seemed. How, despite all the focus-groups(!) could they not hear/feel/see most things revolve around massive concentrations of wealth and influence? Why nothing meaningful to address either that or the associated control of media and corporations?

Falling back into Tory/Reform-lite tropes which are patently, deliberately and knuckle-draggingly racist (and therefore foul and indecent) registers pretty high on the list of offences with me. More importantly, in a stroke it repulses (and therefore alienates) most of what we might provocatively term the Good Labour Folk out there. So as vile as Farage and Trump, morally wrong and politically stupid. Driven by a foul, ‘popular’ ideology that sets theoretical vote-winning beyond any sense of that which is right. Laughably but obviously, this ‘listening to the concerns’ of neanderthals*…

(*get that this is offensive; don’t care; am angry and I know I’m right – in both senses).

resulted in a net loss of support. Because despite the scary levels of xenophobia (or worse) out there, almost no Reform-leaning clown was ever going to ‘come back to Labour’. And yet the language of division continues almost daily, from Labour’s execrable Home Sec, who thinks Powellite soundbites are still the way to go. They are not. They are grotesque and unworthy of us and of any progressive party. Labour is dead to many of us as long as it continues to deliberately demonise ‘illegal immigrants’.

McSweeney we can pretty sure – alongside the cabal of Blue Labour influencers – has shaped the imagery and language around the government’s lurch/capitulation/strategic realignment to the right. It would of course not have been possible without Starmer’s characteristic spinelessness.

Dull Prime Ministers are a commonplace – and not in themselves a particular issue – but Sir Keir’s feeble malleability and susceptibility to influence put him in a kind of world-level category for vacancy and lack of direction. It’s as though he wants to disappear. The ideas, the motivation, the sense of any compulsion towards re-balancing patently obscene injustice or privilege – local or international – has gone. Replaced by McSweeney’s ‘targets’ and subsumed in endless fire-fighting or briefing to hold things together against revelation, corruption, dissent. Plus, let’s be clear, on the biggest issues of all – Gaza; Trump; Epstein; Mandelson; Palantir; Russian interference – Starmer’s regime has been disastrously wrong, on every single one.

To err is human (as they say) but for leaders to be so wrong on the major issues of the day is extraordinary. To be wrong because you or your processes have been so blatantly corrupted or influenced by sources of power known to all of us – whether that be the machinery of the Israeli or Russian states, or the machinery of technocrats and the obscenely rich – takes political misjudgements into a whole new realm. That of blatant, Kafkaesque or Orwellian falsehood. Plainly we are there now. Presented with imagery, with narrative, with economic truth and necessity which is outrageously false.

The one job that Starmer and McSweeney had was to bring back a bit of honesty and truth. And ideally bring the discourse back towards a level of civility and tolerance. They have scorched away in the other direction. Lobbied. Bought. And in any case immune to the stuff that decent people know will always be right. Both have contributed – almost unbelievably – to a further degradation in the quality of political life in these islands.

Beyond the budget.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

(A prologue – not by way of apology but certainly to note the significant and progressive nature of the Reeves budget. Adults are in the room: some congratulations may be in order. However, I stand by what follows)…

Many of us fail to (ahem) network or even accept capitalism(?)/business/the ‘run-of-the-mill’* as a way or The Way because we don’t accept its values. It’s crap; it’s low; it’s a signal underachievement given how brilliant and generous and intelligent people can be.

*(Great phrase, by the way!)

Why would we pretend that systems designed to keep certain wealthy people wealthy and beyond accountability are satisfactory? Why would we accept them? We’re better than that.

Why are there billionaires (and why are most of them vile humans?) when most people have little or nothing by comparison? It’s not right. Why is so little of what we might call politics about redressing these obscene imbalances? (We know why: because most politicians lack the courage or decency or heart to make change and the media universe is nobbled – crippled with corruption and dictatorial myopia – by those billionaires and/or ‘media barons’ effectively corralling or twisting our views towards their own).

This may all boil down to privilege and the protection of privilege. And that may be why I have an issue with private schooling – the Industry of Privilege.

Sure there are wunnerful people – kids/families/teachers – at private schools (I know there are, I’ve met plenty of them) but they all need to be big enough to accept that they are buying or serving privilege. There can be no meaningful change – no ‘re-distribution’, no ‘levelling’ – without this first building block being hauled out, or at least called out. That is, discussed as a real thing.

The assumptions of entitlement – in the ether, in fact – start and are cultivated here. They finish, maybe, they reach their catastrophic low-point with Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his ilk. How can this world (our world, Blighty) have come to be designed so that a human so grotesque and unworthy in every respect could make good on his wild, childhood intention of being Universe-King (or whatever the feck it was?) Johnson was and is a kind of icon to our system failure. It’s utterly obscene that an arse of his scale could believe and then absolutely find that everything and everybody really would fall in behind his boorish megalomania. Because of family and money and Eton and yup, everything.

In this landscape a budget from a centre-right Labour regime which has eminently capable but some might argue pitifully conciliatory people at the helm is likely to be an irrelevance: relatively. There may be encouraging splashing of the pool but there is already too much invested in  the appeasement of the World Order – from issues of class to the markets, to the media, to Israel, to That Which Is Thinkable – that we know Starmer and Reeve ain’t gonna stir things too much. The leadership is largely of this place; or content with it. There is no anger and no compelling sense of mission – though they talk of little else.

The party has already fallen into the trap of silencing dissenters. However much talk we hear about ‘changes of direction’, The Radical is very much out.

Sadly both this fact and the (less heinous than the Tories but still hugely galling) evidence of ‘successful’ gifting and lobbying feeds into the painful narrative that ‘them fookin’ politicians are all the same’. Plainly they’re not, but who can blame Dave from Wythenshawe for equating hugely trumpeted Labour indiscretions with heavily obscured Tory filth? With media and social media often acting deliberately against truth, how are we to engage intelligently with anything?

I won’t watch the budget coverage because it bores me and I don’t expect it to offer much of a lift. Plus the coverage will be depressingly dim. I do hope they prove me wrong and that there are some brilliant ideas – the Labour hierarchy, unlike the previous clowns, is quite possibly capable of that. Mainly though, it will tinker when we need to rip it up..

Who else… and how?

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Whoopeedoo. Our friends at AOL are reporting that the unseasonably warm weather in October has probably saved our glorious government 260 million smackers: monies that would have gone out to the Great (Undeserving) Unwashed to cover heating costs. Rishi and the team will no doubt crack open a coupla bottles of something half-decent to celebrate.

I may have missed the stories about how a #WindfallTax on the energy giants – plainly a legitimate, popular and equitable solution – would have fixed this particular inconvenience. And I may have been distracted when the unanswerable arguments for taxing the super-rich were pumped out, along with the other urgent stuff about Strictly, Meghan’s make-up and the new Three Lions vid. Forgive me for being so lax, you AOL-peeps.

260 mill is obviously a smidge of a deficit – or bonus – when we do the Whole National Math. (I get that most of us never do and are indeed ill-equipped to do the Whole Math, but yaknowhattamean?) Even dumbos like me understand that the Brexit-sized, post-Truss-&-Kwarteng-sized hole we’re in is a fucking monster. Interest rates, food prices, fuel going or gone scarily up: political choices heavily squeezed. A time for good, responsible government.

Fat chance. Rishi may have rather skilfully been positioned as the gentleman-who-knows-what’s-good but with his personal powerbase and charisma negligible and his party still in the throes of a weird, exceptionalist and deeply nasty ideological mud-wrestle, sustained careful steering seems unlikely. Sunak (the Impossibly Wealthy One) may have a wee bit of credibility amongst those gullible enough to associate his working experience with financial competence but he’s also, patently, another obscenely privileged toff. The plebs may easily turn.

The PM does have the advantage of not being as crass as Truss and Kwarteng. He’s less noisily, stupidly strident, ideologically, and probably less stupid, all-round. He will allow himself to be guided, to be considered, you suspect, in a way that his predecessor and her oddball Chancellor shunned. They were consumed by a sharp, masturbatory, Tufton Street-curated frenzy; Rishi is too well-groomed, too self-aware for that. He’s quietly mad – Freeports, hedgefunds, that depressing ease around Market Forces – as opposed to barking and under-equipped, like Liz and Quasi. Despite the pitiful incompetence of a succession of Tory governments, Sunak is likely to seem okaay… and to close the yawning gap in the polls, over time. Incredible-but-true.

‘People’ (or enough people ) may forget Partygate, Dido H and the systematic looting of the Covid resources. Despite both being offenses of a contemptibly filthy nature; despite that almost shocking, ‘un-British’ stench of corruption and deceit. Some are already either forgetting or have been consistently beguiled by the amoral clown that is Johnson: let’s put it on the record, the worst and most grotesquely shallow Prime Minister ever to have smooched with the dispatch-box. It will be fascinating and probably cruelly depressing to see how ‘things settle’, in Sunak’s favour, as the various oven-ready catastrophes fade into history.

Large swathes of the media will obviously either make it their business to distract, or somehow acquiesce to the endless protection of the great families, the shadowy elite, the Establishment*. Johnson and Harding are unlikely to face justice. The roster of palpably hopeless and/or careerist Ministers of the Realm escaping scot-free with a pay-off will be noted but then slung in the chipper with the rest of the old news stories. Politics of a sort will resume.

This may be a difficult period for Labour, depending upon how the execrable mob still labelled The Government can handle the next few months. Starmer has, understandably to some extent, been a non-protagonist throughout the chaos: no doubt advised that it’s wiser to keep his counsel re- Brexit, immigration, even the modest redistribution of wealth. He’s both failed to lead – been a kind of silent passenger – and chosen not to. Some of us find that abdication-by-focus-group depressing and unwise. Not only does it feel a dereliction of duty to allow politics itself to become bland to the point of meaningless; it also deprives the country of hope.

When a succession of appalling Conservative governments shamelessly and endlessly allude to (and deliberately conflate) race/immigration/’invasion’, dragging the discourse into the swamp, it must be the job of the Opposition to oppose, articulately and with moral force.

Currently Braverman is an obvious national disgrace – as was the Johnson/Cummings campaign before her – with regard to that lowest common denominator, racial signalling. Sadly, bigotry, so heavily supported in the national press, appears to draw as much positive agency as revulsion. But people understood that there was something powerfully wrong about Partygate. Then something cruelly cynical about unlimited bankers’ bonuses and tax-breaks for the rich. So there is a measure of decency out there. A Labour Party that proudly champions things that are right and just and explains the rationale in terms the population can understand is a) fulfilling its purpose and b) (probably) grabbing hold of the political narrative.

Those of us who sympathise with the centre-left understand Starmer’s cool determination to win. We see the barriers. We suspect, however, that any movement needs leadership; that if Sunak gets a smooth ride – remains essentially unchallenged – things will conspire towards restoring a general faith in Tory competence, however ludicrous that may seem.

A final thought. With philosophical discourse drowned beneath either a general disillusion or the acidic rants of the Twitterverse, there is a worrying vacuum. There are dangers here, which bots and Press Barons might be/have been quick to exploit. On the plus side is there not the possibility that a single individual with manifest decency, integrity and appeal (horrible word but…) could transform this vapid/wretched environment?

If any one of the progressive parties could find such a voice, in such a void, surely people would fall-in, and an Alliance Against Xenophobia and that other Nasty Stuff might begin to heave us all back towards civility and a certain level of social justice?

You may (I hope) have names in mind and agree with my good self that this feels like a job for some cross-party cooperation? Beyond Labour I can’t help but think that in Sturgeon and Lucas – very much ‘for example’ – we have people who could make a contribution.

But who else… and how?

*Some folks argue that the likes of Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Truss, Farage, even, are too right-wing, too bursting with fervour to be of the Establishment. Cobblers. They are all cosseted, all protected; they all reek of money, exceptionalism and privilege.

Pic (I think) is from Spectator, Australia. Forgive me if wrong.