A Year of Keir

The period from September 2015 to April 2020 was hardly the easiest in Britain's recent history. Yet I cannot remember a single riot, or even much, if anything, in the way of civil unrest. Instead, the Government was defeated a record number of times on the floor of the House of Commons, and it lost its overall majority at a General Election when the Opposition took a high enough percentage of the vote to have won any of the previous three.

Now, however, we have had a year of Ab Starmer, the Leader of the No Position. His party is permanently hopelessly far behind the worst Government in living memory, and it is about to lose hundreds of council seats that it held or won under Jeremy Corbyn, as well as losing the parliamentary seat of Hartlepool for the first time ever. And this country is bracing itself for a burning summer, no matter what the weather was like.

As ever, the trouble started only when the men who had uniquely come kitted out and tooled up for it waded in, camera crews in tow, these days to defend a Bill that would give them powers for which the lands of supposedly lesser breeds were sanctioned and worse. But Corbyn's speech to yesterday's Kill The Bill rally, although cut heavily by the broadcasters, referred clearly to:

"the context of a series of pieces of legislation that this Government is trying to push through that place over there. The Spycops Bill, the Overseas Operations Bill, all these Bills designed to empower the Secretary of State to legislate beyond the powers of Parliament to restrict protest, to organise countersurveillance operations, and so many other things."

Notice that although Labour did vote against Second Reading of this Bill because a policeman had gone off-script and killed the sort of person that Starmer cared about, no one bothered to ask him to address that rally. No one expects a Labour whip to vote against Third Reading, any more than there was a Labour whip to do anything other than abstain at any stage either of the Spycops Bill or of the Overseas Operations Bill.