100 Days On

Traffic to this site is off the charts today, both in terms of numbers, and in terms of global reach. A very warm welcome to one and all as we approach the end of the lately customary honeymoon period of the Arden Strategies Government that faces the Young Voices Opposition.

100 days on from the Conservative Party's worst ever defeat, it is only one point behind Labour, so a statistical tie, but each of them is below 30 per cent. Yesterday, Labour had a truly dreadful set of local by-election results, losing seats in all directions while holding onto others by the skin of its teeth after huge swings against it, in both cases all over the country. We who vote in local by-elections, vote in absolutely everything. Beyond the most titular sense, the Conservative Party does not have a Leader. The same could be said of the Labour Party.

The campaign against John Woodcock, or whatever he now calls himself, suggests the impending re-emergence of the sexual harassment case that led to his departure from the Labour Party. Those were the circumstances under which Keir Starmer retained his services. The former Ruth Smeeth, of whom it can never be said too many times that she lost her seat to Jonathan Gullis, has been made a Government Whip in the House of Lords, precisely because she is a "strictly protected" asset of a foreign power.

Pace Ken McCallum, while there is mayhem on our streets, Russia and Iran are the least of our worries. Public support is waning for the war that Britain is directly waging in Ukraine and inside Russia (so much for nuclear deterrence), and there is ever-less even than there has ever been for the war that Britain is directly waging in Gaza and Lebanon, now involving deliberate attacks on Irish, Commonwealth and NATO military personnel. So this rubbish has to put out there, in the touchingly naïve expectation that anyone might fall for it.

It is possible that only an unvarnished war might yet save Starmer or even Labour, so watch out for a lot more of this, not necessarily excluding one or more false flag operations. But we are no fools. We saw through Starmer's nonsense statement on 7 October, which as much as anything else managed not to mention either Israel or the Palestinians at all, conflating Jews with Israel in breach of the IHRA Definition. We know that the United States Navy was on the Nord Stream bоmbing site in radio silence days before the аttack, that Danish sailors from Christiansø noticed their transponders off and launched a help party, and that the Americans оrdered them to leave.

Labour MPs are under orders not to seek to amend this Government's half-baked legislation, whether on Great British Energy that would produce no energy, or on rail renationalisation but never of the rolling stock and not of much else until well into the next Parliament, or on buses, or on renters' rights, or on workers' rights. Buses were anti-Semitic when Jeremy Corbyn talked about them. As were trees. Yes, really. Louise Haigh openly regretted having nominated him for Leader. To describe Angela Rayner's package of proposed workers' rights as the most radical in a generation is to say nothing whatever.

Certain hysterics in the old no-quite-Blairite academic, media and thinktank circles are calling this the most left-wing Government since 1979. Yet what if it were? How would that be any sort of achievement? If this were indeed a left-wing Government, then Starmer's affair with Jenny Chapman, leading to a child who was born while Starmer's wife was pregnant and who is now supported by Chapman's Ministerial salary, would have brought him down by now. As it is, he even felt able to joke about that at this week's Prime Minister's Questions.

Both in the dropping of key commitments, and in the vague aspiration to two years rather than the firm promise of the first 100 days, the Employment Rights Bill is an enormous breach of the General Election manifesto, you fools who voted for it, and you even bigger fools who paid for the campaign. The emerging train tickets scandal is yet another unanswerable argument for real rail renationalisation, just as the impending collapse of Thames Water is yet another unanswerable argument for water renationalisation. But instead, this Labour Government has broken its undertaking to declare the National Health Service the preferred provider of commissioned health services, while wheelchairs at King's College Hospital, if not also elsewhere, are being rented out at two pounds per hour, payable by card only and so that a mere 50 uses would make back the cost of buying them, by a private company, Wheelshare, that is based in Israel. It is all connected.

As at Westminster, so at Holyrood, only Labour members voted in favour of means-testing the Winter Fuel Payment, although the two Labour MSPs who voted against it, Richard Leonard and Alex Rowley, were respectively a former Leader, and a former Deputy Leader and Acting Leader. The sentencing review is to be chaired by David Gauke, who has only just re-joined the Conservative Party. But if your sentence allowed for your release after less than 12 months, then you were obviously not bad enough to have been sent to prison at all, to spend 23 hours of the day either in front of the television or asleep. At an average annual cost to the public purse of £46,696, which is £127.93 per day, what good purpose does that serve? Let me assure you that there is absolutely none. Now let us see what Gauke came up with. He has talked the talk in the past. This is his only chance to walk the walk.

I do not always agree with Spiked, but this week alone it brings us Tessa Clarke on the Chagos Islands twice, Susannah Copson on snooping into bank accounts, Lisa McKenzie and Fraser Myers on deindustrialisation, Tim Black on Sue Gray and all the rest of them, and Lauren Smith on assisted suicide. This is a Government about which there is an awful lot to criticise. Just before the General Election, someone who is now a Minister told me that 100 days into a Starmer Government, I would be blogging perhaps half a dozen times per week, about affairs abroad, about local matters, about culture, seasonally about the Faith, "and about the Tories if you could be bothered." Beyond that, there would be nothing to say. Well, I suppose that things could change before midnight, Cinderella. But it looks as if here we are.