Shipping Lines

At this rate, Keir Starmer is going to have to bump off some married-in Royal in a car crash. It's Elton John I feel sorry for.

Louise Haigh said that she regretted having nominated Jeremy Corbyn for Leader, and while it would be too much to hope that she now regretted that regret, she really ought to. Keir Starmer has humiliated her for the sake of a company that, only in 2022 and not the many years ago that Starmer has suggested, fired 800 crew without warning, replacing them with agency staff working longer hours for less pay, in some cases below the minimum wage.

All of that was illegal at the time, yet the CEO, Peter Hebblethwaite, defended it both before a joint session of two Select Committees of the House of Commons, and in writing to the then Secretary of State for Transport, Grant Shapps. Neither Hebblethwaite nor anyone else has ever been prosecuted. P&O is in fact state-owned, just not by this state. DP World is owned by the Emirate of Dubai. That is of course one of the United Arab Emirates, where trade unions are illegal, and another of which was recently banned by Statute from buying two small-circulation newspapers and a tiny-circulation magazine in Britain. We are now, however, expected to regard the UAE as one of the souls of moderation in the Middle East. And so to Starmer and DP World.

DP World also owns the Port of Southampton, which is the second largest container terminal in the United Kingdom, and the legal name of which is now DP World Southampton. DP stands for Dubai Ports. Isn't capitalism patriotic? So much for Taking Back Control. But whatever has made possible the outrage at P&O, then it is not Brexit. In 1972, could balaclava-clad private security guards have wielded handcuffs and teargas as they evicted workers from their workplaces, which for the duration of their work were also their homes, with absolutely no notice whatever? All of the anti-union legislation was enacted while Britain was a member of what was really always the EU, and the biggest ever attack on British workers' rights, the Trade Union Act 2016, was brought to us by the Prime Minister who not only campaigned for Remain, but who resigned when Leave won.

We may have seen nothing yet, though. Even Angela Rayner's heavily diluted workers' rights are not to come into effect for at least two years. After this, believe in any of them when you saw them, and not a moment before. And never, ever, ever entertain the notion that the foreign policy stuff, in practice usually but not always about the Middle East, had little or no connection to bread and butter politics at home.