Keir Starmer’s “values” are apparent from the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act and from the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act. Faced with Baroness Casey and Dame Rachel de Souza, Starmer has instead favourably quoted a 1975 speech by Margaret Thatcher, in which she vilified the Shrewsbury 24 and the Clay Cross Councillors, setting the scene for the policing of the Miners’ Strike, for the clubbing of pregnant women at the Battle of the Beanfield, for Hillsborough, and so on. It is scandalously downplaying the role of spycops against trade unions, and the role of the Government in blacklisting trade unionists, but the Undercover Policing Inquiry is making it clear that the likes of Starmer are unfit for public life.
Labour has reverted to type as the party for people who thought that the only problem with the wars, with the austerity programme, and with the authoritarian measures necessary to enforce them, was that they did not go far enough. Such people are not in the Conservative Party, because they dislike country house Tories and the private sector middle class. Labour is their device for harnessing the power of the State to lord it over everyone else.
But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.
To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.
The jig is up for Corbyn. Starmer is to officially block him standing for Labour, it's been announced.
ReplyDeleteParliament waves goodbye to the Far Left.
Announced again. How very Starmer. Corbyn will easily hold the seat, of course.
DeleteI thought you regarded the Government as "Far Left"?
Corbyn won’t stand at all.
ReplyDeleteYes in the sense the Blairites are more leftwing on many issues than Corbyn, but Corbyn’s at least honest about his views. Whereas, (just as Blair tried to hide his CND past and much of his Cabinet tried to hide its eurocommunist past), his opponents pretend to be ”centrists” when they’re nothing of the sort. I prefer Corbyn’s sort of leftist and it gives me no pleasure to see him go.
Oh, I reckon he'll stand. He would certainly be the First Past the Post. Look out for Labour guff about physical fear being the reason why they couldn't find a candidate against him. No, dears, you just didn't fancy coming fourth or below in an English seat.
DeleteBlair never hid his past. It was reported endlessly while he was Leader of the Opposition, and later. It was just that nobody cared. Eurocommunism was really what most middle-aged, middle-class people thought in the 1990s and 2000s, as Pabloism is today.
He is too decent to stand against his own party, and he'd probably lose.
ReplyDeleteNew Labour Ministers went to great lengths to conceal their radical leftwing pasts and were only outed by newspapers and ex friends or colleagues. George Galloway 'outed' Alastair Darling as a (former?) active sympathiser of the International Marxist Group in Edinburgh in the 1970s (of which Bob Ainsworth was also a former 'candidate member'). Stephen Byers was outed by the Guardian in January 1999 as a one-time supporter of the Trotskyist Militant tendency.
Blair himself only recently admitted long after leaving office that he'd been a Trotskyist at Oxford. We know Peter Mandelson was definitely a Young Communist but he's never revealed whether he was a member of the adult Communist party, and we may never find out.
They didn't want people to know about the extent of the Far Left's links with New Labour, but it would undermine their claim to be 'centrists.'
Oh, he would win. But you are right that he has been far too sentimental about the Labour Party.
DeleteThe rest was never any kind of secret. The right-wing papers screamed it all for years. The electorate just shrugged its shoulders at academically highfalutin formulations of what Middle England thought anyway. From opposite sides of the old Tankie-Trot split, that was what Eurocommunism and Pabloism were, and are.
Mandelson used to sell the Morning Star newspaper outside tube stations as a teenager. I remember watching a tv documentary on him the presenter asked two young girls who were selling the same newspaper outside a tube station about who used to do the same 20 years earlier. The look on their faces when he told them
ReplyDeleteThe Morning Star is not distributed like that. It is sent out to subscribers and sold in shops. It is part of the Parliamentary Lobby, briefed twice daily by the Prime Minister's Press Secretary. MPs write for it. But Mandelson did used to sell whatever the YCL was putting out at the time. What of it? Everyone has always known that.
DeleteWhat of it? Well, put it this way, if any similarly senior Tories were ever outed as former members or sympathisers of Far Right equivalents of the IMG or Young Communists, there’d be unending uproar. The double standard is disgusting.
ReplyDeleteIt is not a double standard. You just do not understand how it works. I wonder if you have ever been to Britain?
DeleteMick McGahey used to be on Any Questions? in the Thatcher years. The Morning Star is in the Lobby. And so on. It has never worked like that. It just hasn't.
That said, especially of the 1980s student generation, it is perfectly normal for very senior Conservative politicians to have the most deeply dodgy Far Right connections.
https://youtu.be/ZxaQFpkBoNo
ReplyDeleteWell, yes, but it's not news. They could have just asked him.
DeleteTo have Cabinet Ministers who were Communist sympathizers at the time of the Cold War is appalling and deeply shocking.
ReplyDeleteI can't think of any former Tory Minister in the Thatcher years who had any remotely equivalent connections to the Far Right. Nobody in their right mind has ever lost a moment's sleep worrying that the Tory Party has suddenly become too Right wing. The very thought is laughable. They are now effectively the Blairites at prayer.
"To have Cabinet Ministers who were Communist sympathizers at the time of the Cold War is appalling and deeply shocking."
DeleteTo whom? The Tory Governments of the period were far more conciliatory towards the Soviet Union than the rarer right-wing Labour ones were, anyway. And that is before mentioning dealings with the unions at home.
"I can't think of any former Tory Minister in the Thatcher years who had any remotely equivalent connections to the Far Right."
Then you don't know what you're talking about.
Prayer?