Rights and Power

The Government is not going to fall while the King was on a State Visit to the United States. That would be unseemly. That said, Kemi Badenoch is no soft touch. If she had won tomorrow, then Keir Starmer would have been out. But when she loses, then Labour MPs will be even more tainted with Peter Mandelson than they already were, right in time for the last week of campaigning before the local, Holyrood and Senedd elections. With a working majority of 165, Starmer has had people ringing round backbenchers to save him. He may yet have to impose a whip, perhaps even a three-line whip. And it looks as if there will be Prime Minister’s Questions after all this week. Starmer cannot even arrange a prorogation. He cannot even send everyone home.

On Badenoch’s toughness, she had let go Robert Jenrick’s donations from overseas, because she had beaten him and pursuing the matter would have reflected badly on the party that she therefore led while he remained a member of it. But he has broken that unspoken arrangement and it is now a Police matter. Jenrick, meanwhile, was supposed to have led a fuel protest of lorries, vans and tractors down Whitehall this morning. It was attended by a Reform UK taxi, by a Reform bus, and by no other vehicle whatever. Jenrick, Richard Tice, Sarah Pochin and Laila Cunningham were joined almost exclusively by members of the media, and not even by very many of those.

Still, Lee Anderson may make use of parliamentary privilege tomorrow. Or Zarah Sultana may. At any rate, someone should. Mention the Ukrainian rent boys trial. Pose to Starmer the question that Labour used to deploy, quite deservedly, against Boris Johnson, “How many children do you have?” Mention the junior barrister when he was Director of Public Prosecutions, and since she is a Peer and a Minister, even attending Cabinet, mention Jenny Chapman by name. Probe Lord Alli. Ponder, in view of the fact that Roman Lavrynovych was still only 21 or 22, how old the Ukrainian rent boys were when Starmer lived at his old home or owned his old car, bearing in mind that the age of consent for prostitution was not 16, but 18. Again recalling Johnson, whose “forgotten” pin no one in MI5, MI6, GCHQ or Special Branch has ever been able crack, ask about Morgan McSweeney’s “stolen” phone that did not even have the backup that came with yours or mine.

And ask Starmer how long a generation was, since this evening he told the Parliamentary Labour Party that, “It’s important to see the bigger picture here. They want to stop this Labour Government. And we know why. Because we are the first government for generations to take key parts of the public realm back into public ownership. They don’t like that, but we’re doing it. The first government for generations to give rights and power to workers, to renters, to the less fortunate. The first government for generations prepared to stand against wealth interests, to raise money and put that into public services and fighting child poverty. They don’t like it, they said they’d reverse it. We have a mandate to do all of those things. And they are not going to stop us.”

It would be a stretch to say that it had been a generation since 2010, although I suppose if you thought that the voting age should be 16, a policy hilariously rumoured to have been dropped from the King’s Speech because it would favour the Greens. But “generations”, in the plural? The man who has done more to purge the Left than any other Leader in Labour history is now hoping to rally it against the consequences of his dependence on Peter Mandelson. Who’d be a satirist? But the Stuarts despised the Highlanders until they ended up having to fall back on them, to the utter ruin of both.

In any case, how many of Mandelson’s handpicked PLP would even agree with that repudiation of the Blair and Brown Governments, at least in the sense of thinking that not giving “rights and power to workers, to renters, to the less fortunate” had been a bad thing? Suggesting that those Governments had not invested in fighting child poverty makes Gordon Brown, David Blunkett and Alan Johnson look very silly after their interventions earlier today, when, furthermore, Unite’s talks with Reform forced Birmingham’s parody of a right-wing Labour council to settle the bin strike, long after that strike had cost far more than that settlement. Someone should ask about that at PMQs.