Streeting Ahead?

Wes Streeting has let it be known that, while he would not challenge Keir Starmer, he would stand if Starmer were pushed out. Starmer would remain Labour Leader until a successor had been elected, but he would cease to be Prime Minister instantly, with the King undoubtedly appointing whoever the Cabinet wanted. Angela Rayner is not in the Cabinet. Catherine West, previously best known for calling Sir Geoffrey Cox “pompous” because she had never heard oratory before, is not in the Cabinet. Andy Burnham is not even in Parliament. But Streeting is a Secretary of State, and Labour kept control of Redbridge Council, shoring up both his position and that of the neighbouring slumlord.

Candidates for Leader of the Labour Party now need to be nominated by 20 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party, something that only Starmer managed last time, and he was not the Prime Minister then. The prospect of two candidates’ meeting that threshold would be effectively nil even if one of them were not already the most powerful man in the country, never mind if he were. Heaven help us, but only Ed Miliband now stands between England and having no NHS except to make all of our data available to ICE and the IDF via Palantir thanks to a Prime Minister who had learned an awful lot under Peter Mandelson.

The Epstein Class is closing ranks. On Enfield Council, the Greens, for whose party Noam Chomsky would vote, have agreed to support a Conservative minority administration. At Birmingham’s Glebe Farm and Tile Cross, two recounts have confirmed that Council Leader John Cotton and another Labour councillor had been unseated, although by one member of Reform UK, yet also by one of the Workers Party. So tomorrow, there is to be a third recount, the only one in the entire country. Dare they declare the victories, either of two members of Mandelson’s party, or of one of those, presumably Cotton, and one member of the party for which Peter Thiel would vote? If Birmingham is a Sharia-governed ghetto where English is no longer spoken, then why has it just elected certainly 22 and probably 23 Reform councillors, the largest bloc on the council? Such are the credible coalitions or otherwise that power on Europe’s most populous local authority hangs in the balance, and with it the existence of the right-wing Labour machine, which is the only Labour Party that still exists.

The Labour Right used to be unique in that, by almost or almost always controlling the great majority of the most populous municipalities in England and Wales, plus the Senedd, it had an independent fiscal base, and that was putting matters politely. It controlled Council Tax, business rates, pension schemes looking to invest, sweeteners and backhanders from property developers and others, the allocation of jobs with the council, the allocation of better council housing, and the allocation of any council housing. But under Starmer, its citadels have fallen as if under nuclear attack. Labour Party membership is not cheap. If not to secure access to those goodies, then why bother?