Labour Pains

There is nothing attractive about Keir Starmer’s Labour Party

Regular readers will know that when I’m not ranting incoherently into the abyss about topics I know nothing about making measured observations about important subjects in a thoughtful manner, I like spending some of my time playing video games.

Lately I have been playing Spider-Man 2. The third (I know) of the current crop of Spider-Man games on the Sony Playstation.

Players spend the game spinning webs any size, catching crooks just like flies, and playing as both original Spider-man, Peter Parker, and his new diverse replacement Miles Morales.

To be honest I prefer Miles. He’s a mixed race teenager from modern Harlem, and his youthful insecurities and awkwardness are more in keeping with the original 1960s Spider-man of my youth, than the grown up, dull and staid tech bro who Peter Parker has become as the more recent version of the character.

The game is a bit disappointing to be honest. I won’t go into it here, but basically bigger is not always better.

It doesn’t help that just like all big budget mainstream modern entertainment, Spider-man 2 is literally stuffed with non stop social commentary and wokeism.

For instance the game developers obviously worried that they’d get accused of being a bit sexist if they only let you play as a Spider-you know-man, so they have included a couple of sections where you are forced to take on the role of Peter’s girlfriend. Boring and dull. And one where you have to play as Miles’ deaf girlfriend. Boring, quiet, and dull.

While they’ve turned fan favourite, loudmouth newspaper editor J Jonah Jameson into an obvious analogue of real world villain Donald J Trump. Subtle it ain’t.

And that’s not the worst of it. There are whole side missions where Spider-man swaps crime fighting for his important, and up to now, under appreciated work, as an eco-activist.

During one such plant based non action sequence he expresses his opinion that all basic human needs should be free.

Not sure about that one Spidey. I defer to you when it comes to kicking Doctor Octopus in the tentacles, but economics might not be your thing.

Making basic human necessities free may sound good in principle, but it’s how you end up with rationing, shortages and queues. Health care is a basic human necessity. And it’s ‘free’ in the UK to the extent that it is provided by the state.

Its ‘freeness’ is one of the main reasons we have eight million people on the NHS waiting list.

Maybe young Miles would be interested in learning that there actually used to be an entire society where pretty much every human need was fulfilled for ‘free’.  It was called the Soviet Union. And it was so successful they had to shoot people to stop them leaving for countries where you had to pay for stuff.

It might seem weird to preach Marxist ideology in a £60 video game from Sony, a $112bn multimedia company.

But then again, it’s also weird to have gender ideology ladled into kids show Dr Who. It’s weird to see British police kneeling in supplication before BLM protesters. And it’s weird when  £375,000 a week footballers start dictating government policy on Free School Meals.

But expect a lot more weirdness to come your way soon.

Because Keir Starmer’s unloved Labour Party is about to coast to power on a tsunami of voter apathy.

It’s been a busy week for Man of the People Sir Keir. He’s taken a well earned break from lying to Labour voters about how left wing he is, and started lying to Conservative voters about how right wing he is instead.

Specifically he’s been pretending to Daily Telegraph readers that he is not a fan of high taxation, but is a big fan, of Mrs Thatcher.

Which is a bit like Greta Thunberg, announcing she hates free trips on £5m eco yachts, and loves nothing more than the idea of a Jewish patio heater.

But Starmer, who increasingly resembles a giant baked potato which has grown a pair of tiny shark eyes, has clearly been taking lessons from Peter ‘Don’t Scare The Horses’ Mandelson’,

So the official line from Labour is that they have ‘no plans’ to put up  taxes.

Just as they have ‘no plans’ to cancel Brexit. Or throw you in prison if you ‘misgender’ real life Disney Princess Eddie Izzard. So, yeah, that’s pretty convincing.

It doesn’t matter what Starmer says. Tax rises are inevitable. For a start, they are in Labour’s nature.

It is the party of the public employee, the civil servant, the NGO, the state subsidy and the government handout.

So as the state grows, so the power and influence of its politicians, members, and supporters, also increases.

We’ve seen how this works with the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales.(The SNP is essentially Labour gone wild after a night on the Thunderbird ) Making people less dependent on themselves and more dependent on the benign largesse of Labour/SNP politicians is the name of the game.

Plus the government has run out of money.

Not surprising really after it threw away £410 bn on pointless lockdowns during the Covid 19 dempanic (TM)

Just £410bn for a crippled broken economy, a generation of kids who can’t read, and a civil service that won’t get out of its pyjamas? Bargain.

Now the bond markets are no longer willing to keep lending, (Thanks Liz!) so when Keir Starmer comes under inevitable pressure from the left of his party to turn on the spending taps there will only one place to get the cash. You.

The selfish people who have had the audacity to own a house for the last 20 years. The grasping middle classes with the temerity to have saved for their own retirement. The predator small business owners who spent years risking everything to build a profitable company.

Buckle up Greedy Guts. Starmer is coming for you.

And why not? £75,000 a year NHS DEI officers don’t pay for they-selves you know.

Oh sure he’ll dress up this cash grab as ‘Windfall Tax’ or one off ‘NHS Uplift’, an ‘Online Safety Premium’ (Just a hunch, but I bet someone in this new government has a plan to both censor your internet, and make you pay for the privilege) or maybe in the case of the inevitable Mansion (one bed flat in Hackney) Taxes, as an ‘Unearned Wealth Levy’.

But the result will be the same.

Less money for you. More money for the inefficient bureaucracies of the state.

Will voters really be convinced by Starmer’s Damascene conversion to low tax fan boy? Unlikely.

But look. He’s not the Tories. And come next year’s election, that will probably be enough.

I’ve heard Sir Keir repeatedly described as ‘forensic’. Which sounds like the sort of thing you say when you’ve been asked to come up with a compliment about someone. But can’t really think of one.

Like telling a proud new mum that her bouncing baby looks ‘interesting.’

Besides, ‘forensic’, what good is that? Sir Keir will soon be ruining running the country.

Not inspecting crime scenes on CSI Miami.

The Labour Party has been led by a wide range of duds over the years. (Shout out to Ed, Jezza, Gordo.) But they all have one thing in common. And that’s that they all have an awful lot in common.

Unlike the sexist, xenophobic Tories, the Labour Party has always balked at giving a woman or black person the top job.

Consider the line up of past Labour leaders. You’d find more diversity in a bag of rice.

But admittedly Labour does have a bit more variety further down the pecking order, in the ranks of the also rans, politicians who even the Labour Party consider too rubbish to put in charge.

People like professional Northerner, Deputy Leader Angela Rayner. Who, I was amazed to discover, while researching this article, is an actual real person. And not as I had assumed, a faintly insulting working class caricature as performed by Catherine Tate.

(I’m joking of course. I do not research these articles.)

Or how about David Lammy? Who in 1997 became the first black Briton to study at Harvard. Which sounds impressive. Until you discover that the first black American student, Thomas Jinings, arrived there in 1842. So yeah, well done David.

Quite the achievement.

I guess.

Shadow Foreign Secretary David is a change maker, he’s so passionate about rewriting Britain’s shameful colonial history that during an appearance on Mastermind he claimed that Henry VIII was followed on the British throne by Henry VII.

And then there’s adorably pinch faced joy vacuum Yvette Cooper, who as Shadow Home Secretary has been taking time out from her eternal audition for the role of Matilda’s Miss Trunchbull, to announce that Labour wants to reduce immigration from it’s current 672,000 a year, to a barely noticeable 200,000.

It might seem a Herculean task, but delightful, and forever pearl clutching sourpuss Yvette Cooper has already come up with her own brilliant scheme to help fix the migration crisis.

Since the politicians can’t sort it out, she suggests handing the problem over to……a panel of experts.

It might seem at first blush to be a laughable and ridiculous idea. But look a little closer and you will see that it is in fact a silly and brain dead proposal. So very different.

But hang on a minute. Let’s not dismiss this nonsense out of hand.

After all, it can often be tricky, in a democracy like ours, to ascertain exactly what the public really want.

Are the people of Britain demanding more immigration? Or less immigration? There are so many mixed messages. It’s often hard to tell.

So why not leave it up to a panel of Yvette Cooper’s left wing stooges impartial, fair minded experts, to decide what we should do?

The reality is that politicians like Coops (Can I call you Coops? No? Right, it’s Mx Cooper. OK Got it. Sorry.) have never seen a problem that they believe cannot be solved by simply stuffing a committee full of cronies, pretending it is independent, and forcing through a foregone conclusion.

Which is why we don’t need to spend £500m to find out what the Covid Inquiry will conclude when it finally draws to a close in, if we’re lucky, 2034, just as Elon Musk is touching down on Mars.

We should have locked down harder, faster and sooner. SAGE was brilliant. Matt Hancock is a vainglorious idiot. And Boris Johnson killed your dad.

Labour have an elastic relationship with democracy. Sure it started out as the authentic voice of the working classes. But has lately gorged itself on so much public money and bureaucratic power that it has devolved into a party of technocrats.

Which I guess is how it has ended up with a front bench populated by the sort of talent free second raters, who, if they worked in your office, you’d seriously think twice about sending to Marks and Spencer’s, to fetch the card and cake, on a colleague’s birthday.

But let’s not be negative.

Maybe the quality will improve now that everything is being overseen by Sir Keir’s Chief of Staff Sue Gray. Who up until five minutes ago was the neutral and unbiased civil servant overseeing the inquiry into Partygate, which effectively (and with more than a little help from the man himself) brought down Tory PM Boris Johnson. So yeah. Move along please. Nothing to see here.

Incidentally Sue Gray’s son Liam is about to become a Labour MP. So, well done Liam!

After a tough fight he ‘won the selection battle for Beckenham and Penge’.

Yes it was a battle. Much in the same way that King Kong versus my Nan, is a title fight.

But credit where it’s due. It’s one hell of an achievement. That’s the Labour party’s passion for social mobility right there.

It’s a tale which should inspire even our lowliest citizen.

The humble son of one of the country’s very top civil servants, Liam worked his little butt off to become, against the odds, the son of a Labour leader’s Chief of Staff, and then, through an entirely fair and honest selection process, which isn’t so bent that after being exposed for potential (not proven) corruption by journalist Michael Crick, is having to be re run in neighbouring East Croydon, he was chosen, to the consternation of other, better qualified candidates, to stand as a Labour MP.

Chapeau young Liam! It really shows you what you can achieve.

When you put your mum to it.

If Labour is prepared to play so fast and loose with the votes of its own members. What do you think they’d prepared to do to yours?

Here’s a clue. Starmer is already discussing the idea of extending the franchise to 16 year olds and EU citizens. Ostensibly in the cause of ‘strengthening democracy’. But obviously it’s simply because those groups are far more likely to vote Labour.

In fact such a move would ‘strengthen’ democracy much in the same way that Matt Hancock snogging his parliamentary aide ‘strengthened’ his marriage.

Gerrymandering your constituencies is one thing. But it takes a special type of cynicism, and contempt for the electorate, to gerrymander your actual voters.

The truth is, that just like the Tories. The Labour Party has turned its back on its traditional base.

Which it generally demonises as low information gammons, one micro aggression away from a race riot. (And not even the good BLM sort either. The bad Far-Right Irish sort.)

Or else they are seen as hapless victims of oppression, dunderheaded husks, lacking in agency, easily deceived, tricked and exploited by a never ending line up of predators.

Founded to serve the interests of the working class, the Labour Party of old genuinely helped lift whole generations of workers out of poverty. Empowered them, championed their rights, and fought for their dignity.

As part of the post war consensus it helped my parents go from living in inner city tenements, to members of the aspirational middle classes, buying their own home in the suburbs.

But the modern Labour Party isn’t the party of Attlee. Baldwin. Wilson. Foot. Or Benn. It’s not even the Labour Party of Smith or Kinnock. This is the Labour Party of the sour faced HR executive. The angry, entitled gender studies graduate. The Malthusian eco scold. The anti-Jewish ‘peace campaigner’. The hectoring, lunch inspecting, busybody.

The party of a Labour supporting elite which blames every single inequity, not on an individual’s choices, their upbringing, or their talents, but exclusively on an unfair, stacked and biased system. While never acknowledging that as the stewards of every major British institution, in charge of every charity, NGO, steering group, committee, court room, University, trades union, and public body, they effectively are the system.

It is the Empire playing at being the Rebel Alliance. Darth Vader cosplaying Luke Skywallker.

If it wins by a landslide as some are predicting, the Labour Party will be handed the parliamentary equivalent of unlimited power.

It will bestow riches on its friends (which it will take from you) and be brutal, and unforgiving with its enemies (you again I’m afraid).

Yes, it’s a pretty bleak vision. So let’s end on an upbeat note.

There is one genuine massive ray of light in all this.

The welcome collapse of the hapless, useless Tories, and the less welcome ascendancy of this extremist stuffed new Labour Party means there must be a hole in our politics for a genuinely new party.

I’m not talking about a limited appeal, Tory Grumble Party like Reform, (admittedly, there’s a lot to grumble about), but a fresh new optimistic pro human. Pro science. Pro free speech. Pro solution. Pro colour blind. Pro rational. Pro future. Pro meritocratic. Pro housing. Pro tolerance. Pro young people party.

Maybe we should start building one.

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LSO