Touching the Void

The Labour government isn’t just inept. It literally repels competence.

‘Hang on a minute lads. I’ve got a great idea.’

The Italian Alps. Half clinging to the narrow mountain road. Half suspended over the precipitous drop, a precariously balanced coach teeters above the void.

At one end, a pallet of gold bullion gently shifts in the empty air. At the other, fingertipped to the mountain side, Charlie Croker, and his hapless band of crooks oscillate unsteadily between riches and oblivion.

Every move the thieves make towards their ill gotten gains threatens to tip the scales, and send them cascading over the edge. Even attempting to reverse ferret, and launch themselves off the coach risks them plunging to their doom.

Keir Starmer is clearly no Michael Caine, but his current plight, and the parlous state of his government can’t help but remind me of the cliffhanger ending of classic sixties movie, The Italian Job.

Only it’s not a coach full of freshly nicked gold that’s teetering over the yawning chasm, it’s Britain.

Last July’s election may not have left Starmer sitting on an actual pile of gold, but he had within his grasp a golden opportunity nonetheless.

Five years, a pliant party, and an unassailable parliamentary majority. The world, or at least Britain’s ever shrinking corner of it, was his oyster.

And yet, somehow, just like Croker’s crew, Starmer and his gormless gang of midwits have absolutely, bollocksed it up.

On every level this Labour government has been a disaster. By any metric it has brought nothing but catastrophe, botch, and blunder. By every measure it has wrought only collapse, fiasco, and failure.

This government isn’t just inept. It literally repels competence.

Wracking my brains it seems Starmer’s only concrete achievement so far, in the six long painful months he has been in office, has been to send in the SAS to slice up some second hand lilos, which one solitary Frenchman was allegedly selling to people smugglers.

‘Smashing the gangs’ it ain’t.

Also as an aside. Can we stop calling them ‘people smugglers’? At least actual smugglers have the decency to hide their contraband inside some stuffed toys, old tyres, or up a nana’s bum.

This lot openly turn up on a British beach with a boat full of illicit human cargo, and simply hand it over to the authorities. Who then obligingly furnish each illegal shipment with a pipping hot cup of coco, a free mobile phone, and a suite in a Travelodge

These ‘smugglers’ are less Pablo Escobar, and more Thomas Cook.

So yes. Starmer’s government has been little more than a litany of broken promises, useless policies, failed appointments, disastrous budget measures, tax gouging spite, two tier justice, pedophile cover ups, and public sector largesse.

But don’t worry lads. Sir Keir Starmer has got a plan. Just like Croker, he’s got a ‘great idea’.

In fact he has several. Each one more madcap, brainless, and unworkable than the next.

Let’s take a look at a few.

It feels weird to talk about ‘Labour’ and ‘intelligence’ in the same sentence, but as if this government hadn’t already done its level best, with Angela Rayner’s knock kneed employment policies, Rachel Reeves’ punitive job tax, and Ed Miliband’s lame brain energy schemes, to decimate the British job market, Starmer has come up with an innovative, forward looking, modern new way of rendering even more of the British workforce unemployed.

Replacing us all with AI.

Just a couple of weeks ago, The Telegraph informed us that

‘the Prime Minister [has launched] a new government strategy on Artificial Intelligence aimed at boosting growth by encouraging more AI companies to invest in the UK.

Good luck with that.

Hearing Starmer talk about AI is like listening to a well meaning grandma talk about ‘the transgenders.’

She hasn’t got a clue what they are, what they do, or where they come from. But she’s been told by the BBC that they’re a good thing. And her grandchildren’s school seems to be full of them these days. So on reflection, she’s all for them.

Perhaps I’m being unfair, a Luddite even. Maybe modern life under our recent Labour and Tory governments has simply become too complex, too convoluted, and too complicated for our petty, human minds to comprehend.

Surely only something as sophisticated, cutting edge, and advanced as a government funded AI super computer can hope to calculate the sheer scale of all the houses left unbuilt, all the NHS cancer patients killed by the lockdowns, all the burglaries the police have ignored, all the pensioners frozen to death, all the potholes yet unfilled, all the legal aid lavished on foreign rapists, all the ‘far-right’ Facebook posters locked up, and all the endless freebies that Labour’s grasping pig pen of a front bench has snuffled up from Lord Alli’s trough.

So maybe it’s worth a go.

Also, why would any AI company even consider investing in the UK? We have literally the highest energy costs in the developed world. It’s clear even to an economic dunce like me, that you can have a thriving, though energy guzzling, AI industry, or you can have an Ed Miliband. But you cannot have both.

But not to worry. Clever Keir is simply full of good ideas. He also plans to save squillins of pounds by launching ‘a war on waste and inefficiency’.

But unless his brilliant plan involves embracing his own AI manifesto, and replacing his entire government of dunderheaded human dunces with the superior intellectual power of a broken ZX Spectrum, it’s never going to work.

The idea of course is to cut spending and reduce profligacy.

Which will inevitably entail little more than scrabbling around down the back of the Treasury sofa looking for loose change, rather than identifying, and then cutting, any serious waste.

(Or ‘Anneliese Dodds. Minister of State for Women and Equalities’. As she prefers to be known )

He could, for example, scrap HS2, which remains, in the 21st century, an 18th century solution to a 20th century problem.

He could cancel most, if not all, overseas ‘Aid’. A corrupt, dishonest and grift-riddled racket which makes Britain’s Turkish Barber industry look like a paragon of honesty and propriety.

And he should consider abandoning that most egregious, pointless money pit of all, (unbelievably relegating the increasingly useless NHS to second place) the windmill powered suicide cult of Net Zero.

And I know this is daft, but he could also perhaps maybe, possibly, potentially, even consider, that we might stop paying unemployment benefits, medical costs, and housing expenses for literally anyone from anywhere in the world, who rocks up on these shores in a leaky dingy.

Cancelling such payments on the foolish, old fashioned and doubtless ‘racist’ grounds that we are the sovereign nation of Great Britain. And not simply the world’s doss house.

Anyway. It’s just an idea. I’m probably just being silly with that last one. Ignore me.

Let’s remember this government’s idea of ‘cutting waste’ is paying Mauritius £9 bn to take the priceless Chagos Islands off our hands.

While simultaneously changing the law so Gerry Adams can potentially trouser (always love the opportunity to use a ‘trouser’) millions of pounds of taxpayers cash in compensation for breaching his…… you guessed it ‘human rights’.

The ensuing row has already blown up out of all proportions.

Which seems oddly appropriate.

Nostalgic: Young people today would hardly believe that once upon a time in Great Britain, most alleged terrorists looked like this.

But again I’m probably being unfair, maybe when it comes to cost cutting, Starmer is deadly serious. After all his government has just announced

‘that “challenge panels” made up of external experts are being set up across every department to bring a “fresh perspective on whether every penny spent is necessary or not”.

So as ever, with the British government, the first step in any plan to cut down on excessive waste and bureaucracy is to create a whole new layer of excessive, wasteful, bureaucracy.

Of course one man’s ‘efficiency saving’ is another, blue haired activist’s, ‘austerity’.

So any genuine attempt to axe wasteful public spending, curtail overly generous entitlements, or simply cut back a tiny bit on pride flags, pedophile ally ship seminars, or polyamorous outreach centres, would inevitably be met by charges from Labour’s base that it is literally committing ‘genocide’.

So it’s never going to happen.

Meanwhile the government’s latest brainwave is to ask Britain’s bloated army of regulators, form fillers, licence issuers, innovation smotherers, permit pushers, and dream crushers for suggestions on how to create growth and boost the economy. Which is about the most asinine idea I have ever heard.

It’s like asking the BBC’s Huw Edwards for tips on child safeguarding.

Starmer is so desperate for cash that he even armed Rachel Reeves with a begging bowl, and sent her on a trip to China.

I doubt he was expecting much, but at least while she was away she had to stop wrecking the economy for five minutes. So that’s a win

Rach actually returned with £600m. Ignore the naysayers, that’s not to be sniffed at. After all, it’s almost enough to fund the NHS’s DEI requirements, for nearly twenty minutes.

Poor Rachel is clearly under a lot of stress at the moment. When she flew out to dodge parliamentary scrutiny about sky high public borrowing hold high level meetings with like-minded authoritarian communists, the bags under her eyes looked so enormous, I’m surprised Easy Jet didn’t charge her face for excess baggage.

But don’t count her out quite yet. Rachel is fighting back. And in a BBC (obvs) interview on our imploding economy, the Chancellor resorted to the favourite trick of all failing, flailing progressives. She played the victim.

Attempting to make the thousands of lost jobs, closed businesses, shuttered shops, empty restaurants, and despairing famers, all about her. Which I suppose, in a way, it is.

Reeves laughably claimed

‘that she was “happy” to be known as the Iron Chancellor – a nod to Margaret Thatcher’s Iron Lady nickname’.

What planet are you living on Rachel? You’re as deluded with this as you are with your imaginary ‘black hole’.

No one calls you the ‘Iron Chancellor’.

The entire nation knows you as ‘Rachel Thieves’.*

(*Judges will also accept ’Rachel from Accounts’.)

But maybe it’s not all doom and gloom.

The economy might be in free fall, with the nation descending into a penniless, crime riddled, authoritarian, dystopia, but at least Starmer has got his priorities right.

He’s promising us a war on touts, and cut price Oasis tickets!

Clearly Sir Keir has always thought of himself as Mini Me to Tony Blair. And though he might not have a fraction of Tony’s greasy charm, political acumen, or election winning prowess, who cares?

Under Sir Keir Starmer, Cool Britannia is Back!!!

I could go on but I’ll leave it there.

The truth is that like The Italian Job’s Charlie Croker, Keir Starmer can come up with as many plans, schemes, plots, brainwaves, and ‘great ideas’ as he likes.

But until he abandons his party’s anti wealth, anti business, anti worker, anti freedom, anti British, and anti human agenda, and finally rejects the pernicious, small minded, envy fuelled and spiteful ideology which birthed it, then it can only be a matter of time before his government, and our entire nation, topples over, into the abyss.

****************************

Thank you for reading Low Status Opinions. Of course the big news, the only news this week, is Donald Trump’s Inauguration. But like a fool I thought I’d write about something else.

If you enjoyed this piece please share it far and wide. It really helps this Substack grow. Thank you to everyone who already helps me in this way. It really is appreciated.

Also, please subscribe if you haven’t already. It’s free unless you don’t want it to be, and even then it’s only something like 75p a week. Actually that really is a bargain. Please subscribe before I realise, and put my prices up!

There’s also a Buy Me A Coffee option here 👇. Again, thanks so much to all of you who regularly contribute, and leave such supportive messages. You genuinely give me a real boost.

That’s it until next time, except to say, best of luck, and God Bless America, to all my readers in the States.

ATB

LSO