PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by (Jane Austen) Keir Starmer, aged 10
The Prime Minister’s claim to love this country while he presides over a party and government that muzzles opponents and random eccentrics rings hollow. As he pays to give away historic and useful overseas military bases while he claims that investment in defence is “vital for our national security: hollow. Claiming that “a Labour Party that cannot control spending is a Labour Party that cannot govern” while he taxes those who pay to opt out of state education and probably, state medical provision: hollow. While the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service fails to provide security to its citizens, or timely justice for those that suffer all sorts of indignities, those flags need to be waving more vigorously to the left.
Anyone for a rousing chorus of Land of Hope and Glory?
Re-positioning Lady Nugee’s disdain for the flag-raisers in to a party supposedly based on a feeling of national pride does not alter the patronising contempt the Labour party has for “ordinary” citizens.
Improving the leader’s wooden delivery by the injection of some rehearsed emotionalism does not improve his party’s ability to deliver improvements in strategy, administration or implementation.
Hollow words wrapped in an all-too-obviously manufactured sentimentalism. Let’s try to tug your heart-strings while we work out how to pick your pocket.
Similarly, decrying Reform UK’s advocacy for the abolition of Indefinite Leave to Remain as racist and repeating false accusations that beer-swilling, cigar-chomping Nige was a teenage Hitler Youth supporter does nothing to defend your own party’s failure to reduce immigration levels.
Accusing others who make policy suggestions of inherent racism will do nothing to mask the total lack of actual governmental policy action. “It woz all those wicked Tories fault, innit?”
Sadly, after just one year in “power”, the Labour Government’s cupboard seems to be bare. Having spent a year excusing lack of progress on the terrible inheritance received from those wicked Tories, we now seem to be embarking on a year of enraged denouncement of Reform and Farage prescriptions for changes in policy. Any changes really. Meanwhile, having started out from a low competence base, the “Iron” Chancellor must continue her search for bubbles of wealth or profit to tax to prop up the over-spending she refuses to rein in.
For all Labour’s new enthusiasm for flag-raising (was there anything ever so unconvincing?) it’s going to be a very long four years.
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