Starmer shoots himself in the foot
JVL Introduction
We’re all indebted to Alex Nunns for turning a forensic spotlight on the claims of well-known “forensic” expert Keir Starmer.
Turns out Keir tells lies – massive porkies – without a hint of irony or regret.
These extracts from Keir’s leadership hustings campaign speeches shows not only that he is lying now, but quite how much he lied then…
For example: “that doesn’t mean ditching the radicalism of the last five years, it means building on it.”
But perhaps one statement of his from the campaign will turn out to be true: “We can take lumps out of each other… being factional, divisive… and if we go on like that we will lose the next election.”
Update on Keir’s honour & integrity. He’s now fibbing about previous fibs.
He told @AndrewMarr9 his broken pledges were overridden by a promise of a “laser-like” focus on winning which he made in his closing speeches at leadership hustings.
Turns out that’s not true either! >>
It’s daft to claim he was elected on the basis of one point he made at hustings events rather than on his campaign pledges, but anyway, he didn’t even make it!
I’ve checked his closing speeches from six of the 2020 hustings and in none of them does he say what he now claims.
Here’s what Keir said to Marr:
“About those pledges… we went through the hustings [in 2020]… everybody at every hustings had a closing speech and my closing speech was the same every single time which was: if we don’t win, all the things that all the candidates are saying…
Here’s his 3 min closing speech from the first hustings in Liverpool. He didn’t talk about a laser-like focus on winning above all else. Instead, he said: “Another future is possible but only if we fight for it.” 🤔
In Bristol a couple of weeks later he did say he was in politics to change lives and we don’t achieve that by losing an election, but then said “that doesn’t mean ditching the radicalism of the last five years, it means building on it.”
In Cardiff, as elsewhere, he mentioned losing the 2019 election as part of an appeal for unity going forward, not in order to say winning must be prioritised above candidates’ policy pledges, as he claimed to Marr. They’re completely different “pitches.”
Same story in Glasgow:
Even by the final hustings in Dudley, there was no laser-like focus on winning. The idea of a trade-off between power and policies is something he has come up with recently, to justify brazenly breaking his own pledges.
I like this bit:
“There is a choice. We can take lumps out of each other… being factional, divisive… and if we go on like that we will lose the next election. Or we can… recognise that with so many thousand members we’re unstoppable when we’re united.”
He made a choice.
There are no words…well, not that can be printed here.
Starmer’s entire leadership is built on lies, corruption, dirty funding, broken pledges and treachery..
Imagine what the Guardian would have said if Corbyn had done something similar. Front page news
How did such a devoted Tory, with such Tory ways, con his way into a leadership position as representative of the specifically named Labour Party, who helped him, was it the same birds we see flocking around him now?
The whole media “antisemitism” “crisis” was a scam.
To listen to Hodge and Smeeth berating one of their former “allies” for having a go at Labour – oh the irony.
I just feel sick.To think that an honourable man, and the voters were cheated by this unmentionable person.
This person has taken control of our Democratic Socialist labour movement by deception, He is a shameless liar and ultimately just as bad as Johnson and the Tories.
Us on the left will never tolerate occupation by any sort of authoritarian top down fascistic, so called, leader.
He must go.
And where is he when Julian Assange is held in Belmarsh prison for years awaiting deportation but not accused of any crime other than being a journalist exposing war-crimes?
Lies are more prevalent than they have ever been and come out of a political culture where soundbites replace policies and ‘celebrities’ replace politicians. The biggest criticism the Mainstream press has of Starmer is that he’s ‘boring’. That’s not what I object to – I object to his policies: pro-establishment, pro-US, pro-NATO, pro-Zionist. The current hysteria around Ukraine reminds me of the hysteria around the antisemitism attacks on Corbyn. Any nuanced analysis that attempts to look at what has gone on is dismissed as ‘Putinist’. It is hysteria. It will one day be recognised as hysteria just as more and more people acknowledge the branding of Jeremy Corbyn was hysteria.BUT it has a political purpose AND IT WORKS.
The new-variant Boris Johnson.
Well it seems as though the Forde Report is FINALLY
being published .. there are various leaks from it
which do not bode too well.
But hope against hope eh!
PS Andrew Marr – a lot better than has previously
appeared – but why did he not ask him questions
about the Jewish members being thrown out of
the Labour Party? A prime example – all of the
JVL Committee have been harassed and/or
threatened.
He’s a born proven liar not fit to be an MP
Forde Report (138 pages) now downloadable from Forde Inquiry web site.
A quick check on the media reports shows that almost all media highlight the findings that the antisemitism charges were weaponised for political reasons by one faction to attack the Labour leader. The media reports point to the wrongful actions of senior management people and the racist, sexist nature of many of their Whats App messages. However, they don’t link up what else was happening within Labour at the time (eg the “chicken coups”) nor which jobholders participated in the Whats App messaging. I wonder what the NEC, CLPs and union affiliates will make of it?
Given that his 10 Pledges would have undoubtedly been popular with a majority of the electorate, then why would he feel the need to ditch them as a consequence of a promise of a “laser-like” focus on winning?
Not only is it a falsehood and a deception, but it’s illogical and doesn’t make sense anyway.
And needless to say, if the corporate media believed for one billisecond that he intended to continue with JCs radical program, they would have made absolutely certain he didn’t win the leadership election.
What he was saying in effect is that such policies would be a winner with voters, but a big NoNo with the corporate/establishment media. And he was just duping the membership of course (apart from those who knew that he was, that is, on both the left and the right!).
I just did a search and Starmer’s ten pledges appear to have received very little coverage by the MSM at the time he made them. Mmm…… I wonder why not!
But I came across the following Express article from September 30th, 2021:
Keir Starmer’s 10 broken pledges since taking Labour leadership
Mr Starmer yesterday delivered his closing speech at the Labour Party conference……
Mr Starmer battled away heckles from those on the left of his party while delivering his conference speech in Brighton, where he sought to draw a line under Jeremy Corbyn’s era of influence.
A day earlier the opposition leader appeared to admit he was willing to break the 10 pledges he made during the Labour leadership election if it were to make the party electable.
He told BBC News: “I stand by the principles and the values behind the pledges I made to our members, but the most important pledge I made was that I would turn it into a party that would be fit for government, capable of winning a General Election, I’m not going to be deflected from that.”
Mr Starmer won large swathes of support from Labour’s left in the contest to replace Corbyn after he issued a list of 10 pledges which aimed to continue key elements of his predecessor’s policies.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1498591/keir-starmer-labour-party-conference-boris-johnson-10-pledges-jeremy-corbyn-spt
Please read the whole article.
The Independent covered the above as well:
Starmer: I’m ready to break pledges to make Labour electable
Keir Starmer has said he is willing to tear up the promises he made during the Labour leadership election if it is needed to make the party electable.
During the contest to replace Jeremy Corbyn, Sir Keir issued a list of 10 pledges to continue with key elements of his predecessor’s policy platform, including common ownership for industries like energy, rail and mail.
The move won him the support of large swathes of the Labour left, but many have since accused him of breaching his promises.
There was fury at Labour’s annual conference in Brighton this week when he said he would not nationalise the big six energy firms.
Sir Keir denied that he had broken his pledge by ruling out energy nationalisation.
“I didn’t make a commitment to nationalisation,” he said. “I never made a commitment to nationalisation, I made a commitment to common ownership.
“They are worlds apart, but the central thing is that those commitments I made, those pledges are made of values that I hold dear.
“The world has changed since they were made. But now the question is, how do we apply them in the reflective circumstance we might go into election.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/keir-starmer-labour-conference-pledges-b1928605.html
One poster summed up his mendacity perfectly in the Comments section:
The worse kind of liar is one who refuses to acknowledge they lied, even when they’re caught bang to rights.
In the Marr interview Starmer is asked if he will renationalise energy, water and rail and answers without his customary squirming … “No” he replies, directly, without hesitation or equivocation.
When he is subsequently shown his own pledge to bring those very industries back into public ownership he is actually smug in his mendacity as he unashamedly plays semantics with Marr … “I don’t see any mention of nationalisation there” he feigns with alarming ease.
It’s isn’t really about not knowing what he stands for anymore, it’s about realising he is the kind of guy that will use evasive and vague language in order to persuade people to ‘assume’ they know what he stands for … and then blame them for misunderstanding when he double crosses them.
Snake is what comes to mind every time I see this guy now.
PS Apologies for so many posts……
“The idea of a trade-off between power and policies is something he has come up with recently, to justify brazenly breaking his own pledges.”
He didn’t even come up with that one himself. This is the standard Labour right mantra, trotted out along side the usual ‘you can’t win from this left’ tropes, as their answer to anybody who offers genuinely progressive politics.
It connotes the obvious false dichotomy; principled politics that loses, or vacuous and often deeply conservative and elitist politics that ‘wins’. If true (it isn’t; it’s self-serving tripe to sooty the wreckers consciences) it begs the following questions:
1) Why bother contesting elections as Labour if all you’re going to offer is warmed up conservatism by red tie wearing ‘grammar school’ Tories cosplaying as ‘progressive’
2) Who ‘wins’ in that scenario? Because as far as I can see, the only winners are affluent upper middle class social climbers (whom much the PLP truely serve) and a slightly different set of rent seekers and corporate interests (than those served by the Tories).
Blair’s administration was awash with incompetents and corruption, all in service to privatisation and party donors. That’s Toryism, and it rendered moot the tiny number of vaguely progressive policies that snuck through. So it seems to me that the real aim is to use the ‘clothes’ of Labourism to sneek through this kind of brazen corporatism, precisely because THEY (the Labour Right) couldn’t win an election in their own merits (i.e. without the brand, and with their true intentions balls-out in the open for all to see). Not because it is impossible to win ‘from the left’.
Was sir Kier in any way associated to the vexatious litigant ruling on whistle blower and former CWU member* K W Simmons QB Divn 2003 High Court as sought by then Blair government and Horizon scandal perpetrators Post office 16 years before Panorama exposed it ? * reason for membership termination undetermined to date, S Yorks police informed 1999,
The man Disgusts Me.I hate the Tories.But I have got to the point,Where I would vote for them,Before I would give My voice to labour.
WE hear your pain but there is no circumstance on the planet where voting Tory is a good idea.
The comments so far have covered the majority of my thoughts on Starmer. I’ll just add this, he tells us we lost 4 elections on the trot. The first 2 were too close to the World economy crash, caused by the Banking Industry, with the MSM blaming Labour. The 3rd in 2017 loss was caused by the attacks on Corbyn and calling the Party divided due to the Coup and Owen Smith’s challenge for the Leadership against Corbyn, whose main campaigner was Starmer. He criticises the Party for not being united in the past, it’s laughable, I’m surprised he hasn’t been challenged on it.
He should have been challenged about this at every opportunity.m, especially at the hustings.
Methinks he has something of the night about him. Not original, but very pertinent!
I have one question. Why won’t the Labour Party allow Jeremy Corbyn ‘back in’?
Roger Irrelevance, the man is deluded insofar as the worst dishonesty is that of the self. When you believe your own lies, a starnger to integrity.