Starmer has no idea and no ideas
Published
by
Leah Levane
JVL Introduction
The book reviewed here (Get In by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund) is a behind the scenes look at Starmer s a leader. The absence of any creative ideas (or any ideas?) is clear and is part of why he so often looks “like a rabbit in the headlights” when faced with even moderately tough questioning. What he had was ruthlessness as we on the left of the Labour Party know too well. He dropped all the policy pledges he made in order to get elected as leader and then ruthlessly purged the left of the Party.
Instead of progressive ideas we have a rigid commitment to “growth”, boasting about raiding more workplaces and deporting more immigrants than the Tories managed to do and ongoing support for the genocide in Gaza. No one is convinced: his popularity ratings plummeted from low to miniscule. Of course he does know he was elected with a lower number of votes than Jeremy Corbyn got not only in 2017 but even in the “disastrous” election in 2019.
Still not good enough.
LL
This article was originally published by The Guardian on Sun 9 Feb 2025. Read the original here.
Starmer’s dislike of real politics is plain to see. It’s why his government has no direction
In power, Labour’s agenda has been stripped back to an empty obsession with growth and an imitation of Reform UK. The public isn’t falling for it
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“No idea!” Well, he is continuing the redistribution of wealth from the general public and public commons, that went on under Blair/Brown’s New Labour. There was less council housing building under New Labour’s 13yrs than one of Thatcher’s who’d inherited a traditional Labour housing budget.
Starmer & Reeves are not saying anything about Council Housing now, nor what constitutes affordability within their building program. Their housing proposals are basically a service to property speculators and the building industry- and for this local democracy is being destroyed. We’ve been here before with Tessa Jowel’s deception about Olympic regeneration in London. And estates built upon a similar program in Ireland had to be knocked down. Blairite neoliberals and the Tory A-team are playing ‘bad cop, bad cop’ with us.
As I regularly observe, Keir Starmer is worse than useless. He has gathered a cabinet of duds disloyal to the Labour Party and/or disconnected in every way.
Andrew Rawnsley reviewed the book in last Sunday’s “Warmonger’s Weekly” aka “The Observer”.
What made me really laugh was when he said that Starmer was ‘more or less’ loyal to Corbyn. A truly incredible statement about someone who openly sought to oust him twice and then worked to undermine him in other ways.
For Tony!
Andrew Rawnsley smeared Corbyn’s landslide leadership vote and membership recruitment as merely a ‘selectorate’. The leadership vote for Corbyn was significantly more than the Observers weekly sales. Yet Rawnsley never had the honesty or self-awareness of his own arguments to question why his unrepresentative voice should be raised above all those voters. Rawnsley never used that term – ‘selectorate’ – before or since, about neoliberals in Labour, who had far less societal and electorate credibility, than Corbyn and his team of traditionalists. Nor has he done much to challenge Starmer’s suppression of democracy.