What next for Starmer after his election thrashing wake up call?
After a completely humiliating thrashing at the local elections, Starmer has woken up.
This year he's shown himself to be ruthless. Not a ruthless focused leader - he's more of a toothless sheep. He's completely ruthless at throwing people under the bus. He's completely ruthless at saving his own arse and blaming others for his failings.
The electorate have clearly sent a message they are not happy with Labour or Starmer.
The sheer scale at which traditional Labour heartlands have swung over to the apparently far right Reform party is staggering.
Whatever the Left medicine is that Starmer has been prescribing is not going down well with the Left voters.
So has Starmer learnt anything from this? Well not really. He's calling the huge defection and voting for popularist parties as a protest and popularist noise. The irony is not missed on me. When he "wins a landslide - it's a clear mandate" and is not popularist but when it's anyone wins it is popularist.
Starmer clearly doesn't plan to resign as a result of this defeat. Any normal human would feel humiliated by this outcome but not StarmerBot. He has concluded that the electorate are calling for Change and they want him to go further and faster.
I'm still really unclear what this "Mandate for Change" is that he's delivering and I suspect most of the Labour party haven't got a clue either. Pretty shocking as they have been in power for nearly 2 years.
The blueprint for change appears to be:
1/ Breakfast clubs for schools
2/ Drive up energy prices so all the traditional Labour heavy industries no longer exist
3/ Give more money to benefit claimants
4/ Discourage people from striving or working hard
5/ Force all the rich taxpayers to move to Italy or Dubai
6/ Allow more migrants in so they can become the future Labour voters (correction Green voters)
7/ Give inflation busting pay rises to Junior Doctors without addressing the declining NHS performance.
So I find it deeply worrying that he wants to go Further and Faster with this "Mandate for Change".
They key conclusion he seems to have gleaned from a weekend at Checkers - soul searching and pouring over the entrails of the defeat - is that the electorate want closer ties with Europe.
Really?
Reform - the pro Brexit party - which vast swathes of Labour voters have just voted for means they are crying out for closer ties with Europe? I just can't see that.
Delusional.
I await the Kings speech to hear what else Starmer thinks but the key things he needs to do:
1/ Bring down energy prices - scrap ALL green (or should that be greed) subsidies which are hidden in energy bills.
2/ Remove VAT from energy bills - even if only as a temporary measure for say 2 years
3/ Start extracting North Sea oil and gas - Iran is going to go on longer than expected and the energy shortage is heading our way.
4/ Stop signing energy contracts for wind power with massively stupidly high supply prices
5/ Start building nuclear on a serious scale. Scrap all the bureaucracy. Why does a standard Chinese (or Korean) nuclear reactor design cost 10x more to build here and take 20 years when it's built in 4 years in China or Korea? If Starmer got his act together we could have a new nuclear reactor on line by the end of this fixed term parliament. That would be a real note worthy legacy vastly superior to Breakfast Clubs.
6/ Give BP and Shell some relief - if they supply fuel to the UK at below market rates then give them tax relief against the huge windfall taxes which are being imposed on them.
7/ Stop interfering. Sending messages to banks that their profits are going to be subject to windfall taxes does not help. It's nearly 20 years since the financial crisis and it's taken them that long to recover. Rather than imposing windfall taxes - force them to pay back the liquidity loans or increase the interest rate they need to pay on the liquidity loans - they are no longer needed if they are making bumper profits. QE is still costing the tax payer £125 BILLION per year. Telling Landlords that they are going to be unable to increase rents for 1 year due to cost of living crisis is crazy. Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck : "next to bombing, rent controls are the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities".
8/ Stop giving inflation busting pay rises to benefit claimants. If someone hasn't worked or paid tax then they are capped at claiming benefits for some period say 6 months. If they have worked then benefits are capped at 2 years unless there are good reasons eg caring for sick etc. This brings it in line with the very socialist French system. Here it's perfectly possible to be a benefit claimant as a lifesyle choice - not so in France.
Starmer is right the electorate are calling for Change - just not his delusional Change.
==============================================================
Well lacklustre Starmer has now delivered his dam busting, rousing speech and his key pledges are:
1/ Stronger ties with the European Union. Hang on everyone voted for the pro Brexit party.
2/ Nationalising British Steel. So the tax payers will pay for uneconomic steel production with our extortionately high energy prices....
3/ A boost for Britain's youth. Well the gist of this is to ship our young over to the EU with the stronger EU ties - there's no future here so let them leave. He's pretty much made all young people unemployable in the UK with the new minimum wage rates and the Employment Rights Act "jobs tax".
It's clear his great reset speech - a make-or-break moment - was NOT aimed at the disgruntled electorate. It lacked passion. It lacked substance. It was 100% Starmer - DULL. His clapping stooges didnt know when to clap and he ended up telling them to shut-up in true Starmer fashion. After a long weekend of reflection I'm sure he simply hasn't heard what the plebs have said - he's tone deaf and he thinks he knows better than the wisdom of the crowd. He is morally superior to those pesky voters.
His speech was very focused on internal Labour matters and glossed over the message from voters. "We lost some good councillors" (ie we also lost a lot of terrible councillors too). His speech was clearly aimed at the internal Labour party - a plea to stop the chaos. The same chaos which he was gleefully gloating-at when it was Tory chaos. It wasn't a plea to the electorate to give him a second chance. It wasn't a plea that Labour could improve the lives of the plebs. It was rather resignation that the current situation will persist where he and Labour will make most people's lives worse for the next 3 years. Sadly it wasn't the type of resignation the majority of the electorate were hoping for.
This is hardly enough to turn around Britain's fortunes.....
Starmer will not resign. His ruthless self preservation and moral superiority will keep him in post and refuse to be ousted by the Labour MP plebs. I suspect the key thing which kill him off is not his internal Brutus MPs but external markets. Britain's finances have been destroyed by maths genius Rachel. We are now in the position where the UK is borrowing money to simply service the interest payments on the massive debt pile. It won't be long before the bond markets start betting against Starmer and Rachel and a trip to the IMF will be Labour's demise. Even before a leadership challenge has even been made the 30-year bond yield hit a new 28-year high of 5.81% today. Ten-year bond yields were up almost 10 basis points to 5.13% today. Long-term borrowing costs are now at the highest level since the late 1990s. Wreckless Tory and Liebour governments have run up £2.7 TRILLION in debt - that's £156 BILLION per year in interest payments - £13 BILLION per month which is the additional borrowing Rachel is taking out each month. Just today's rises are costing us an extra £7M+ in interest payments per day. Our Greece moment is not too far away.
Starmer Chaos - that's the difference a Labour government makes.
So to finish let's look back to Starmer's speech he delivered on the 4th July 2024
"When the gap between the sacrifices made by people and the service they receive from politicians grows this big, it leads to a weariness in the heart of a nation, a draining away of the hope, the spirit, the belief in a better future" [I would add that anger is simmering]
"We’ve changed the Labour Party, returned it to service – and that is how we will govern, country first party second".
Comments
Post a Comment