EITHER Keir Starmer’s the worst Prime Minister ever to have stood up in the Commons or he’s playing a game of 3D chess so fiendishly calculating that we’re going to wake up one morning and he’ll be President of the Galactic Federation.
The Labour leader didn’t need freebie designer glasses to see that he was going to get a fearful kicking in the Tory press from the word go. That hostility came with the job and that realisation, combined with the fading influence of printed media in the digital age, meant that oafish insults in the Sun and more elegantly worded attacks in the Telegraph were entirely survivable.
But every single blow to his credibility and reputation has either been thanks to his own ineptitude or has been carefully planned and calculated. Recanting on his pledge to the WASPI women to reimburse their stolen pension money is the latest disastrous decision made not in the panicked heat of crisis, but in the air-conditioned cool of the strategy room. But equally damaging – and deeply more embarrassing – has been his complete failure to take even the most basic Caesar’s wife self-preservation steps in relation to personal behaviour.
Starmer’s biggest and most damaging policy decisions have impacted most negatively on the very people that the Labour Party is supposed to look out for – labouring people without much money. His first big announcement when he took the keys to No.10 was to u-turn on his promise to scrap the two-child benefits cap. The betrayal was deep and it was personal – think Jurgen Klopp standing in the Stretford End with a Red Devils scarf at the next Man Utd-Liverpool match; Jim Allister in the front row at Féile Rebel Night; Fine Gael suggesting a commemoration event for the Black and Tans (no, wait – scrub that last one).
Then he reneged on his promise to scrap the money-spinning charity status of 40k a year private schools, which led to rejoicing on the Tory benches and exclamations of ‘Huh?’ in the staff rooms of comprehensives from Bristol to Birmingham. He shafted students present and future by ditching his promise to ditch tuition fees; he resiled from his promise to increase the tax burden of GB’s richest five per cent; his passion for nationalising key public services has cooled so much it needs scraped off the hob; he’s not only no longer defending freedom of movement like he said he would – he’s in the process of restricting it further; and the House of Lords is going nowhere after he nixed that plan as well.
So unceasing has been the drubbing he received – both from the Tory media and from traditional Labour supporters – that Starmer recently announced a ‘reset’ of his programme for government which doesn’t actually reverse or even address any of the things that made the reset necessary in the first place.
Which brings us to the Labour Party snout-in-the-trough revelations, which can’t be said to be part of some large, unseen plan. Free glasses, free suits, free tickets, free accommodation. You name it – Starmer and his most senior people have been filling their bespoke boots with it. And while the shameless greed is instructive in that it provides us with an insight into the motivation of Labour’s most prominent figures, it also suggests that the list of other problems that I’ve just provided aren’t in fact part of some grandiose, elaborate plan which is going to come together soon, requiring us all to admit we got Starmer terribly wrong. The greed suggests that the simple truth is that Keir simply hasn’t got a clue.
If he failed to understand the most screamingly obvious, fundamentally necessary and embarrassingly easy task of opposition – not to replicate the shockingly self-serving behaviour of the Tories – then the idea that he’s engaged in some brilliant Machiavellian plot becomes rather more difficult to accept.
Israel-Ireland and a tale of two embassies
THE straw that broke the camel’s back came for Tel Aviv when Ireland joined the South African case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the start of the month. So incensed was Benjamin Netanyahu by this act of outrageous provocation that he ordered the closure of the Israeli embassy in Dublin.
Fair enough, that’s his call. The lunatic head of a psycho government full of racist genociders and fundamentalist religious crackpots is as entitled to do what he wants with his embassies as a sane national leader, but his decision did leave one small but significant question unanswered: Why is the Israeli embassy in South Africa still open?
I mean, if you look at it from the Israeli point of view, Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Galant are fugitives from the International Criminal Court (ICC) because Pretoria with its ICJ case set in motion the judicial wrecking ball that has smashed to pieces what’s left of Israel’s name outside of Washington and London. That South African decision to go after Israel, to use the kind of Biblical term that Netanyahu and his gang are so fond of, was the original sin that launched the reputational Nakba that has been inflicted on Tel Aviv in the world’s courts.
CLOSURE: Benjamin Netanyahu is not happy with the Irish
Ireland, by comparison, merely jumped on the bus once it was under way. And it’s only one of 14 countries which bought a ticket for the South African legal tour of the world, although Israel has seen fit to sanction none of the other 13 countries which “crossed the red line”. Not that Ireland has seen it as a sanction. In fact, on Twitter – which is turning into a gathering place for demented far right loons – the Irish and their pro-Palestine allies have been having a rare old time since Netanyahu decided to throw his toys out of his own pram while firing bombs and bullets into prams in Gaza.
Look – there it is, the Israeli embassy in Pretoria website, in fine form and loving life in the South African administrative capital: Raising a glass to an Israeli winery’s success in an international tasting competition; celebrating the International Day for Persons with Disabilities (by making more Gazans disabled, but the sentiment is appreciated); sharing Roman-era art found in a village in Palestine. Sorry, Israel. It’s almost as if their host hadn’t inflicted the greatest blow on the state of Israel since Dana International won the Eurovision.
All of which would make you think that there’s something that Israel’s not saying. Something about small nations perhaps?
