Keir Today, Gone Tomorrow

 If there was a General Election tomorrow, how would it turn out?

Well, as Starmer tries to out- Tory the Tories on spending cuts and out-xenophobe Reform on migration, the bad news for Keith is, he's toast and so is the entire "New" Nu-Labour project.

Three national polls in a row put the far right, Trumpite party of chancers and self-enrichers of Reform in the lead, the latest a full 6% ahead of the government.

With the SNP resurgent in Scotland, the result via Electoral Calculus would produce a parliament of:

REFORM - 305 seats

LABOUR - 142

TORIES - 93

LIB DEMS - 59

SNP - 23

GREENS - 4

IND SOC - 4

PLAID CYMRU- 2

OTHERS - 18

(figures use the latest polls for UK from "Find Out Now" and for Scotland from "Survation".

So not quite an outright majority, but with some rebel Tories and ULSTER!!!men (and they are ULSTERMEN!!!!) there'd be little doubt we would be staring a Farage Premiership in the face...

So let's take a minute to grasp what that would mean:

- no more free NHS treatment, you'll need to pay insurance instead;

- huge cuts in taxes for big business and the wealthiest, cuts in services and benefits for everyone else;

- racism run amok in our schools, communities, public services, and immigration service

- men convicted of assaulting their female partners accepted to be MPs

- an end to most types of employment protection, so it would be much, much easier for your employer to fire you at will;

- tax cuts for private schools, spending cuts for state schools;

- scraping of investment in green technology and energy and spending more on subsidising private nuclear energy companies;

- scrap the BBC(yes, you'll miss it when it is gone) for more TV like GB News ;

- cuddling up to Trump, and Putin

- government by the rich for the rich...

Starmer and co, of course, cling to the analysis of 30 years ago, when Bliar won a landslide victory on a minority vote and then watched it wither away over 3 subsequent elections. With even fewer voters supporting him last year than poor old Jeremy Corbyn got in his much-excoriated and widely misrepresented 2019 result, Starmer is facing oblivion... even although Reform has even less support than he got!

Believe it or not, there is every prospect, thanks to our ludicrous first-past-the-post voting system, that Nigel Farage can become PM with just 29% of the vote: a calumny, an utterly bizarre situation that can and must be remedied via electoral reform and proportional representation (PR) so that broadly speaking, parties' shares of the vote should equal their seats in parliament.

I've only ever heard three arguments against PR:

1. Our current system produces "STRONG GOVERNMENTS".

Erm... ???WTF?? WTF ACTUAL F???!!!

2. Our current system means people know who their MP is.

Well, actually, the vast majority haven't a clue who these increasingly faceless, marginal individuals are. I do follow politics and was previously very involved in political activity - I recall lots of MPs resigning their posts under Boris Johnson and realising I'd never heard of the vast majority of them; this has only increased since; who had ever heard of Andrew Gwynne before his career crashed to a close last weekend over his tasteless Whatsapp messages?

3. Our current system may not be that democratic, but it at least KEEPS OUT THE EXTREMISTS...

Well, we all have our views of what is extreme. The Con-Lib Dem coalition remains one of the most hard right governments we've ever had, but either way, with the polls suggesting Reform could just about win outright with barely a quarter of the vote, that little lie falls by the wayside.

At the Nuremberg trials, Hermann Goring noted that Hitler had come to power legally after an election in which the Nazis polled 43% of the vote and got 43% of the seats. To become dictator, Adolf had to bully and bribe the German Nationalists, the liberal democrats and the Catholic Zentrum parties to vote for him, as well as arresting all the many Communist MPs so they couldn't vote against the Austrian Corporal.

Hermann however, pointed out that, had Germany at the time used the British first-past-the -post system, none of this unseemly cajoling and threatening would have been necessary; indeed, the Nazis would have come to power two years earlier than they did because

"Had the democratic election system of England or the United States of America existed in Germany, then the National Socialist German Workers Party would, at the end of 1931 already, have legally possessed all seats in the Reichstag, without exception.."

Starmer is finished before he has even begun. If he wants any sort of lasting legacy, anything worthwhile or even vaguely distinctive to be remembered for, the least he could do is save us from the fascists and give us PR NOW!

Suits You, Sir Keir!

Behind You! - The allegedly scruffy Jeremy Corbyn followed by Man in an Empty Suit

Reeling from a 7% swing to the Tories in the latest opinion poll, haemorrhaging members and money and struggling to be heard even in the silence of the depleted Covid Commons, Labour's leader Sir Keir Starmer has taken a leaf not so much from the Biden as the Trump Playbook to try to revive his flagging fortunes.

In the true spirit of neoliberalism and new Nu-Labour, a leaked report recommends the party needs to "make use of the (union) flag, veterans and dress smartly". 

In an unsurprising triumph of form over content, the report from the party's Research team has found that after nearly a year of the startled Starmer regime, the vast majority of voters have no idea what the party is about or what it stands for. Possibly seeking to consolidate this vacuum, the proposal seems that the party should become even more indistinguishable from the Conservative Government, to whom Sir Keir has repeatedly leant his support or, failing that, his abstention on issue after issue through their dreadful mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Supposedly intending to hold Boris Johnson to account via his lawyerly "forensic questioning", he has rarely landed so much as a light smack on the fingers to the Old Etonian prefect as now over 106,000 citizens have died. The supposedly lame Ed Miliband has been the only Labour frontbencher to come anywhere near embarrassing this laziest of Prime Ministers during these historic days, only to have to hand back in time for Starmer to try to outdo the Tories in demanding schools stay open in the face of union fears - until of course he heard Johnson was going to close them and so rushed out a closure demand just ahead of the PM's announcement.

Similarly, he has singularly failed to challenge the appalling nepotism and pork-barrel politics of this most corrupt of government and he has backslid on a raft of legislation. The latter has included notably supporting the Brexit Deal in spite of doggedly insisting on opposing the almost identical Theresa May deal two years ago and later dragging his party to supporting a second referendum - this latter step was a fatal move that drove millions of Labour voters over to the Tories and Brexit Party, shearing the party of dozens of seats. More recently and even more shockingly Starmer failed to oppose new powers granted to the espionage services including the right to torture and kill, in spite of his past fairly good record as a challenger for human rights in the courts. 

His time as Director of Public Prosecutions though perhaps pressaged his true or maybe changed self.  Quite aside from the failure to prosecute Jimmy Saville (not his direct decision, but on his watch), his tightening of the criteria for viable prosecutions for sexual assault led to a marked and immediate decline in rape prosecutions which remains the case today, a decade later.

But of course, the one thing that does seem to set the wooden knight aflame is attacking the Labour Left and in particular Jeremy Corbyn, now expelled from the Parliamentary Party (though readmitted to wider party membership by the National Executive Committee). In spite of campaigning for the leadership election on a promise of keeping the socialist, transformational policies of the Corbyn era, he and his Shadow Cabinet have now backed away from tax reform, from ending student fees and have even signalled a move away from the radical Green New Deal. Once the pandemic crisis is over, it seems only a matter of time before his Shadow Chancellor Annaliese Dodds will be out-austeritying the Tories on balancing the budget after the months of furloughing employees (a policy adopted by Sunak and Johnson after their one and only meeting with Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell in the early stages of the crisis).

So as he waves his flag and patronises veterans in his best pinstripe, Starmer seems unlikely to see the truths staring him in his seemongly ever-startled face: that when Labour previously embraced this Tory-lite strategy under Tony Blair, it was in the backwash of the collapse of the USSR and the "end of history", where voters were however uncertainly willing to accept neoliberalism and the benign guidance of the liberal "Political Class" in return for some meagre share of the Dream. 

But we are twenty years on now and Cool Britannia is buried under thick icy sheets of  personal debt, broken promises and shattered lives. The Tories have successfully played the new landscape by setting neighbours against neighbours and sharpening conflict everywhere. Even their ludicrous, vicious predatory purchase at above-the-odds prices of over seven times the quantity of covid vaccines needed to innoculate all of the UK has been driven by an attempt to stymmie other countries' efforts to vaccinate and save the lives of their citizens. 

Yet from Starmer, there is nothing. Some level of complaint that some things haven't been done well enough, or soon enough; or a bizarre notion that he can bring down Boris by pointing out some time or other that the PM muddled his figures - when anyone knows he can't even count his children properly but his voters don't care.

Just as Biden needs Bernie Sanders, AOC and others in the USA to drive him hard if the grievances that Trump leeched off are ever to be resolved, so here we need more than a Man in a Suit - especially this particular man (after all, even Corbyn managed to wear a suit with "for the many, not the few" pinstripes during the last General Election). Voters will not be won back by some well-scrubbed liberal with excess hair gel oozing his support for the incumbent. Rather, they want the transformational politics skewered in December 2019 by the vitriol of the billionaire press, the bias of the BBC and the rampage against their own party by the Labour Right - quietly among them, perhaps, Starmer himself with the more than obviously suicidal strategy of his insistence on Corbyn backing a second Brexit referendum.

Like the rest of the world, we are at a historic crossroads. The death and devastation of the pandemic demand something better than the "business-as-yesterday" Blairite revanchists. We do well to remember that the last time Labour lauded veterans in this way, it ended with scores of sons and daughters of some of the poorest communities in the UK lying dead or maimed in Iraqi deserts or on Afghan hills. True love of country, or of community, involves challenging its wrongs and making it into something better. It isn't about the flim-flam of waving flags and putting on a tie.

Above all, it isn't about being another Tory Party. We've already got one. And that's already more than enough.