I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Starmer’s honeymoon is over. I mean it was over a long time ago but now it’s over over.
With some great stock phrases and familiar economics (George Osborne wants his policies back), Keir Starmer spoke of ‘tough times ahead’ and ‘No more sticking plaster politics.’ The slogan ‘Fixing the Foundations’ was rolled out, which sounds like an advert for a forward-thinking builders firm.
It’s not going down well.
Both the message and the content seem odd. ‘Tough’ but also incoherent.
‘This is our country’. I mean, is it? In what possible sense could it be? So many people can’t afford to live in it and around half of this country don’t want to be part of it.
Anyway, we were kind of hoping seeing as your – you know – the Prime Minister you might want to do some fixing? Seems instead your regurgitating (whole) the economic and social policies of the Tories while talking some bilge about ‘broad shoulders’ and ‘difficult decisions’.
We’ve all been here before.
We know what this language is.
A lot of people comparing Keir Starmer with David Cameron from 15 years ago. Except austerity in 2024 will be far worse as it lands on the back of the grotesque inequality, poverty and mass destitution created by the ‘cost of living’ crisis.
There is a strong whiff of Cameron’s ‘We’re all in it together now’ but only in the sense that we’re all living in the ruins of a broken dysfunctional backwater with emboldened fascists on the streets and Tory politics and slogans on a grim never-ending loop. There is no ‘together’ and Britain is far more broken now than it was then. People will not survive this trite garbage.
Responding to the slogan ‘This is our country. Let’s fix it together’ one person said: “Complete shite — you’re not fixing a problem by doing the thing that caused the problem even more. Throwing away a massive majority to do more austerity. Shameful as well as stupid. Bravo.”
Brutal https://t.co/bnK2ETylJW
— BELLA CALEDONIA (@bellacaledonia) August 27, 2024
There is also the deeper issue of belief in any form of political change. Many of us wrote well in advance of the major problems with Starmerism. It wasn’t exactly difficult to see.
But for those who clung on to the distant folk-memory of a progressive, or even radical Labour party, this will all be a bit of a shock. Now the liberal media and the chattering classes will be having to work hard to make sense of it all. Wasn’t the task ‘getting rid of the Tories’? Wasn’t their going to be a wellspring of Blairy/Obamay ‘hope’.
Er, no.
Some of course will love it all. For many in the media class what they wanted was to get rid of the Tories but keep their policies. Such is the broken nature of British politics, so barren is the landscape of ideas that anything beyond the narrowest ideological bandwidth is literally unthinkable. For these people the speech from the rose garden will be ‘common sense’ and further example of their being ‘adults in the room again’ (insert cliche as required). For the rest of us this is no surprise. But it is confirmation that systemic change will not come from within the system and that Britain is irredeemable.
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Accompanied by the whiff of sleaze, Lord Ali getting to run around Downing Street in return for buying Starmer’s specsnsuits.
Hard to imagine the thought process going on that resulted in Starmer thinking that looks good. Maybe he’ll stop going on so much about the Tory slease now.
“Tory Sleaze” is about the only thing Starmer says that doesn’t make people hate him even more.
The scot LINO’s (labour in name only) satraps, sarwar,baillie and co.will not be forgotten at the next Scottish election a pathetic crew of crawlers and chanty rasslers to their core,red tories all!
You’ve left Viceroy Murray and F***wit Foulkes out of that list. I’ve had several verbal goes at them both in the past at the fitba at Tynie. I don’t think we’ll see Murray there again anytime soon.
Wasn’t it Shakespeare who said:
“A turd, ev’n in a Rose Garden, by any other name, would still smell of shite”
I’ve been preaching this mantra since well before the GE in my local in Edinburgh and was laughed at by many. They’re not laughing now.
Yes indeed, more of the same. Starmer is just another puppet of neoliberalism. And neoliberalism is really just a euphemism for rule by violence solely for ‘stakeholder value’ (wealth and power in which we have no stake). In other words, ‘You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy’, and ‘there is no alternative’. It is just the 21st c version of fascism.
Sir Oswald Mosely was a ‘Labour’ MP. The Nazis called themselves ‘socialists’.
It’s all a lie. Our institutions are now hollowed out, Orwellian fakes. And as I’ve said before every major party is bought and sold for American gold. Scotland needs independence not just from utterly corrupt Westminster, but also from the US ‘robber barons’ who pay the piper and call the tune.
A future is perfectly possible. We just have to reject this ideology.
Thanks for your blog Mike – as we all knew or know, the roses have thorns…..ouch!
Great commentary as ever Mike, but it all applies to the SNP who are so dyed in their tartan Blairite wool that independence as an escape from sinking Britannia is a lost hope, and for all the same reasons as Starmer is beyond hope.
Very true Stevie
How so?
I don’t think so, Steve and Mike. The SNP have no powers worth paying for. Westminster and the MSM are making sure they never have – and they won’t give up without a real fight. Resignation to this fact is the problem with some of the SNP hierarchy. We need someone with backbone who will refuse to co-operate until concessions are forced from WM – like the powers of a Scottish Parliament to ask what the Scottish people want for a start.
With Starmer, just like the Tories and indeed (sadly) the SNP, it’s always the exact opposite of what he says. They are all bought and sold for corporate gold. That is the foundation none of them have any intention of fixing.