Change Begins
The true nature of the Starmer Labour party is on display in Liverpool this week, its quite the reveal. The crowds cheered as protestors were dragged out of the hall shouting: “We are still selling arms to Israel! I thought we had voted for change Rachel…” before being dragged out by security and put in handcuffs.
For most people those optics, and that conduct will look terrible. For this new Labour party it will probably be ideal. Rachel Reeves used it as an opportunity to boast: “This is a changed Labour Party, not a party of protest.”
Richard Leonard, the one-time Scottish leader said: “Grabbing this protester by the throat was an unnecessary and disproportionate use of force. When Walter Wolfgang was manhandled out of the conference hall in 2005, the Labour Party apologised to him. We should do the same now.”
That won’t be happening.
The conference comes at the end of a dire week for Labour, with a series of self-inflicted gaffs and exposes, all of which they handled terribly.
Rachel Reeves used her first speech to party conference as Chancellor to defends Labour’s cut to the winter fuel allowance, that withdraws the Winter Fuel Payment to 860,000 Scottish pensioners. She made it into a virtue telling conference: “I know that not everyone in this hall or in the country will agree with every decision that I make. I will not duck those decisions, not for political expediency, not for personal advantage.”
I mean, at the end of this week I wouldn’t be using the phrase ‘personal advantage’ in public, but who am I to tell? Reeves spent £7.5k of donors money to buy clothes for a six-week election campaign.
Image credit @davidpeterkerr
In front of the strangely worded slogan ‘Change Begins’ Anas Sarwar delighted the party telling them how the general election delivered 37 Labour MPs and put “Scotland at the heart of government” – even saying “there will be no return to austerity with a Labour government.”
Presumably if they’re at the heart of government they’ll be able to save Grangemouth and reverse the two child cap that is pushing 87,000 Scottish children into poverty? There was no mention of the £150 million poverty fund that’s disappeared either.
Lord Alli, the Labour donor, is at the conference, but apparently not taking interviews. It’s been a tough old week for them. It turns out, after much buck-passing it was the magnificently paid Sue Gray who sanctioned giving Labour peer and donor Lord Alli a pass to No10.
That’s the same Lord Alli that donated £10K to Liam Conlon’s campaign. That’s the same Liam Conlon who’s mother is … you guessed it … Sue Gray. Talk about Nepo Babies!
I’m sure all of this can be explained. In fact, the newly revived Douglas Alexander has the perfect explanation. Speaking on the Good Morning Scotland, Alexander said he welcomed the fact Lord Alli had donated to the Labour Party.
“There is absolutely no suggestion that he is looking for something in return other than what he has dedicated many years of his life to achieving, which is to get a Labour government,” he said.
He added that Lord Alli had made the donations “to try and level the playing field in circumstances” between Labour and other parties.
This all seems fine.
The Lothian East MP continued: “We exist to try and improve people’s lives and opportunities and if that means accepting support from donors who have been longstanding Labour supporters for many, many years, then actually I make no apology for the fact that Keir Starmer has made the Labour party competitive again.”
The sense of entitlement is spectacular.
Here’s Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson:
‘It was a hard one to turn down… one of my children was keen to go’
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson explains why she accepted free @taylorswift13 tickets earlier this year@bphillipsonMP is in Liverpool for the @UKLabour party conference pic.twitter.com/0B2P8Ej4Vi
— ITV News Politics (@ITVNewsPolitics) September 22, 2024
Is that what they meant by ‘tough decisions’?
To follow the logic this Labour party is claiming these two things simultaneously: first that pensioners can live on £12,500 per year and second that £14,000 isn’t a lot of money for a birthday party.
It get’s worse.
It turns out that Labour’s cabinet has taken over half a million in donations from private healthcare lobbyists. According to a story by The Canary magazine lobbyists, hedge funds, and private equity firms connected to the private healthcare sector have funnelled more than half a million pounds to the new Labour Party cabinet since 2023. In a damning exposé, Canary columnist Dr Julia Grace Patterson’s advocacy group EveryDoctor revealed the staggering scale of donations from those with vested interests in NHS privatisation.
The magazine stated: “Notably, these didn’t all simply come as direct monetary donations or freebies. Some of Starmer’s new cabinet had seconded free staff direct from lobbying firms or think tanks.”
“EveryDoctor identified hedge fund boss Martin Taylor among Labour Together’s biggest donors. It noted that Taylor’s firm Crake Asset Management holds £30m in shares in US private healthcare giant United Health. On top of this, it holds a further £5.4m in shares in Elevance Health, another of the biggest US-based private health corporations.”
I mean, that’s fine, right?
Presumably, like Lord Alli there is absolutely no suggestion that they are looking for something in return?
It also turns out that David Lammy has just returned from Washington and there’s some very strange things going on. It seems that Lammy and Starmer’s trip to Washington didn’t go well.
Speaking at a fringe event at the Labour party conference in Liverpool, Lammy said the hardship and challenges of the war in Ukraine would get “deeper and harsher”, particularly heading into “the back end of 2025 into 2026” and beyond.
“So this is a critical time for nerve and guts and patience and for fortitude on behalf of allies who stand with Ukraine,” he said in comments that appeared directed at a hesitant Joe Biden. This is a reference to the use of long-range weapons – such as British Storm Shadow missiles – which Voldymyr Zelenskyy wants to be allowed to carry out strikes inside Russia. Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK and the country’s former top military commander, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, was also present at the Labour conference fringe event, which was organised by the Tony Blair Institute.
Diane Abbott summarised the position as follows: “David Lammy has let the cat out of the bag. It is clear he and the PM went to Washington with a madcap scheme to attack Russia with long-range weapons. But Biden dismissed them as completely reckless.”
What’s emerging is the outlines of a Starmer regime, dangerously entitled, reckless and gung-ho in foreign policy, regressive on social policy and riddled with corporate lobbyists and dark money. After over a decade of Tory rule people are hungry for change and desperate for some support in the wake of years of austerity and the crippling costs of everyday life. Many people, stupidly, put their trust in Labour. Despite all of their efforts to signal before they were elected that they would do nothing at all, people had hope that Labour would deliver an alternative and offset the social vandalism conducted by the Conservatives.
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China’s one-child policy was disastrous and blinkered. The Conservative and Labour two-child policy can only function by drawing in people from other countries but that does not mean we have to be nice to them. Johnson and Rees-Mogg have done their best to mitigate the consequences of the two-child policy but their sprogs are not going to be hewers of wood. They will be competing to rule over us.
The world’s population, already 8 billion in overshoot, would be now 8.6 billion if it weren’t for China’s on child policy.
“What’s emerging is the outlines of a Starmer regime, dangerously entitled, reckless and gung-ho in foreign policy, regressive on social policy and riddled with corporate lobbyists and dark money”.
IE another Tory party.
Well done Britain.
Although to be fair the establishment gives the British voters little other choice, the Overton Window gets narrower each decade.
Lack of choice is crippling our democracy…yes indeed…im grateful to this article for brin8 g into the daylight some facts…intuitively felt but not previously confirmed
”It’s CHANGE , JIm , but not as we know it ! ” Dr McCoy .
The recent GE was primarily a vote against the corrupt and incompetent Tory government. The evidence for this is the fact that not only did Tories get the lowest number of votes and seats in modern history but that Labour’s vote was barely higher than in 2019. The landslide victory in seats was not an endorsement of Labour but achieved on the back off gaming an outdated FPTP electoral system.
The Labour government may be an improvement on the previous Tory administration (a very low bar) but appear to have few alternative ideas to reverse the UK’s long term economic and social decline. In addition they have already exhibited a sense of entitlement allied to Treasury meanness that is already alienating an underwhelmed electorate. Labour are playing with fire because if they do not make a meaningful difference to people’s lives in next 3 years the sense of disenchantment is liable to be so great that Reform could attract a lot mote voters in England and anti independence supporters in Scotland with a plague on all your houses snake oil message. They could realistically achieve an overall majority with 33% of vote under FPTP and God knows what would happen then.
The sense of entitlement of Labour is higher in Scotland as they appear to still consider themselves as the natural party of government in Scotland. Their tactics for 2026 Holyrood election appear to be focused on attacking and demonising the current administration. While most people would agree the current administration is far from perfect I worry that the nature of Labour’s (and other parties and media’s) attacks on Holyrood will undermine the public confidence in devolved government itself. I would contrast Labour’s approach to devolved administration in Wales as evidence of their hypocrisy.
The main winners in Scotland from demonising Holyrood and its institutions are opponents of devolution ie some Tories but primarily Reform who are actively campaigning to abolish devolved governments.
Yes, yes, the political party system is an engine of corruption, and while the two-party system has many specific flaws on top:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system#Disadvantages
the British reality seems to be 1) corporate capture of significant political parties and politicians; 2) the British Empire is commanded by its USAmerican Empire master, which in turn obeys the ultra-right Israeli government (whose cyber-ops presumably involve blackmail of British politicians); 3) the British deep state (permanent government) whose clammy hand grips the throat of the desecretisation pipeline and runs probably the world’s worst ministry of defence, while British diplomacy decays on the world stage; 4) all the anti-democratic abuses the royal prerogative can oppress the planet with.
NATO is pursuing a proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, which the British Labour government seem keen on upgrading to a nuclear conflict.
I like the ‘Mr Freeze’ graphic. No longer just Kid Starver but… (Kelvin Sucker? needs more work)
Ukraine’s resistance to Putin’s aggression requires a more considered response than to just dismiss it as a proxy war by NATO against Russia.
@Paddy Farrington, who is ‘dismissing’ anything? What am I ‘dismissing’? The whole point about proxy wars is that conflicts can be hijacked, initiated or supported by others. I would dispute Wikipedia’s ‘Proxy War’ definition that one party has to be a ‘non-state actor’. There is a more reasonable definition attached to its (disputable) list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proxy_wars
We studied quite a few during North–South Relations in International Politics, especially from the ‘Cold War’ era (perhaps why some people say ‘Cold War’ is a grossly misleading label).
It is politically significant that there are disputes over these labels, of course. Proxy status was something that Niccolò Machiavelli warned about in The Prince, for example in Chapter 21, don’t join aggressive alliance with stronger party else be their prisoner.
But if you simply mean ‘the conflict in Ukraine is much more complex than a proxy war between NATO and Russia, and the agencies of all parties should be respected’, then sure, I agree. However, if NATO holds against a peace deal, what power do the Ukrainian authorities have to go their own way? Visible patterns of conflict vary and mutate, new conditions emerge, but there are patterns.
SD – try NATO is responding to the request for assistance from Ukraine to protect itself from an invasion from a larger, more powerful neighbour led by an authoritarian regime.
Can you explain why Baltic states are desperate to join NATO?
I can put you in contact with a family of Ukrainian refugees I know who will be able to explain to you the impact of Russian invasion on theme and millions like them.
@John, I’ve already addressed one obvious reason leaders of countries opt to join NATO: they don’t want to be nuked by NATO.
The case is analogous, I think, to the USAmerican indigenous cultures which practice Christianity:
“I asked him how he reconciles his Christian faith with the history of violence upon the Apache people in the name of Jesus Christ.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jun/24/apache-students-school-reservation
NATO is the world leader in developing plans of genocide (indeed, world ecocide), as far as I know. Several of their nuclear fire plans would have torched half of Europe and lethally irradiated the rest. This included specifically targeting Ukrainian ports, airbases and cities until relatively recently. So painting NATO as a natural saviour of the Ukrainian people is an awkward spinning exercise.
Sleeping Dog – to say Baltic states want to join NATO to avoid being attacked by NATO shows you have gone down the rabbit hole!
Oh yes I remember Zelensky saying ‘we can repel Russia on our own but we better ask for NATO help or they will overrun Ukraine’!
I am not a great supporter of NATO but on some occasions you have to identify the greater enemy. In this case Putin is the greater threat and cannot be allowed to succeed in Ukraine against the wishes of Ukrainian government and population.
If you cannot see this you just cannot see the wood for the trees.
@John, I didn’t say NATO would attack the Baltic states, I said they would (rightly) fear being inside one of NATO’s nuclear fire plan zones (after all, NATO has deployed tactical nuclear weapons in Western Europe which would have been fired onto European soil, not Russian).
You might want to look out for declassified material about events such as Able Archer 83:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
To many historical NATO planners, (East) Europeans have been expendable, if not actual targets for destruction. There is survival strategy commonly referred to as “if you can’t beat them, join them”. NATO is the biggest bully in the playground, although also probably the dumbest. If you stand behind it, you may have less chance of being hit by its flailing fists than if you stand against it.
I appreciate your willingness to share your theories on Baltic States motivations.
Baltic States we’re not rushing to join NATO prior to recent Russian actions. I am happy to go with what I hear from the Baltic Leadership in that they feel they need to belong to NATO now to avoid potential Russian aggression as witnessed in Ukraine .In their case it is a simple lesser of two evils.
Re Russia/Ukraine war settlement ultimately this is primarily up to Ukrainians. I am pretty sure that if there is any pressure to be put on Ukraine it will be to settle for less land than they would actually like.
I, for one, am glad that Sir Keir Starmer is taking a principled stand over the return of the sausages.
Media Lens: ‘Everyone In Gaza is Sick, Injured, Or Both’ – Israel’s 2.1 million Victims
https://www.medialens.org/2024/everyone-in-gaza-is-sick-injured-or-both-israels-2-1-million-victims/
picks up on “a letter to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, shamefully ignored by virtually all ‘mainstream’ media outlets, 30 qualified, UK-based doctors, surgeons, nurses and medical professionals – volunteers in Gaza since 7 October 2023 – [which] described the full extent of the catastrophe.”