Keir Starmer is, ostensibly, the Leader of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition. Westminster, for all its flaws, represents the cradle of democracy and the “mother of all parliaments. More importantly, it’s where the representatives of the British people come, to represent the interests of their constituents. Starmer’s comments that he prefers Davos to Westminster, that Westminster is just a “shouting place” that does not have “meaning”, and implying that he no longer wants to work with those elected to represent the British people there, are therefore deeply, profoundly disturbing. It would not be inaccurate to describe them as traitorous – which is not a word that should be used causally.

Westminster is where actual politics happens, with all of the tribalism, compromises, heated debates, and tensions that come with balancing competing interests. There are disagreements, clashes of personality, worldviews, and thinking. A melting pot. In comparison, Davos is where consensus is formed into a monolithic world establishment position, a place of utopian “transformative” (transhumanist) thinking in which competing interests don’t need to be balanced with each other but rather realigned or, perhaps, “reimagined”. Where an elite class decides what’s best for everybody and then colludes to attempt to bring it about. No wonder the conniving, insecure, ideologically rigid, little ingroup bully that is Keir Starmer prefers that to actual politics.

Which begs the question: how did he end up in “politics”, anyway? How did this former chief of the Crown Prosecution Service and human rights lawyer, who only became an MP in 2015, end up as Leader of the Labour Party just four years later? How was he able to climb up and over people on both sides of the Labour Party, many of whom had worked tirelessly literally all of their lives at rising to the top of it, despite alienating many of those on his own “side” of the party by refusing to sign up to their campaign to remain in the European single market? Who, and whose money, were behind the “Keir4Leader” campaign that supposedly got spontaneously launched in 2015 without his blessing? Just who is Keir Starmer?

Rhetoric long ago parted company with reality in British politics. Having lost Scotland Labour now has to appease middle class voters to an even greater extent than Blair did.

Middle class voters love the rhetoric of leftism. It makes us feel like nice people. But don’t even think about taxing the the real wealth of the country – the trillions in unearned property wealth that we’re sitting on – that simply won’t do.

Blair understood this. Ask who were the principal beneficiaries of Blairism? It certainly wasn’t wage earners or rent payers. Starmer is just following a successful playbook.

We should never forget that it was a Labour Chancellor who changed the way that the cost of living is calculated purely to conceal the effect that his policies were having on the Party’s core constituency.

‘Pinioning the left’? Whilst embracing far-left identity nonsense, CRT and a truly awful anti-child, anti-woman gender ideology…….Mark the WEF IS the far left now. Globalism IS the far left. TRanhumanism IS the far left. Hyper individualism IS the far left. Starmer IS the far-left. You’d do much better in the SDP

Even a stopped clock etc.

Starmer is clearly useless, and might get found out in an election campaign, but removing the assorted cranks and crackpots of the previous regime is not going to harm his cause.

There’s nothing as satisfying a reading a man of the Left putting the boot into another man of the Left.
Most Tories I know (and I’m not one, before you ask / assume / allege) want Starmer to win. They think five years of hopeless Labour government influenced by Ed Miliband, along with culture war flip-flopping, a clueless MP cohort and rats-in-a-sack positioning to be the next next leader (Wes and Rachel) will secure the Cons a default victory circa 2028/29.
Although this makes me chuckle, as by then I imagine the Tories will be eviscerated by a more recognisably centre-Right political party. This means Sir Keir will be PM for ten years, with the concomitant Americanisation of our politics into permanent left/right intransigence.

By going to Davos, making him appear what you laughingly call “Centre Ground”, well at least they’ll have some common ground as neither Starmer and the denizens of Davos have been elected

My sense is that Starmer is naturally quite far to the Left but he’s doing what he thinks is necessary to win the next election. The far-Left, people like Diane Abbott for example, are always hard to control, so keeping them on the periphery makes it easier for Starmer to control the party, even though he may agree with what they’re saying.
After all, Stalin had no qualms about silencing the thinkers of the Communist Party and you wouldn’t call him a Centrist.

It seems to me the sole purpose of going to Davos was for Starmer to make an issue out of Sunak not being there. The media lapped it up, as if that actually meant anything serious.

The main vulnerability for the davos globalist vision has always been that it could be easily dismantled by hostile governments pursuing national agendas at the expense of global goals. Globalism, being a form of collectivism applied to nations, suffers from the same vulnerabilities as other more familiar forms, namely that it requires individuals to act in ways that are inconsistent with short term self interest. That’s not an impossible hurdle, but it requires either a significant amount of ‘buy in’ from individual members or mechanisms to enforce compliance, inflicting punishments to change the self-interest calculations. Thus, it follows that globalism requires at least one of two factors to succeed, broad public support or governmental police power. Given that the former looks increasingly unlikely (they had to hire a small army to protect davos from ‘protestors’), it stands to reason they will focus on their efforts on the latter, attempting to corrupt and control governments at every level. Attempting to capture major political parties and place their supporters in key leadership positions is a basic strategy for this. That’s why Brexit opposition was robust in both the parties. The globalists had cultivated influence and support in both parties. They’re doing the same thing in the US, trying to expel Trump and take back the Republican party while keeping the Democratic party close to the political center. They’re having more problems here because America is a larger and less dense country and the people who designed America’s government knew that and deliberately wrote the Constitution to favor geography over population and resist the sort of imperialistic national control prevalent in Europe then and now. The struggle of globalists is necessarily global, and it will no doubt continue anywhere and everywhere the multinational corporations and the oligarchs that drive them operate. The getting, keeping, and wielding of power has always been a nasty business, often resulting in violence. The modern world is no exception. I expect the globalists must eventually fail because their philosophy runs contrary to human nature but I don’t expect them to go down easily, and I expect they’ll do as much damage as they can on the way out. Rather than concede the game and gracefully withdraw, keeping their dignity and some level of influence, they’ll instead do what people in power usually do when threatened, that is anything they can to keep power and hold back the threat. I expect ultimate something like a revolution, violent or otherwise, in one or more large nations will be required to break their hold on power. As for the present question, I expect Starmer will win the next election, then his policies, like the present Tories, will generate friction and public backlash until he too is defeated. Starmer’s leadership career is likely to be short and perhaps historically unpopular, but that’s of little concern to the davos crowd. By that point, they’ll be grooming another Tory leader or pushing a new EU referendum or something else along those lines. Starmer is a pawn, one of many around the world whose political career will be unceremoniously sacrificed to the masses while the globalists continue to delay the reckoning that is coming for them as long as they can.

Marina Hyde expressed the problem with Starmer perfectly – whatever he says, you expect the next sentence to be “And have you thought about what kind of wood you’d like for the casket?”

Starmer may be no good, but that needn’t stop him winning the next election. All he has to do is silence the far left and react plausibly to Tory blunders. As for ‘meat and potatoes’, voters don’t believe anything politicians promise anyway.

At the next election we will be offered the chance to decide whether our regional WEF branch manager (so much more than just a meteoric rise in common!) will wear a blue or red tie and that is what passes for democracy today. Enjoy.

I was warming to him but his weasel words referencing Rosie Duffield with no mention of Lloyd Rusell Moynes have reminded me not to.

“And they’re the principles & the values…..that I insist on in our Labour Party whether it’s Rosie Duffield or anyone else.”

We see you, Keir.

Dull and tedious little Pooter man….

‘Consiglieri’ not ‘consiglieres’

A BS article by a neo-Corbynite. Who cares? And why is it on Unherd?

The destructive debate in the Tories is a short term opportunity for Starmer, but a longer term challenge as to his ability to define and execute policy that addresses that main challenges faced by the UK. Given that the BBC is now presenting Starmer as the PM-in waiting, it’s reasonable to question what Labour’s position is (or might be) on various issues.
The major and enduring challenge is to define a coherent post-Brexit economic strategy, and the consequent social transition to a new economic model. The idea of investment in renewable energy and green technology does have substance, but this can only be a part of what is needed, and is unlikely to have the transformative effect that Reeves proposes. From what else I can read, the Starmer/Reeves position is virtually indistinguishable from that of Sunak/Hunt, and the most likely outcome is a muddled set of compromises, increasing national debt, and progressive decline as the UK is out-competed on new technologies. In these circumstances, a return to EU membership is a rational objective, and is likely (in my opinion) to emerge as a policy position from Labour if they do indeed achieve a parliamentary majority at the next general election.
The alternative – a low-cost, competitive, nimble UK, progressive on global trade and at the forefront of new technology – looks like it will remain an abstract dream for the Tory right, who may never acknowledge that they squandered the opportunity to put this in place. Covid was a factor, of course, but the window of opportunity has now largely shut. The idea that Truss had the gravitas to deliver this was always fanciful, and I can’t see anyone else willing to put themselves forward to deliver this. (Of course, if the UK economy does improve in the first half of 2023, a meaningful challenge might emerge from the Tory right).
Addressing the NHS (as a talisman for the public sector in multiple ways – degree of investment, quality of service delivery, wage rises in an inflationary environment, and position opposite the trade unions) is the other major challenge. I don’t see anything from Labour that would convince me that they will do anything other than throw taxpayers’ money at this problem, rather than beginning a process of fundamental reform to a service whose delivery, resource and cost model has become obsolete.
You can follow similar lines of thought on other major policy areas. The most likely outcome of a Starmer PM-ship, in my view, is that within the next decade, the UK begins the process of return to full EU membership, mainly to mitigate some of the economic damage caused by Brexit, but also to procrastinate on areas of economic and social reform that are ’too difficult’ to address. As a corollary, the UK will then recover much of the diplomatic power that it has also lost through Brexit, and reassume the position of main interlocutor for the US in dialogue with Europe. Policy vagueness and ambiguity can have significant consequences.