Starmer’s year of lies and betrayals
Speymouth
It’s exactly a year since the Labour party under Keir Starmer swept to power in the Westminster general election and won a landslide majority of over 170 seats in the Commons, albeit on a mere 34% of votes cast, such is the distorting effect of the first past the post system. In fact, fewer people turned out to vote for the party than had done so in 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.
I suppose I should say the party calling itself Labour won the election, because the Labour party of Keir Starmer is a very different political beast from the Labour party of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party of the 1980s, or even from the New Labour party of Tony Blair and Gordon Blair’s New Labour party had pivoted significantly to the centre right, but it still had space for the old socialist left. On becoming party leader, Starmer ruthlessly purged the left and shifted Labour even further to the right, taking advantage of the political space opened up by the hard right madness which overtook the Conservatives after Brexit.
Just like the Tories, Labour too drank deep from the crazy cup of Brexit and is now a right wing Brexit supporting party occupying roughly the same political terrain as the Conservatives did under John Major. Only a handful of marginalised and neutralised left wing voices remain in a Labour party which is now a natural home for private healthcare and defence industry lobbyists, corporate interests and a Chancellor who “listens to the concerns of the non-dom community” while slashing benefits for the elderly and disabled.
Those who voted Labour in 2024 in the hope and expectation of meaningful change have been bitterly disappointed. It’s still the same old story of high handed patrician arrogance with a nasty authoritarian edge that we came to expect under the Conservatives. The infamous “tough choices” are only ever tough on the poor and the vulnerable and are inflicted by a man who gets a party donor to pay for his suits. Any hope of rejoining the European Customs Union and Single Market and a restoration of freedom of movement with EU countries has been buried under the red lines which Starmer took over from Theresa May.
There’s no money to ensure that the disabled have a basic standard of living, to abolish the two child cap on benefits, or to keep the elderly warm in the winter, but there’s plenty of cash for nuclear submarines, military aircraft, and bombs.
I wrote in this blog long before the 2024 election that a Starmer government would quickly become very unpopular, but no one, certainly not me, could have predicted just how unpopular Starmer’s Labour in name only government would become, and just how quickly.
Labour took swathes of formerly SNP seats, leading Labour MSPs to strut their stuff in the corridors of Holyrood as though they owned the place, fully expecting that Anas Sarwar would become the next First Minister and exultant that the genie of independence had been securely put back in the bottle.
Yet one year on things look very different. Yes, Labour unexpectedly won the Hamilton, Stonehouse and Larkhall Holyrood by election by the skin of its teeth, despite a mediocre party machine candidate who was chosen primarily on the basis of his links to Rangers. But that was largely due to a poor campaign by the SNP which focused on Reform UK instead of Labour, and which scarcely mentioned independence and dismally failed to motivate independence leaning voters to turn out and vote. These are not mistakes that the SNP can make again in May next year.
Over the past year it appears that Starmer has gone out of his way to alienate Labour’s traditional supporters. Within a couple of weeks of winning the general election, Labour voted to keep the cruel and punitive two child cap on benefits, which is the biggest single driver of child poverty in the UK. Labour was then embroiled in a freebies scandal, with Starmer and his wife accepting thousands of pounds worth of free clothing and football and event hospitality from political donors. The man is paid a six figure salary plus a generous expenses allowance, he gets free accommodation, transport, and the free use of a country estate. He can pay for his own bloody suits and football tickets.
Then Labour pissed off pensioners by axing the universal winter fuel allowance, giving the Scottish Government just 40 minutes notice to work out how the decision would affect delivery of the payment in Scotland.
This was followed by the shameful betrayal of Waspi women. In opposition Labour had made a meal of its support for fair compensation for women affected by the maladministration of changes to the retirement age for women and their eligibility for a state pension. Once in power it was a case of – sorry but no cash.
For Scotland Labour’s betrayals have been especially bitter. The party campaigned on the slogan that a vote for Labour was a vote to save Grangemouth only for Anas Sarwar to turn around and claim that the government could not do anything to keep Grangemouth open because it was owned by a private company. That didn’t stop them holding an emergency sitting of the Commons to pass measures to keep open the privately owned Scunthorpe steel works. Neither has it prevented Labour from intervening to rescue a refinery in England and keep it from closure, the Lindsey refinery in North Lincolnshire.
But Scotland? You’re on your own. The much vaunted GB Energy which was supposed to create a thousand or more jobs in the North East of Scotland and be headquartered in Aberdeen has turned out just like the contents of Gordon Brown’s infamous Vow, watered down again and again until there’s precious little of the original substance remaining.
The good news for the SNP is that Labour’s implosion continues. One of Labour’s cruelest measures was its plan to slash £5 billion from benefits for disabled people. Labour steadfastly refuses to countenance a wealth tax so the poor and the vulnerable must be forced to shoulder the burden even as the rich grow ever richer. The Government’s own figures predicted that 250,000 disabled people would be forced into poverty as a result. Disability charities calculated the true figure to be in excess of 400,000. Is this the ‘change’ Labour promised? Vote Labour to consign hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable in society to poverty. This is Thatcherite behaviour. To their eternal disgrace, most Labour MPs representing Scottish seats were perfectly OK with it.
Hundreds of thousands of disabled people have spent months in terror, fearing the loss of income which is essential to maintaining a basic standard of living and fend off penury. Labour shamelessly lied and claimed the measures were aimed at helping disabled people into work. Quite how stripping a disabled person of cash they need to pay the extra costs associated with their disability will help them into work, Labour never explained. Neither did they explain where all these jobs are with employers queueing up to take on disabled workers. And the biggest lie of all was Labour’s failure to make clear that Personal Independence Payment and its Scottish equivalent Adult Disability payment are not out of work benefits. But then it was never about helping disabled people into work, it was always about balancing the books on the backs of the disabled in order to protect the wealthy from tax increases.
This week, as the cuts were due to come to a vote in the Commons, the wheels came off the cart Starmer was driving over the crutches of the disabled. Although most of his Scottish MPs are tame lobby fodder, sufficient back benchers revolted against these despicable and heartless cuts to make the passage of the Government’s bill unlikely. Moreover they proved resistant to the usual repertoire of threats and cajoling that Government whips deploy on such occasions. They forced Starmer into his third U turn in recent weeks. The first on the winter fuel allowance, the second on a national inquiry into grooming gangs, and now the cuts to disability benefits have been kicked into the long grass. Now the Labour rebels know that they can force Starmer to U-turn and his authority has been fatally undermined. A year on from winning its landslide Commons majority, this is a government whose back has been broken as a year of lies and betrayal have come home to roost.
My mum’s funeral has been organised for Tuesday 8 July. Naturally I won’t be about around that date or the day before or after. Thank you very much to everyone who left messages of love and support on my recent post. My family read your messages and were very touched by them.
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