Keir Starmer: Simply Not Good Enough

Some of you old timers (in a political sense) will remember when we used to wait keenly for a new opinion poll to arrive. If it was YouGov we would generally dismiss it before it was even published, because of the polling giants various links to the Tory Party. The most notable link was the fact the company was co-founded by the vaccinations minister, Nadhim Zahawi - the guy who used more than £5,000 of your money to heat his stables.

Then came Ipsos MoriI, ComRes, Delta and a whole host of other polling companies that you wouldn’t ever know existed unless you was a sad political anorak. 

But the holy grail, the one we all waited for, was from Survation. They was one of the only pollsters to call the 2017 general election as a hung Parliament, while others predicted a decent sized Tory victory. Survation was the most accurate polling company with a polling error of less than 1%. 

Ever since that moment Survation became the go-to poll for a fairly accurate idea of where things stood. 

So we move on to the very latest Survation poll, published on the 12th February. 

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party are now six points behind the government responsible for 115,000 unnecessary deaths in less than a year. Not six points ahead, but six points behind. In fact, Labour sits just one percent higher than the dreadful 2019 general election result. 

Do you call this progress? It’s an unmitigated disaster of spectacular proportions. 

It’s not even like the Tories are hoovering up the votes, they’re not. But the Green Party will be, simply because the Labour Party stopped speaking to young people the moment the establishment-friendly bin full of dreariness Starmer took over from Jeremy Corbyn. 

Keir Starmer will drive away younger voters. Younger people want hope - they want to fulfill their dreams. Younger people want someone they can get behind, maybe someone with a bit of charisma. 

Starmer is an enemy of hope, an obstacle to fulfilling their dreams, and his charisma ranks alongside that of a faulty radiator. 

Starmer cannot and will not win an election without the “Youthquake” that sent Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour to their highest number of votes since the 2001 election - shortly before Tony Blair teamed up with the pretzel-choking idiot, George W. Bush, to invade Iraq, setting off a spiralling conflict of death and misery that we still see the consequences of to this very day. 

To make matters worse, Gareth Gates was number one in the charts. 

Starmer cannot and will not win without a huge swing back to Labour in the North of England - and there is no evidence to suggest that it will happen. The same can be said for Scotland, although the latest polling indicates Starmer is losing voters North of the border. He is comfortably being thrashed by the Scottish Conservatives, and most pragmatic observers will tell you that a Labour recovery in Scotland is about as likely Keir Starmer coming out as a socialist. 

The pressure is slowly beginning to build. 

Starmer was supposed to be twenty points ahead, particularly of the worst government in living memory. 

I barely need to reel off the charge sheet against Boris Johnson these days. You all know about one of the highest death rates in the world. You all know about how they bribed the middle classes into going to Wetherspoons to save a tenner on a platter of deep fried cholesterol. You all know about the failure to lockdown soon enough, and the thousands of lives that could’ve been saved had the Prime Minister listened to the science he claimed to be guided by. You all know about the chronic shortage of PPE, the nurses using bin liners as aprons, with the face masks purchased from eBay, and the tragic deaths of countless healthcare professionals. You all know about the dodgy contracts being awarded to the Tory donors, or anyone with a remote link to Matt Hancock - this is corruption. You all know how they’ve sent the children back to school to help spread the deadly virus - children are a vector for disease. 

But the tragedy of Starmer’s inability to adequately oppose this absolute failure, this gut-wrenching catastrophe, is glaring. This is only made worse by the simple fact that Starmer even chose to support some of the measures that have left us where we are today.

Poll after poll would suggest we are not the only ones noticing this abandonment of opposition. 

The Tories aren’t walking away with it, by any means. Most of Labour’s losses would appear to be heading to the Green Party, and even the Liberal Democrats - I would assume this is down to Starmer’s incredible transformation from Captain Remain to supporting Boris Johnson’s shocking Brexit deal in a matter of months. 

Starmer hasn’t realised the importance of having some principles, and that is why nobody really knows what he stands for. He has alienated much of the FBPE/Rejoin crowd, he’s declared war on the left of the Labour Party, the Labour hard-right want to replace him with Yvette Cooper and all that will be left soon is the Parliamentary Labour Party circling their wagons around him, a bit like the Battle of Little Bighorn with Keith playing General Custer. 

I’m not a political strategist, as you know, but you do have to wonder what Focus Group told Team Starmer to deepen the civil war in his own Party with the childish “Bring it on” rhetoric being aimed firmly at hundreds of thousands of Labour Party members, and the wider British left? This seems incredibly naive, just three months before the local elections and while you are trailing between four and six points in all of the opinion polls. 

But many of us are more than happy to bring it on, because we won’t be campaigning for this Labour Party. Not a hope in hell. 

Jeremy Corbyn is still being denied the Labour Party whip. This is unacceptable. 

Keir Starmer is still failing to offer anything that resembles robust opposition, and many would argue his complicity in the Tories handling of the Coronavirus crisis. This is unacceptable.

Keir Starmer is still dragging the Labour Party to the political right, into a position where it shouldn’t be, and doesn’t belong. Labour is a democratic socialist Party - read the back of your membership card. This is unacceptable. 

Decent socialists are being turfed out of the Labour Party for upholding party democracy, and the diktat from David Evans and Keir Starmer is control-freakery at its very worst. This is unacceptable.

The Forde inquiry had been an absolute shambles. We know what happened, we’ve seen the receipts. Yet the Labour Party allows a number of these horrendous individuals to quietly sneak back into the Party while nobody is looking. This is unacceptable. 

I think you get what I’m saying. Keir Starmer’s leadership has been an unacceptable failure, and it looks like the public are beginning to think the same. 

When Jeremy Corbyn was in charge of the Labour Party we had the perfect rebuttal to anyone telling us that politicians are “all the same” - because Corbyn was different. Whether you love him or loathe him, you knew exactly what he stood for and you knew exactly what kind of Labour Party he wanted us to be. 

You cannot say the same for Sir Keir Rodney Starmer QC, or Keith to you and I. 

Our chances of removing the Tories are incredibly slim if all we can offer the British public is a not-so-extreme version of this current government. We cannot remove the Tories in government until we remove the Tories from the Labour Party. It’s that simple.

The current Labour front bench is as lightweight as I can ever remember. 

Show someone a picture of Rachel Reeves and ask them to name her. How about Anneliese Dodds? She comes across as a CBeebies presenter, rather than the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Maybe show them a photo of Nick Thomas-Symonds. Who? He’s the Shadow Home Secretary. How about Kate ‘The Ghoul’ Green? She may come across as a librarian, but she is in fact the Shadow Education Secretary - the one who said of the Covid disaster, “I think we should use the opportunity, don't let a good crisis go to waste” - while the deadly disease was tearing its way through our communities. 

Our grief. Labour’s “opportunity”. 

Utterly disgraceful. Rebecca Long-Bailey was sacked for calling Maxine Peake a “diamond”, and Kate Green gets away with an apology for suggesting the Labour Party should make political capital from a disaster that has cost more than 115,000 lives? This is factionalism at its very ugliest. Green should’ve been sacked immediately.

Look through the ones that you probably have heard of. 

Jonathan Ashworth - The Shadow Health Secretary has the passion of a Zopiclone-addled slug. A Smart Price Hancock. An election-wrecking bundle of lilly-livered inadequacy. Nobody beyond his own social bubble believes he is capable of our looking after *our* national treasure. His epitaph will be nearly as dull as the man himself. 

Lisa Nandy - The town-obsessed Shadow Foreign Secretary wasn’t sure if Donald Trump was a racist. He is Lisa. She thought I was though. Long story. Nuke ‘em Nandy believes Spain’s handling of the Catalan independence movement could be a model for dealing with Scottish independence. Her own father believes she is “right-wing”, and in all truths, she is a social conservative - some people call it “Blue Labour”. The former Chair of Owen Smith’s disastrous leadership campaign also suffers from charisma issues, with one former Labour MP telling me she has the “likeability of a dental abscess”. 

Honestly, I cannot believe any opposition party can truly believe they will gain power with this collection of principle-free z-list nobodies who would all be vastly over-promoted if you employed them as paper clip auditors. 

For you football followers, this is like expecting Swindon Town to win the Premier League, the European Champions League and the FA Cup, with their Under-10’s team. 

Sadly, Swindon Town and the Labour Party do share more than just the colour red, for the Robins are also financially ruined and on the brink of extinction. 

Things can only go downhill once I start talking about football, so this is my call to say cheerio, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. 

Keep the faith. 

Rachael x

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