Where Is The Leadership? Tax The Rich, Not The Poor
Bonafide leadership isn’t just about the next general election, it's about the next generation, for many of the decisions made today will shape the future for many years to come.
This vacuum of leadership in Brexit Britain was always predictable. Don’t get me wrong, I reluctantly accepted the inevitable departure some four years ago, and like many of you, I felt we had to try and make the best of a bad situation. Pragmatism, if you like.
But how do we make the best of a bad situation without some urgently needed sort of vision from those at the very top?
On one hand you’ve got Johnson. The only thing this ridiculous speckle of humanity could ever lead is the queue to defend the indefensible.
And then not quite on the other hand, such are his ludicrous, lacklustre, and utterly lamentable attempts to sit on the fence long enough to gauge public opinion, is Keir Starmer, who you wouldn’t leave in charge of a lucky dip stall at the local village fete.
I think this is roughly how it works.
The electorate tends to buy into the person before they buy into the vision.
Johnson managed to persuade enough people to buy into him, the person, and while I cannot stand the philandering liar, enough people could stand him - in fact, some absolutely adore him and would gladly let him add to his other "three hundred thousand, and thirty four, nine hundred and seventy four thousand" children.
Cheers Priti.
Johnson could have promised forty new hospitals and no rise in National Insurance, oh, that’s right… but it doesn’t matter, because enough people decided to buy into Boris Johnson, the person. He could have promised a new prosperous outward-looking post-Brexit Britain, free from the shackles of the unelected bureaucrats - not including Dominic Cummings and hundreds of unelected crony peers - with unlimited amounts of free sovereignty for everyone, once the big red bullshit bus dropped you off next to the sunlit uplands. None of this matters to the people that support Boris Johnson, because they have invested themselves in the person.
As a few folk on social media will know, once you climb up a hill, it’s very hard to climb back down again, through fear of looking weak, or ridiculous.
So that’s one of your leaders. An incompetent compulsive liar with the blood of tens of thousands of your loved ones on his hands. Nearly every promise he makes gets trashed, whether you’re a voter or a lover, Boris Johnson will screw you over.
A good leader adds value to others, but to do that Boris Johnson would have to value other people, but he doesn’t. The quality of a good leader should be reflected in the standards that Johnson sets for himself. But Johnson doesn’t set himself any standards, you know this, and so do I.
And what about the other leader, Sir Keir Starmer?
My feelings for him are well known. Starmer isn’t a leader, he is a failed manager, and a shit failed manager at that. There’s a simple difference: Leadership is inspiring people. Management is keeping the trains running on time.
Mr Starmer is a failure junkie. He thrives off failing. If something needs failing, Keith is your man. Do you need examples? Not a problem.
Keir Starmer promised to unite the Labour Party. There would be no knocking of Jeremy Corbyn and no besmirching of Tony Blair. I think it’s fair to say he failed, if the purge of socialists by the anti-socialists in the Labour Party is anything to go by.
In April 2020, Britain hit the first peak of the Coronavirus pandemic. More than 1,000 people were tragically dying, every single day. How much of this could have been avoided if Johnson acted sooner? Starmer was supposed to hold Johnson’s feet to the fire. He didn’t need to be critical for the sake of it, but he did need to ask some searching questions. But you know what happened, he told reporters that now isn’t the time to ask difficult questions of the government.
As failures go, that one was pretty damn massive. You see, failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying. But Starmer never started trying in the first place, and that is his biggest failure of all.
I will never forgive Keir Starmer. He lied to all of us. He promised us a leadership that would argue “the moral case for socialism” - his words, not mine. I haven’t seen any morality from this leadership, and the word “socialism” in the Labour Party ranks can only be whispered through fear of being purged from the Party.
Let them purge you. This Labour Party is dead and buried I’m afraid. Hold on to your cash. Why on earth would you want to fund Luke Akehurst’s tea and biscuits anyway?
A Labour Party with someone like Akehurst sitting at the top table while socialists like Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn are cast aside is a Labour Party I will campaign against in the same way I would campaign against this hideous government.
I’ve spent many weeks writing about the disaster that is Keir Starmer, and barely a week goes by where I fail to think of the promised land of twenty points ahead of the Tories under anyone but Jeremy Corbyn.
Of course, the latest poll from YouGov puts the Labour Party ONE whole point ahead of Johnson’s Tories, and the Starmerrhoids will tell you this is because Keith’s message is finally starting to cut through with the electorate. But the reality is a collapse in support for Johnson following the announcement of the rise in National Insurance contributions for the low paid working classes - we’ll talk a bit more about that in a moment - but expect a Tory recovery when Johnson makes another impossible promise and Priti Hindley sinks a few rubber dinghies in the English Channel.
So I fully believe Britain is bereft of leadership, at this moment in time.
And the most painful thing? It didn’t need to be this way. Just a couple of years back the Labour Party had a leader. He came up with the idea of a National Care Service, free broadband for all, and an NHS that had the funding it needed - and the top 5% of earners would pay a tiny bit more tax to help fund it.
Doesn’t sound so radical now, does it?
The same leader inflicted more parliamentary defeats on a government than any other opposition leader, on record. And what makes this more remarkable is the fact he achieved this with a constant barrage of abuse from a vitriolic Tory press, and as Jeremy told me himself, he only ever really had the full support of ten, maybe fifteen Labour MPs!
That was leadership, despite what the bullshit establishment media tell you, that was real leadership.
This middle-ranking office manager stuff from Starmer is about as appealing as clipping Boris Johnson’s overgrown toenails with your teeth.
So that’s what I think. We have no leadership. HMS Brexit Britain is guided by a rudderless Prime Minister, and even if he were to walk the plank, and the establishment decide to give Starmer a chance, it will not make a jot of difference. You can change the captain, but the direction of the ship remains the same.
We’ll talk about Andy Burnham another time.
I want to finish by briefly mentioning the National Insurance increase.
Yes Mr Johnson, we certainly do have a “broken social care system”. But we also have a broken manifesto commitment. Yet another lie from the prolific liar.
So who should pay to fix this broken system?
The low paid, of course.
It was the poor, low paid and disabled that paid for the banking crisis, so why would we expect this to be any different?
Here’s an idea or two, Prime Minister.
If you refuse to do away with useless nukes and and a vanity project train, why not introduce a one-off 5% Wealth Tax?
Applying this levy to net assets of more than £500,000 - affecting around 8 million residents - would take in, are you ready for this?
£262 BILLION.
This towers over the measly £36 billion this national insurance increase will bring in over the space of three years.
Why fuck the poor of you can tax the rich?
That’s your social care paid for. That’s your backlog of cancelled operations sorted. That’s a big chunk of the Covid debt wiped off.
But of course, making a fundamental change like this would require leadership, and that takes us right back to where we started.
In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Never give up on fighting for a better tomorrow.
Talk soon,
Rachael x
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