Starmer: Standing Up For The Powerful Against The Powerless

Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil. 

You can hold your nose and grit your teeth if you wish, it is your right to do so, but I am a socialist and I cannot give my vote to a man and a party that has done more to attack socialism and socialists than the Conservatives. 

I appreciate the importance of getting the Tories out more than most. I played my part in launching #GTTO some time ago - oddly enough, many of the people that use the tag on Twitter these days used to prefer screaming #FBPE at us. 

Isn’t it strange how getting the Tories out between 2015 and 2019 wasn’t a priority for the same people that insist it’s the only thing that matters today? 

The last five years didn’t need to happen. 

We didn’t need to have one of the worst responses in the world to the arrival of Covid-19. 

We didn’t need to hand over billions of your money to any old Tom, Dick, and Harry with links to the Conservative party. 

We didn’t need to go through the grotesque scandal that became ‘Partygate’. 

We didn’t need to leave the European Union on the terms of the ERG. 

We didn’t need to open up our National Health Service to deeper cuts and further privatisation. 

We didn’t need to have four economically illiterate Tory Prime Ministers in just five years. 

We didn’t need to go through the Owen Paterson scandal and the repulsive greed of the MPs that think being elected as a member of parliament is their second job.

We didn’t need to have a Prime Minister decorating his family flat at Number 11 Downing Street with £840-a-roll wallpaper, paid for by a rich Tory donor. 

We didn’t have to have the oppressive Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill - a hugely concerning and widespread attack on our human rights. 

We didn’t need to see worsening poverty, the choice between heating or eating, the largest drop in living standards on record, and a huge economy tanked by a Prime Minister that was outlasted by a fucking lettuce. 

Do you see where I’m coming from? 

You vote for whoever you want, apathy isn’t the way forward, but we will never forget how we ended up where we find ourselves today, so don’t expect us to fall in line because your choice of Tory isn’t quite as right-wing as the other one. 

I’m not quite sure how, but stale Starmer has managed to halve his poll lead over the Tories over the last few weeks. 

In fact, a new poll from Savanta has Starmer’s Labour just 11% ahead of the slowly-dying Tories, although fans of Sir Keith might point to other polls and suggest this is just an outlier. Time will tell. 

Here’s where I think Starmer is losing a lead that was once a seemingly insurmountable 36%. 

Starmer’s Labour has failed the working classes, many of whom are low paid, being told their wages will face a real-terms pay cut, and are quite rightly exercising their right to withhold their labour. 

Ask Starmer or any of his shadow cabinet to offer vocal support for nurses, posties and train workers, or ask them to commit to a pay rise that keeps up with inflation and they fall apart. 

Keir Starmer is too scared to upset the right-wing British press and too spineless to admit to left-of-centre voters that he doesn’t have a left-wing bone in his body - because he needs those votes to win back vast swathes of the red wall that he lost in 2019 with his ludicrous Brexit policy. 

Another contributing factor to the decline in Labour’s poll lead is the hideous treatment of the former party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. 

Some 12,877,918 people voted for Corbyn’s Labour in 2017 - despite the centrist sabotage just a year before. 

This was Labour’s highest vote share since 2001, representing its highest increase in vote share between two general elections since 1945. 

It was the first election since 1997 in which the Tories made a net loss of seats or Labour a net gain of seats. 

The 2017 election had the closest result between Labour and the Tories since February 1974. 

Just because Starmer and his shadow cabinet despise Jeremy Corbyn it doesn’t mean the millions that believed in the hope and vision of Corbyn’s brand of politics (we call it socialism) automatically feel the same way. 

The grubby smear campaign designed to delegitimise Mr Corbyn’s decades of anti-racism was a truly vile attack against a thoroughly decent man.

Stopping Corbyn from standing as a Labour MP at the next general election - for refusing to apologise for being honest about the vastly exaggerated ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’ - is spiteful, unnecessary, and entirely consistent with Keir Starmer’s campaign of anti-socialism. 

Go, Jeremy, leave this pile of steaming red Tory shit to fester in its own sewer. You are better than this. You are better than them. 

One thing we could take for granted under the leadership of Jeremy was the simple fact that a huge corporation or a shady donor couldn’t buy their own piece of the Labour Party. 

You cannot say the same for Starmer’s Labour Party which would appear to be going through the early stages of privatisation. 

At least two Tory donors have gifted the Labour Party with thousands of pounds and Starmer and his shadow cabinet are on a charm offensive in the City of London. 

Labour will put big business before striking workers because big business has invested in access and influence within Starmer’s version of the Labour Party. 

We could rely on a huge membership and close cooperation with the trade unions, yet Starmer and his band of inadequate careerists have alienated 180,000 former party members and continue to fail the many trade unionists that once believed the Labour Party was the natural vehicle for societal change. 

Has Starmer blown it? It’s too early to say.

But the more Starmer refuses to support working class people, fiddles selection processes, disrespects the former leader, fails to offer a vision for a better Britain, and sells the heart and soul of the Labour Party to the rich and powerful, the further his poll lead will head southwards. 

Keir Starmer has missed numerous open goals, beyond anything Harry Kane could ever manage, and he has failed to take advantage of his huge poll lead by refusing to set out a vision that puts a bit of hope back on the agenda. 

Keir Starmer promised to make the “moral case for socialism” - his words, not mine. 

Do you think Starmer had made any case for socialism? The bloke is an absolute fraud of a Labour leader that lied his way into the top job. 

Prove me wrong, Starmer fans, prove to me your establishment quisling of a leader didn’t mislead the Labour Party membership in 2020. 

You can’t. You must enjoy being lied to. Will you doff your cap and tug your forelock for Keir Starmer like you did for the disgraced Boris Johnson? 

Make Brexit Work? Opposing the Tory Brexit would be a fucking good start. 

Starmer embraced the People's Vote Ltd campaign because it offered him the best possible chance of stabbing Corbyn in the back. 

Where is he now, fellow Remainers that accepted the fraudulent 2016 referendum? It was a matter of life or death to the con artist Starmer, wasn’t it? 

Face it, Starmer is just another lying posh boy politician, a member of the political class, and he will gladly shit on each and every one of us to get to where he wants to be. 

If the poll lead continues to slide in the coming weeks and months this will be down to the awfulness of Keir Starmer and the Tory-lite shambles that he calls a shadow cabinet. 

Warmongers, lobbyists, privateers, the right-wing media, Tory donors, this Labour Party belongs to you, because I am a socialist, and proudly so. 

I wholeheartedly believe in compassion, equality, justice, unity, dignity for all, and holding power to account, and that’s pretty much everything that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party doesn’t stand for. 

What a desperately sad waste of a once-great political movement. 

The chance for change was real, but the only change we might see is the colour of the rosette that is in government, beyond that you’ll notice very little difference between the two contenders, because once again, they’re all the bloody same. 

Thanks for reading. 

Rachael 

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