Polls open for by-election Labour should win – but will probably lose. Here’s the reason
Keir Starmer: the name on the ballot paper may be Kim Leadbeater but the Batley & Spen by-election is a referendum on his leadership of the Labour Party – and he’s going to find that a suit, a haircut and a flag are no substitute for genuine socialist policies. That means he’s in trouble because he HATES socialism.
Voters are filing into polling booths in Batley and Spen to choose their latest MP, after Labour’s Tracy Brabin quit to become a metropolitan mayor.
Will Labour retain the seat with new candidate Kim Leadbeater, sister of murdered former MP Jo Cox? Probably not.
Why not? Here’s one reason:
https://twitter.com/jrc1921/status/1409211045370077190
She doesn’t have any policies and won’t even think about them until after she is elected – if she is.
This means Labour voters don’t know what they’re getting.
It’s Keir Starmer’s malaise, over again. If he was a serious – Labour – politician then he would have come out with serious Labour policies, and stuck with them, from the moment he announced his candidacy for the party’s leadership. He didn’t.
He pretended to support policies put forward by former leader Jeremy Corbyn and then ditched them immediately after his new position was secured. Now, more than a year later, he still stands for nothing other than power for his own sake.
We should hope that Ms Leadbeater’s experience today will show him exactly where that policy – because having no policies is a policy – leads.
Oh, there will be tribal Labour voters who’ll support a shaved monkey if it has a party logo with a red rose next to its name on the ballot paper, sure.
But the right-whingers who have been in charge since the mid-1990s (they are the reason Corbyn failed) haven’t realised they can no longer rely on this vote being large enough to carry their shaved monkey through.
Starmer’s lack of any alternatives to Tory policy makes a very clear message: he supports Tory policy.
Leadbeater’s own words put her in the same position: she says there’s “no magic money tree” – a Tory phrase, and a Tory lie, because they’ve been raiding it like bandits throughout the Covid crisis.
(For those coming late to this party: all the money used to get the UK through the pandemic was created – not borrowed – by the Conservative government, specifically for that purpose. As such, we should all bear in mind that there is no debt to be repaid.)
So traditional Labour voters are faced with a choice between the Conservative, Tory-lite Leadbeater, George Galloway, or one of 13 also-rans.
My bet is that most of them will stay at home and the Tory will romp to victory. Starmer will then blame Jeremy Corbyn – but we’ll all know the truth.
And the Labour leader’s days in power will be numbered.
He may well claim he’s in a four-year project to install a Labour government but he will never achieve that goal.
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Stammer the spammer a Tory in a red tie people’s are fed up with the Tony Blair party
Yes, ‘borrowing’ from the BoE at negative interest rates is actually ‘profitable’ It will, no doubt, be used as a further excuse to squeeze the very poorest in yet another round of victim blaming.