Keir Starmer: he has bored most of us away from Labour and now he wants his boring friends to finish the job if he can’t.
It seems Keir Starmer is determined to steer Labour into disaster – from behind the scenes, if he has to.
After handing in his questionnaire about possible breaches of Covid-19 lockdown rules at an online campaigning event last year, it seems he has contacted the people he sees as potential successors, instructing them to prepare for a leadership contest.
These include Lisa Nandy, Yvette Cooper, and even Wes Streeting. God help the Labour Party if any of them get the top spot!
Apparently he has told friends, “I will not let our hard-won gains be squandered so we will need to be ready in the unlikely event that the worst comes to worst.”
What “hard-won gains”?
Under Starmer, Labour has haemorrhaged party members and, if it hasn’t lost seats, it has certainly failed to gain them. He has struggled to gain even a polling parity with the most overtly corrupt Tory prime minister of our lifetimes.
Starmer’s time as Labour leader has been an abject failure. Any leadership by his anointed successors will certainly continue the trend.
Labour’s controversial shadow cabinet reshuffle brought one particular MP back to the frontline of politics after several years on the backbenches: Yvette Cooper.
Centrists have made a huge fuss about this, saying that Cooper’s appointment as shadow Home Secretary is hugely important in making Labour electable again…
… only to have all their work rubbished in a few seconds by BBC newscaster Clive Myrie, while presenting Have I Got News For You:
One person’s idea of a political heavyweight is another person’s idea of political baggage. This is well put. pic.twitter.com/QGlFTiXjAn
Ian Hislop says that Keir Starmer has finally brought ‘some sensible people’ into the Shadow Cabinet and Clive Myrie rightly points out that Yvette Cooper is an absolute proven failure. The look on Hislop’s face. #HIGNFY
The look on Hislop’s face can hardly be worse than the look on the faces of all those hard-right (Centrist! Ha!) goons when their golden girl proves she still has feet of clay.
Starmtrooper Cooper may have marched onto Labour’s front bench but she all she’ll do there is fail again.
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The rivals: but Yvette Cooper (left) and Priti Patel (right) will be vying to see which of them can come up with the most right-wing – if not downright fascist – policies.
Cornish Damo got this right in his latest Rant: “Refugees and disabled people beware!”
Yes, Yvette Cooper is back as Shadow Home Secretary, a position she filled in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet from 2011-2015.
Fascinating how the fact Yvette Cooper was Shadow Home Secretary from 2011-2015 has been completely forgotten, for a very good reason – she was completely and utterly invisible in the role, except for occasional gratuitous pandering to migrant bashing rhetoric
Blairites and centrists are full of glee that Sir Keir Starmer has promoted Yvette Cooper to his Shadow Cabinet
Let me remind you that she introduced the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) in 2008. It has led to the persecution of hundreds thousands of disabled people ever since
Coopers policy oversaw the excess deaths of thousands. Cooper laid the groundwork, and was responsible for, setting in motion the Tories regime of welfare cuts and system of testing to the most vulnerable of our citizens, many of whom would have been Labour voters.
Great to see Yvette Cooper back at the top table & great everyone has forgiven her for approving plans to make the ESA medical harder to pass, by docking points from amputees who can use their stumps to lift, or getting people that struggle to walk using an imaginary wheelchair..
Yvette Cooper’s DWP, April 2010, Iain Duncan Smith’s inspiration.
Claimants with speech problems who can write a sign saying, for example, “the office is on fire”, will score no points for speech, & deaf claimants who can read the sign will lose all of their points for hearing.
Yvette Cooper – As DWP secretary forced disabled people on incapacity benefit to take fit-to-work tests run by Atos, despite well-documented problems with the tests wrongly finding people fit to work https://t.co/q7cLsZ3n94
Voted for use of UK military forces in combat operations overseas (x8)
Voted for replacing Trident with a new nuclear weapons system (x4)
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush 🟨🟥🥀🇵🇸 (@WarmongerHodges) November 29, 2021
Yvette Cooper voted for the Iraq War. She subsequently opposed holding an inquiry into the war & voted to block an inquiry multiple times. pic.twitter.com/mLl6PUkGbd
— Julie Harrington 💚💜💜💙Refugees Welcome ❤️ (@celtjules66) November 29, 2021
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Not communicating: Angela Rayner (left) and Keir Starmer (right… far right) aren’t looking at each other in the image, and it seems there’s not much communication going on elsewhere either.
Keir Starmer has shot himself in the foot – yet again – with a surprise reshuffle timed to upset his deputy, and that gave his critics a chance to pillory him in public.
Angela Rayner was giving a speech at the Institute for Government think tank on lobbying, following up on the Owen Paterson second jobs scandal, when it became clear that Starmer had started reshuffling his top team.
She had known a reshuffle was coming but had not been given any details, meaning she had no details when asked about it.
Instead, she said: “I do know that what we have to do is show that we are a government in waiting and that we have to be the next government because we can’t carry on like this,” she said. We need some consistency in how we’re approaching things as an opposition.”
That could be interpreted as criticism of Starmer’s behaviour.
Of course, as Deputy Leader, elected by the party membership, Rayner is the only senior Labour representative Starmer can’t sack. He should be ensuring that she is always fully-informed but instead he appears to be playing silly games.
At the other end of the spectrum, Starmer did have the power to sack Cat Smith – but she didn’t give him the chance. Instead, she turned down his request for her to remain Shadow Minister for Young People and Democracy, in protest at his mistreatment of Jeremy Corbyn.
“It’s been an honour to serve on the Labour front bench since 2015 but I’m looking forward to spending even more time at home here in Lancashire and standing up for my constituents,” she wrote. “Even more time at home”? Was this a veiled claim to have been excluded?
On Mr Corbyn, she said Starmer’s position was “utterly unsustainable” and told him: “It is important that you truly understand how much damage this is causing in Constituency Labour Parties and amongst ordinary members, a number of whom are no longer campaigning.”
Mr Corbyn isn’t the only reason people are deserting Starmer. A recent appearance on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show was featured on Channel 4’s Gogglebox – and you can see support for the Labour leader draining away as the segment progressed:
This clip is a good illustration of why Starmer still hasn't cut through with the public despite being Labour leader for over a year and half and crucially, despite the worst government and Prime Minister ever.. https://t.co/A2JhDAd6lu
His reshuffle decisions won’t win back any doubters either. Headline appointment was Yvette Cooper, replacing Nick Thomas-Symonds as Shadow Home Secretary.
Just when you think starmers labour could not get any worst
David Lammy replaced Lisa Nandy as Shadow Foreign Secretary, and Wes Streeting replaced Jonathan Ashworth as Shadow Health Secretary.
A Starmer reshuffle, will anyone bloody notice?
I mean the three names being bandied around have only done exactly as Starmer does – stand for nothing, take no concrete positions on anything, deny ever promising a damn thing & supporting the Tories!
Still, what could we expect from the Labour leader who, we were reminded over the weekend, has put homophobia up with anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism in general and sexism as his most clearly-supported policies?
David Blunkett at the end of this makes your jaw drop. In 2021 @Keir_Starmer has given him a position reviewing the future of work. If a Corbyn supporter had said such a thing it would be the topic of a panorama doc and a week of James O’Brien rants on LBC pic.twitter.com/4uG6S2nwlG
Could we maybe have some sort of statement from Starmer's Amazing Collapsing Circus about whether they too think gay people have 'bizarre and unacceptable lifestyles' (David Blunkett)?
Will this get me banned? I don’t know, but David Blunkett – what an absolute c**t. Obviously such homophobic c**ts are welcomed by @Keir_Starmer and @UKLabour. Unlike socialists, who are being shown the door at a rapid pace. #DavidBlunkett#homophobes
— (((Brian Capaloff))) #GTTO 💙 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ (@cocteau8) November 28, 2021
Blunkett has made appalling gay-hating comments: Starmer has appointed him to a 'council of skills advisers'. Any other demographics you'd care to alienate, Sir Keir?
Flailing, Starmer tried to regain some credibility by swearing on Tory supporter Nick Robinson’s show, Political Thinking.
Trouble is, he was talking about honesty – and we all know that he is thoroughly dishonest. Below please find just one (mild) example of Starmer’s fibbing.
Blimey what with his 10 pledges, he must be relying on the media not to annihilate him 😂 pic.twitter.com/mYzlMJCQqK
Starmer can’t even properly shaft political opponents in his own party. He’ll never get the better of the Tories.
What a missed opportunity that he didn’t reshuffle himself out of the Shadow Cabinet.
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Were Theresa May’s talks with Jeremy Corbyn a sham, intended to run down the clock on the extension to Article 50 that was established after she failed to persuade Parliament to pass her dire withdrawal deal? Was it part of a plan to shift the blame for a bad Brexit onto Labour?
Was she hoping to present the nation with a fait accompli – of leaving the EU with no deal at all, because she has made it perfectly clear that she won’t cancel Brexit? That would have been the only alternative, if the EU did not grant a further extension.
But was the EU likely to refuse another extension? The bloc has previously made it clear that it did not want the UK to leave at all, but recently it seems attitudes of some countries have changed. France persuaded Belgium and Spain to support a “no deal” Brexit, we heard last week, so the expected result was by no means certain.
Was Mrs May secretly hoping that she would be forced into a delay, and the EU would support it? That’s a possibility – especially if you listen to ‘Leave’ supporters who claim that the prime minister never abandoned her loyalty to the cause of remaining in the EU.
Well, now she has to request an extension, and a motion to go before the Commons today (April 9) will set the new new Brexit date as June 30.
The EU may decide not to accept that date, preferring a longer period. Either way, it seems the UK is set to take part in the next European Parliament elections on May 23. The UK may only remain in the EU for slightly more than a month after that poll, but it cannot stay as a member state without representation (which may disappoint ‘Leave’ supporters who have been claiming that the UK doesn’t have representation in the bloc, despite all the evidence to the contrary).
Or have I missed something? If so, I wouldn’t be at all surprised, as the goalposts are now being moved on a daily – sometimes several times per day – basis.
And what’s happening in the Tory-Labour Brexit talks?
Your guess is as good as anybody’s, it seems.
“Talks have to mean a movement, and so far there has been no change in those ‘red lines’,” according to Jeremy Corbyn, talking to the BBC.
That’s the situation: Limbo. Meanwhile the real problems facing the UK – not least because of the expected effects of Brexit – are being allowed to go unaddressed.
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