Promises broken: Jeremy Vine also pressed Keir Starmer on his reasons for abandoning the 10 pledges on which he was elected Labour leader.
Here’s a balancing view to set against This Site’s earlier article about Keir Starmer’s plan to tackle the cost of living crisis.
In the same Jeremy Vine interview when he discussed that plan, Starmer refused to support strike action by the TSSA (Transport Salaried Staff Association) union, saying he had to focus on his own ambition to be prime minister.
This Site’s friend Cornish Damo has this to say about it:
Keir Starmer appeared on #JeremyVine this morning & repeated he has no intention of attending picket lines now he's fixated on his own ambition of becoming Prime Minister at the next Election. They were good enough for him when he wanted to be Labour leader though… #DamoRantspic.twitter.com/mgPwhxDJux
— Damien Willey #SupportTheRMT (@KernowDamo) August 31, 2022
He’s got a good point, hasn’t he?
Starmer also discussed with Vine his u-turn on plans to renationalise the privatised energy firms; apparently the Covid-19 pandemic changed everything and now he can’t justify it.
Damo says this is nonsense and – from the arguments This Writer has heard over the last few years – he’s the one making sense:
So aside from telling striking workers to do one this morning on #JeremyVine, Starmer also faced questions on his refusal to now renationalise energy. Apparently we can't afford to now because of the pandemic. Try again & learn some economics you liar. #DamoRantspic.twitter.com/mHqa4xO5tp
— Damien Willey #SupportTheRMT (@KernowDamo) August 31, 2022
It’s all worth thinking about, when you’re weighing up whether a Starmer-led Labour Party deserves your support at the ballot box.
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Turncoat: Lisa Nandy was actually doing the right thing by joining a CWU picket line – but it was a staggering act of hypocrisy and betrayal of Keir Starmer. Why did she do it?
No wonder Keir Starmer is losing public trust to loony Liz Truss!
He sacked Sam Tarry as Shadow Transport Minister for giving interviews from a picket line last Wednesday (July 27).
Starmer said Labour could not be the “party of protest” – ignoring the possibility that a party that does not protest against government failures is the “party of collusion” with them.
It has also been suggested that Starmer has a personal animosity towards Mr Tarry – possibly over political differences.
But yesterday (August 1), key Starmer crony Lisa Nandy turned up at a CWU picket line and gave interviews there:
Meanwhile, it seems other Labour bigwigs are also defying Starmer – although it could be said that his decree about frontbenchers doesn’t extend to them…
When the inevitable leadership challenge happens- and she runs- she will say, “well, of course I support the unions. I went on the picket line when we were told not to. There’s photo evidence of that!”
The only conclusion This Writer can draw is that Labour’s current leaders have no interest in winning elections; their job is to drag that party through the dirt.
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Packed: the Young Labour rally that Keir Starmer’s Labour conference app falsely stated was cancelled. Now Young Labour is refusing to campaign for party members who break picket lines.
This may have deep repercussions across the Labour Party – and indeed the Labour Movement, although the two are now very clearly separate entities.
After Labour members of Sheffield City Council broke the picket line at that city’s university, where UCU workers were striking over pay, pensions and other working conditions, Young Labour – the party’s youth branch – has announced it will not campaign for such people in any way:
Trade unions are the bedrock of the labour movement and are at the forefront of defending workers rights against corrupt bosses and Tory governments which have harmed the lives of millions of workers.
We believe if you are elected or seek selection wearing a Labour rosette, you should always respect picket lines and the tough decision workers face to take industrial action against bad bosses.
Labour was founded by trade unionists and we are proud to continue this tradition.
We will instead direct our energy, our members and events towards contributing to the election of those Labour candidates who explicitly stand by trade unions, respect picket lines and who will unwaveringly represent workers interests in elected office.
Make no mistake – this announcement is a calculated slap in the face for Labour’s leader, Keir Starmer, who with his barely-legitimate general secretary David Evans unilaterally cancelled Young Labour’s conference, that must run alongside the main party conference, according to its rules.
That decision was apparently because the Young Labour conference would have featured an event showing solidarity with Palestine – at least, that’s how YL chair Jess Barnard saw it.
Note the line that a lack of solidarity “has no place in our movement”. Keir Starmer is fond of flinging that phrase around and this seems a deliberate choice to fling it back at him.
What will Starmer do?
Will he condemn his councillors and cause a rift with them? Will he condemn Young Labour and cause a rift with them?
Or will he just hide wherever he goes for weeks on end when difficult questions present themselves?
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The Labour Party is supposed to represent workers and working-class people, especially if they are struggling for decent pay, in-work benefits and pensions, as part of its reason for existing – wouldn’t you agree?
Members of the University and College Union have been striking in a dispute that is partly over the management and financing of the University Superannuation Scheme (USS), which provides pensions to the UK’s older universities as well as research institutes and academic thinktanks, and partly over low pay and issues including insecure fixed-term contracts used to employ an increasing number of teaching staff.
So why did Labour councillors in Sheffield not only cross a picket line but, in one case, apparently assault a picketer?
The Labour Chief Whip of Sheffield City Council Tony Damms assaulting a picket.
This after some Labour crossed a picket line to discuss whether they would support the @ucu strike.
My Solidarity with Labour Councillors who stood on the Picket.
It seems a meeting of Labour-led Sheffield City Council had been scheduled to take place in a university building – during the strike, which seems extremely insensitive of a Labour-run organisation.
These councillors were attending a pre-meeting, and it seems they crossed the picket line to do so, attracting cries of “Scab!” from some of the picketers. That’s how the incident came to take place.
Sheffield UCU subsequently released a statement:
Today, a group of Labour councillors from Sheffield City Council made a decision to use a university building, walking past a group of striking Sheffield UCU members to do so. Our statement on this is below. pic.twitter.com/BhDl2lOlne
“Today, the majority of Labour councillors entered a University of Sheffield building for a pre-meeting, and in doing so, walked past striking members of Sheffield UCU. Along with UCU members from 57 other HE institutions across the UK, today is our first day of strike action in our dispute over rampant precarity, unhealthy workloads, equal pay, and substantial cuts to our pay and pensions. These are issues that we trust would be of particular importance to the Labour party.
“We do not condone the use of university buildings during strike action, and when we learned of this meeting, had worked with the Sheffield Students Union to find an alternative location in the Students Union next door, which is treated as neutral ground during industrial action.
“We are extremely disappointed that any member of the Labour party would choose to cross past striking union members, despite being given an opportunity to support our action by simply relocating their pre-meeting to a nearby building. We understand that at this pre-meeting, the Labour members took a vote and were determined to not attend the later, full council meeting. This decision does not negate their previous choice to do so, but we are pleased they made the correct choice in the end.
“We appreciate the solidarity of those Labour, Green, and Lib Dem council members who chose to not enter the building.”
Yes indeed. Apparently the alternative, Student Union, building was turned down by councillors because they thought it was too small for social distancing.
That doesn’t excuse the Labour Party from having scheduled a meeting to take place at the university during strike action, though.
What were they thinking?
And isn’t this typical of Labour Party policy at the moment – that the challenges faced by workers and working-class people are increasingly overlooked by career politicians who are more concerned with keeping their positions as members of the Establishment?
If that’s the political position occupied by Keir Starmer’s Labour, then it is worse than useless to the people for whom that party was originally formed.
Labour Exploitation Party. They climb to the heights by walking all over us.
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“If this isn’t intimidation, I don’t know what is – it’s a very clear message to anyone: How dare you protest against us and, if you do, we’ll find you fit for work!” Anti-Atos protester Joanne Jemmett with the sign left by Atos workers outside the assessment centre in Weston-Super-Mare on Wednesday (“Fit enough to protest – fit enough to work!”) at the start of this short film documenting the demonstration there.
Watching the stories stack up in the wake of the national day of protest against Atos last Wednesday has been very interesting.
The immediate response was that Atos has approached the government, seeking an early end to its contract. This deal, under which Atos administers the hated Work Capability Assessments to people on incapacity or disability benefits, would have been worth more than £1 billion to the company over a 10-year period.
Allegedly, company employees have been receiving death threats, both during and after the protests. We’ll come back to those shortly.
The Conservative-led Coalition took this development in the way we have come to expect – spitefully. A DWP spokesperson said that the company’s service had declined to an unacceptable level, and that the government was already seeking tenders from other firms for the contract.
This is what happens when bullies squabble.
Atos is the big bully that has just had a shock because the other kids in the playground stood up to it and made it clear they weren’t going to stand for its nonsense any more. We’re told that all bullies are cowards and it appears to be true in this case – Atos went running to the bigger bully (the government) and said it was scared. The government then did what bigger bullies do; it said Atos was rubbish anyway and set about finding someone else to do its dirty work.
Here’s the sticking-point, though – as the BBC identified in its article: “The government was furious with Atos for leaking information it believes to be commercially confidential… If Atos wants to pull out early, some other companies may pay less to take those contracts on than they otherwise would.”
I should clarify that companies don’t actually pay for contracts; they offer to carry out the work at the lowest prices they think are viable, in competition with other firms. The government chooses the company it feels is best-suited to the work. In this situation, it seems likely that the possibility of death threats may put some firms off even applying.
So let’s come back to those threats. A spokesperson for the organisers of Wednesday’s demonstration tells us that pickets took place outside 93 Atos centres, across the UK. Most of these were very small – averaging 30 people or less (I can confirm that in Newtown, Powys, a maximum of 15 people attended at any one time). Brighton and London were bigger, but 12 demos had only one person present.
“That is really funny because, as you have seen, Atos are saying they had to close down all their centres for the day – up and down the country – because of huge hoards of scary, threatening disabled people issuing death threats,” the spokesperson said.
“All demos were peaceful and no trouble or arrests were reported.”
In the spokesperson’s opinion: “Atos have been planning to step down for a long time because they weren’t making enough profit and just used our tiny little demos as an excuse.”
Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and sister group Black Triangle issued a joint statement: “The bizarre exit strategy Atos have developed in identifying apparent physical threats on Facebook despite the growing lists of real deaths caused by the WCA regime is an outrageous insult to all those who have died and all those who have lost family members through this regime.
“It is an insult to those left without their homes, without money and needing to go to food banks.
“It is an insult to every person who has suffered worsening physical and mental health through this inhuman regime.”
The statement also poured water on any government claim that other companies had been put off bidding for the contract:”The alphabet corporations – G4S, A4E, SERCO, CAPITA – are already lining up to take over the multi-million profits and the mantle of the new Grim Reapers. The misery imposed by this Government and the DWP will continue as long as its heinous policies continue.”
I would strongly urge all readers to put their support behind the remainder of the statement, which asserted: “The Work Capability Assessment must also end.
“The reign of terror by this unelected Coalition Government which has awarded itself pay rises and cut taxes for those earning more than £150,000 while piling punishment, poverty, misery and premature death on everyone else in its policies of rich against poor must end.
“Make no mistake – we will continue to demonstrate against ATOS, now delivering the complete failure of PIP in which claims are being delayed by up to a year.
“We will demonstrate against any other company that takes over the WCA contract.
“We will continue to demand the immediate removal of the WCA, and the removal of this Government.”
Hear, hear.
In my article on the Bedroom Tax evictions taking place in my home town (yesterday) I made it clear that too few people are bothering to pay attention to the evils of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government. That article received a huge response, garnering almost four times the readership of other recent posts within just 24 hours.
The situation described in this article is much worse – people aren’t being evicted from their homes; they are being forced off of the benefits that have kept them alive, pushed – by the government! – towards destitution, despair and death through either suicide or a failure of their health that their Atos assessment results deny should ever take place.
Today’s article should have more readers, after the success of yesterday’s – but we’ll have to see, shan’t we? If fewer people read it, we’ll know that they all just looked up for a moment, thought, “Oh, that’s interesting,” and went back to whatever distraction keeps them happy in the face of impending government-sponsored pain.
Any attempt to inform the public will fail if the public stops paying attention.
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So now we know that Margaret Thatcher lied about the scale of her attack on the British mining industry.
She told the country that only 20 pits were to be closed, when in secret she and National Coal Board chief Ian Macgregor had planned to close no less than 75.
The revelation vindicates then-National Union of Mineworkers’ leader Arthur Scargill, who claimed at the time that there was a “secret hit-list” of more than 70 pits marked for closure.
Documents released under what used to be called the Thirty Year Rule show that under the plan, two-thirds of Welsh miners would become redundant, a third of those in Scotland, almost half of those in north east England, half in South Yorkshire and almost half in the South Midlands. The entire Kent coalfield would close.
The workforce was to be cut by about a third, from 202,000 to 138,000.
Thatcher went on to use the lie as an excuse to break the power of the trade unions, setting the scene for the long decline in employees’ rights that has brought us to the current sorry situation in which part-time work, zero-hours contracts and fake ‘self-employed’ status are robbing us of what few entitlements we have left.
She used the police as a political weapon to attack picket lines, sowing seeds of distrust that persist to this day. How many people who saw the scenes of carnage during the miners’ strike can honestly say they trust the police to uphold the law without fear or favour? Is it not more accurate to say they fear the police as agents of a ruling elite?
She destroyed Britain’s ability to provide fuel for our own power stations, leading us into dependence on foreign powers for our energy needs. It is this helplessness – caused by the policies of that Conservative Prime Minister – that has put so many British families into fuel poverty under the current Conservative Prime Minister, forcing them to choose between heating and eating.
In short, Margaret Thatcher owes compensation to a huge number of British people.
Some might consider it a lucky escape for her that she died last year and will avoid our wrath, but then again, considering her state of mind at the end it is unlikely that she would have recognised what it was.
Perhaps it will be possible for some of her victims to claim compensation from her estate; that will be a matter for them.
But other leading Conservatives and civil servants were in on the plot – and they should not be allowed to walk away unpunished. These include:
Nigel Lawson (Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time).
Norman Tebbit (Employment Secretary).
Sir Robert Armstrong (now Baron Armstrong of Ilminster, Secretary of the Cabinet in 1983). Armstrong has denied that there was a cover-up – an astonishing claim when documentation shows there was an agreement not to keep records of the secret meetings in which the plans were hatched and developed.
Peter Gregson (although he may also be dead; attempts to determine his status have turned up nothing).
They all knew about the lie and could all have told the truth but they did not.
They betrayed Britain.
Will they escape justice?
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Caught with his trousers down: Herr Flick from ‘Allo Allo’ – possibly the last secret policeman to be revealed in quite such an embarrassing way.
So now not only are our students facing the prospect of a life in debt, paying off the cost of their education (thanks, Liberal Democrats!) but they know they can expect the police to be spying on them in case they do anything radical, student-ish and treasonous like joining UK Uncut and occupying a shop to publicise the corporate tax avoidance our Tory-led government encourages.
Rather than investigate and solve crimes, it seems the police are embracing their traditional role (under Conservative governments) as political weapons – targeting suspected dissenters against their right-wing government’s policies, trying to undermine their efforts and aiming to apprehend key figures.
They are behaving like secret police, in fact. Allow this to go much further and we will have our own Gestapo, here in Britain. Before anyone starts invoking Godwin’s Law, just take a look at the evidence; it is a justifiable comparison.
According to The Guardian, police have been caught trying to spy on the political activities of students at Cambridge University. It had to be Cambridge; Oxford is traditionally the ‘Tory’ University.
The officer concerned tried to get an activist to rat on other students in protest groups in return for money, but the student turned the tables on him by wearing a hidden camera to record a meeting and expose the facts.
The policeman, identified by the false name ‘Peter Smith’, “wanted the activist to name students who were going on protests, list the vehicles they travelled in to demonstrations, and identify leaders of protests. He also asked the activist to search Facebook for the latest information about protests that were being planned.
“The other proposed targets of the surveillance include UK Uncut, the campaign against tax avoidance and government cuts, Unite Against Fascism and environmentalists” – because we all know how dangerous environmentalists are!
Here at Vox Political, it feels as though we have come full circle. One of the events that sparked the creation of this blog was the police ‘kettling’ of students demonstrating against the rise in tuition fees, back in 2010. It was a sign that the UK had regressed to the bad old days of the Thatcher government, when police were used (famously) to intimidate, annihilate and subjugate picketing miners.
Back then, BBC news footage was doctored to make it seem the miners had been the aggressors; fortunately times have changed and now, with everyone capable of filming evidence with their mobile phones, it is much harder for such open demonstrations of political repression to go unremarked.
This would be bad enough if it was a single incident, taken in isolation – but it isn’t. It is part of a much wider attack on the citizens of this country by institutions whose leaders should know better.
The UK is now in the process of removing the rights it has taken nearly a thousand years for its citizens to win.
It is a country that abuses the sick and disabled.
And it is a country where free speech will soon be unheard-of; where the police – rather than investigate crimes – proactively target political dissenters, spying on anyone they suspect of disagreeing with the government and looking for ways to silence them.
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