Tag Archives: Sun

Also in the news: Keir Starmer’s betrayals of Labour are coming back to bite him

Keir Starmer: he never looks sure of what he’s doing, does he? One has to wonder if he’s being worked from behind.

It’s looking bleak for Keir Starmer as unions and constituency Labour Party organisations turn against him.

Skwawkbox provides an excellent chronicle of the conflict in Labour between the socialists who represent the soul of the party and the right-wing entryists, led by Starmer, who are working hard to wreck it, and This Site would like to direct you to the information that may be found there, such as the following:

Bootle Labour Party demands Starmer’s resignation over S**m column

The operative part of this is the wording of the motion that has won unanimous support from Bootle CLP:

Bootle CLP strongly condemns the party leader Sir Keir Starmer for his decision to renege on his promise to the people of Merseyside made during his leadership election campaign, to not speak to the S*n newspaper.

Therefore Bootle CLP calls for the resignation of the Leader of the Labour Party Sir Keir Starmer, on the grounds we no longer have any confidence in his leadership, as he says one thing, and then does the other.

Socialist lawyers condemn Starmer for suspending new NCC member

Well, you can trust Starmer to do the dirty on the Labour left – but of course he would never admit it.

Still, isn’t it strange that, days before the election of a new chairperson for the party’s National Constitutional Committee, which is still its only quasi-judicial disciplinary body (even if it doesn’t work properly, as This Writer knows too well), its newest left-wing member was suddenly suspended under suspicious circumstances.

Rheian Davies

who is a solicitor and a member of the [Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers], was suspended by Labour last week over years-old and entirely accurate posts on social media and in a private group.

The Haldane Society posted a statement on Twitter condemning the attack by Starmer and his administrative sidekick David Evans on Ms Davies and on member democracy… In February, Haldane banned Keir Starmer from membership, saying that he was ineligible because he is ‘demonstrably not a socialist’ and condemned him ‘in the strongest possible terms’ for his conduct since winning the Labour leadership election on a set of false promises.

Starmer fights £20 weekly Universal Credit cut with plan to ‘pause’ VAT – saving 35p per week per person

Perhaps Starmer thinks we should be grateful that he – well, Rachel Reeves actually – has finally announced a policy. But it’s a stinker!

The party plans to ‘pause’ VAT on fuel in response to soaring energy costs. But VAT on fuel is at 5% and the average energy bill for a family of four adults at the moment is around £30 a week.

At a 5p saving in the pound, that’s just £1.50 per week – or 35p a week for each of the four household members.

Starmer’s other idea is a cut in business rates. Businesses pay 20% VAT and most can claim this back in full routinely anyway.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Starmer’s Sun article hasn’t just betrayed Liverpool but the whole Labour movement


This Writer heard yesterday (October 2) that Labour ‘leader’ Keir Starmer had written an editorial for The Sun but I refrained from commenting in the hope that the negative response elsewhere might encourage him to see sense and withdraw the piece.

Well, that was a forlorn hope!

Of course, he had made no commitment not to write for The Sun. Certainly, while campaigning to be party leader in Liverpool, he had said he would not have anything to do with that rag during the course of his leadership campaign. Some of us questioned that caveat at the time.

Having anything to do with The Sun has been taboo for Labour since the Hillsborough tragedy, after which that paper colluded with the Conservatives to publish shocking lies about the event that smeared and insulted the people of Liverpool.

Liverpudlians have shunned the rag for more than 30 years, and Labour has done the same in solidarity with the city that the Conservatives so badly wronged –

– apart from a handful of arrogant right-wingers who thought they knew better.

And now Starmer has joined their number – fatally torpedoing Labour’s chances of election under his leadership.

Possibly the worst insult of all (I haven’t bothered to read the piece; why would anyone?) is that Starmer has apparently repeated his lie that Jeremy Corbyn led Labour to its worst defeat since 1935. In terms of the number of votes cast for the party, that simply isn’t true…

… and it just reinforces the impression we have of a liar who does not deserve our support.

Don’t just take my word about the damage Starmer has done to the Labour Party:

It is particularly telling that Liverpool’s Labour MPs have condemned their ‘leader’ and his silly Tory-wooing antics:

… along with other Labour MPs whose hearts are in the right (rather than the right-wing) place:

Last word? Try this:

If you are a supporter of genuine Labour values, then this man and his hangers-on simply aren’t worth your time.

Spurn him as you would spurn a rabid dog. Shun him in the same way Liverpool shuns The Sun.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Outrage as Labour MP writes in The Sun. Where is Starmer?

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has betrayed the people of one of its stronghold cities by allowing one of its shadow ministers to write an article in The Sun, days after the death of a victim of the Hillsborough tragedy that that rag misrepresented so grievously.

And Wes Streeting isn’t even sorry about it (yet). Is it because he’s an out-of-touch Londoner who thinks he’s above the concerns of people in the North?

The Ilford North MP was putting forward the latest part of Starmer’s campaign to turn the clock back to 1997, with a “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” attitude that focused on child poverty. But, as one commenter put it, when has any UK political party claimed to be soft on crime?

On Twitter, he said he had written an article in The Sun:

Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves then retweeted the announcement, making it clear that this was a move that had been endorsed – hypocritically, but we’ll come to that – by the Labour Party leadership.

The choice to write for Rupert Murdoch’s far-right hate-rag was highly controversial – and Streeting’s justification for it was risible:

While it may once have been true that Labour-leaning voters read The Sun (most of its readership in the 1980s voted Labour and bought it to get angry at the pro-Tory bias it contained), those days are long gone. Dwindling readership means it is now a loss-making minority-interest hack-rag, written by rabid Tories, for rabid Tories.

Those are the voters Wes Streeting wants to attract to Labour.

Labour can happily do without them – and him. He has made his own political preferences abundantly clear:

And he could not have done this at a worse time.

Remember: The Sun blamed the people of Liverpool for the Hillsborough disaster that killed 96 people, when in fact the responsibility lay with the police. Its editors and publisher (Murdoch) colluded with Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government and the police to push on us a lie that Liverpool fans caused the deaths.

The people of Liverpool have never forgiven Murdoch and his filthy little toilet-paper periodical has been boycotted there ever since. Traditionally, Labour has supported this choice – until now.

That’s a general rule – but it became far more specific this week because Streeting chose to publish his article in the sun only days after the death of Andrew Devine, who became the 97th victim of Hillsborough.

It was an act of phenomenal insensitivity, and arrogance bordering on callousness.

Labour – and left-wing – voices who genuinely seek to represent the people – especially when faced by Establishment lies and corruption – have leapt to condemn Streeting:

Streeting’s monumental insensitivity can possibly be best described by comparing his desire to chum up with the Conservative rag and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attitude – which was to have nothing to do with it and to seek to reduce the power and influence of its owner:

And what of the current Labour leader?

Remember above, where I mentioned that Labour’s bosses have endorsed Streeting’s article and it is hypocritical? Here’s the reason: in January last year, during a Labour leadership campaign hustings in – guess where? – Liverpool, Starmer attacked The Sun, saying he wouldn’t be giving any interviews to Murdoch’s rag. However…

… did you spot the “get-out” clause in his speech? He said he wouldn’t be giving any interviews to The Sun “during this campaign”. Labour members in Liverpool – and elsewhere – saw it as support for their campaign – “don’t buy The Sun“. They were all mistaken.

He was only saying it for effect.

He was only saying it to dupe them into voting for him.

And now he is actively courting The Sun‘s (dwindling) readership, via Streeting.

I wonder what good he thinks this highly-visible about-turn will do him – especially at a time when a poll of the British public shows that we want him to resign:

On the basis of this disgusting betrayal, Starmer’s departure – and that of Tory suck-up Streeting – can’t come soon enough.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Did the media delay Matt Hancock ‘affair’ story to keep Labour’s useless leader in place?

Hancock and Starmer: it seems evidence of the former’s affair was held by a Tory-supporting newspaper in order to bolster the latter’s position in the polls, because Starmer is considered a better advert for keeping the Tories in power than Hancock.

Here’s a disturbing new wrinkle in the story of Matt Hancock’s affair with Gina Coladangelo and his fall from the UK Cabinet.

According to Jeremy Corbyn’s former spokesman Matt Zarb-Cousin, The Sun – a member of the UK’s mass media that insists on calling itself a newspaper while consistently failing to meet the standards required – had evidence of Hancock’s affair for a considerable period of time before publishing it.

He reckons that… periodical… sat on the CCTV image, waiting for the best moment to use it – a moment that would create a political advantage for its own bosses and their opinions.

So the images – taken by a CCTV camera that had been moved from its original angle – were made on May 6, but The Sun didn’t publish them until nearly two months later, on the weekend before the Batley & Spen by-election.

Zarb-Cousin reckons the intention wasn’t to support Labour and its candidate, Kim Leadbeater (The Sun supports the Conservatives politically) but to ensure that the Labour Party remained stuck with a useless party leader in Keir Starmer – who is doing more harm to the UK’s official Opposition party from the inside than any Tory ever could (Starmer’s future as Labour leader was in doubt as pre-election polling showed Labour could lose the formerly-safe seat but he seized on the wafer-thin majority of 323 votes won by the party to claim a huge resurgence in support):

Zarb-Cousin puts forward convincing evidence:

There can only be one reason a Tory would want to keep an Opposition leader in position, and that is because they believe their own position in government is made safer by him being there.

Of course this puts Starmer in an untenable position because action to keep him in place by the Tories undermines any authority he has as a force to remove them from power…

… but we all know, now, that he won’t do the honourable thing and quit because he wants power for himself.

Does he just want it for its own sake, or is he actually following a plan to destroy the Labour Party? I don’t know.

Does it matter? No.

In the distorting hall of mirrors that is the Westminster media, we can only rely on what we see.

And, seeing that a Tory-supporting rag withheld information until it could be used to support the Labour leader, we must conclude that he is unfit for the job and must be removed.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

The surprising demise of Sarah Champion

Sarah Champion, the MP for Rotherham [Image: Victor De Jesus].


What the blazes just happened to Sarah Champion?

Only a few months ago, in the run-up to the general election, Ms Champion was a star of the Labour Party – partly because of her expert demolition of top Sky News Tory Adam Boulton in this interview:

Now she has been obliged to resign as Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities after penning an article in The Sun accusing British men of Pakistani origin of raping white girls.

In The Sun!

Labour MPs should be banned from writing in that rag altogether – if not because of its all-out support for the Conservative Party, then because of the lies it published about the Hillsborough tragedy and other politically-motivated cover-ups by the Tories.

And let’s not forget that Gloria de Piero used The Sun to try to flood the Labour Party with right-wing entryists in a bid to unseat Jeremy Corbyn from his position as party leader.

The Sun is no friend of the Labour Party and Ms Champion should have known better than to write anything for its editors. So who put her up to it? Her aides?

The same aides who signed off the piece, apparently without her knowledge, despite it having been changed by the Murdoch paper’s editors, according to Ms Champion herself?

Who are these people and what disciplinary action will they face?

We should also consider the fact that this is the second time Ms Champion has resigned from a Jeremy Corbyn shadow cabinet.

Last year, having followed the leaders of the so-called ‘chicken coup’ onto the backbenches, Ms Champion famously “unresigned” after reconsidering her position.

If she tries that again, she’ll earn herself a nickname: Yo-yo.

That would be the death of her political career.

And that would be a shame.

Twitter has been sympathetic, for a change:

https://twitter.com/ToryFibs/status/897852669926264832

Source: Sarah Champion resigns as shadow equalities minister | Politics | The Guardian

Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Don’t blame the poor when the rich are bleeding you dry

bluelabour

You know that things have come to a pretty pass when Labour Party supporters turn against the poor.

This has happened at a time when the number of people with money to spare has dropped dramatically, meaning more of our people have become poor.

The change may reasonably be blamed on Labour’s adherence to Liam Byrne’s diabolical welfare policy, that aims to continue where the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats leave off – demonising people who have done nothing wrong, unless you count illness, disability and unemployment as a personal choice.

It suggests that people of good heart are leaving the party in large numbers, allowing those who are left to turn it into what its critics have claimed it to be for a considerable time now: Tory Lite.

The change is identified in a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, that showed 47 per cent of Labour supporters surveyed in 2011 thought that, if benefits were less generous, people would learn to support themselves – up from 17 per cent in 1987.

The fact of the matter, of course, is that benefits are much less generous now than they were in the 1980s. In 1987, unemployment benefits totalled around 20 per cent of the average weekly wage; now they come to around 10 per cent – around half of what they were. But Labour supporters – Labour! – say they are too generous.

It looks like the Tories really are brainwashing people with their nonsense rhetoric, as repeated in newspapers that Labour supporters shouldn’t be reading, like The Sun and the Daily Mail. That good friend of the Conservative Party, Joseph Goebbels, was right – “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Of course, Goebbels added: “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent.”

So those of us who are interested in the facts may be looking forward to hard times. It’s still better than being a fair-weather friend of social justice – only interested in the good of our fellows if it doesn’t impact on us.

But it is already impacting on everybody!

The Office for National Statistics, using Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) figures, has reported that the UK has plummeted down the international league table of economic well-being, from fifth to 12th within the six years up to 2011.

On a separate labour-market ranking, the country fell even further, dropping 12 places. In the labour market league table it ranked 21st out of 34 countries. Top of the league was Norway, which has just three per cent unemployment and, as I understand it, a thriving welfare state. Think about that.

The ONS noted changes to taxes and benefits as key factors in the drop.

This morning, one of Vox‘s longest-serving commentators reported that there is a change among the people around him; that those who argued against his criticism of the Conservative-led government are now turning to the Left. If so, it seems they are not turning to Labour.

Recently we have witnessed a movement to form a new political movement, representing socialist views but untarnished by the memory of New Labour’s 13 years of Neoliberal mistakes. Several contenders have cropped up but none of them will carry any weight at the next general election – instead, all they are likely to do is sap enough votes from Labour to let the Conservatives back into office again. That would be a calamity for the country.

No, the best thing to do is to take Labour back for the people it was meant to serve. First step in that direction must be to consign Liam Byrne and his vile mess of a welfare policy to the back benches, and design a new plan, attacking the causes of unemployment and workplace sickness and disability, rather than their symptoms. This is simple logic.

And we need to get people into the shadow cabinet who have actually held proper jobs. Look at Ed Miliband: Oxford graduate – short media career – Westminster job for Labour. Ed Balls: Oxford graduate (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) – short media career – Westminster job for Labour. Douglas Alexander: University graduate – six-month career as a solicitor – Westminster. Yvette Cooper: Oxford (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) – Westminster researcher job for Labour. Andy Burnham: Cambridge – researcher for Tessa Jowell. Many of these also went to Harvard.

Liam Byrne, the demon of the Labour Party: University (Politics and Modern History at Manchester) – Harvard – then work for a multinational consulting firm (Accenture) and then the Rothschild merchant bankers(!) before going to Labour to help lead its ‘New Labour’ business campaign. This man has nothing whatsoever to do with real working people.

When everybody in a particular group – in business, politics, socially, whatever – is from the same background, they tend to agree about key subjects. From the above group we can see that many of the Labour front bench have followed exactly the same career path. What do they know about working-class people? At least two of them – Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, no less – graduated from the same Oxford degree course as David Cameron, the comedy Prime Minister.

No wonder people are having a hard time distinguishing between the two main parties and want a left-wing alternative.

It’s time for Labour to grow up and realise it needs to change. It must come back to its voting base and start to represent the people of the UK once again – rather than Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard graduates. If Ed Miliband wants to keep his position, he needs to clear out his shadow cabinet and get some fresh thinkers in. Someone recently mentioned Abraham Lincoln’s ‘cabinet of enemies’, and the fact that it was good for him to have opposing views at the heart of his government.

Until we get that in the Labour Party, maybe we should agree that the ‘Tory Lite’ criticisms are accurate.

What are you going to do about it, Labour?