It’s open season on Keir Starmer these days, and rightly so. If the man has a single redeeming feature it passed me by. He’s stupid, unprincipled, untruthful, arrogant in an odiously patrician way – yet oddly thin of skin – and venal to boot. Lacking any scruple, he lied repeatedly to gain leadership of the Labour Party, purged then led it to the hollowest of electoral victories, on the lowest voter turnout since 1928, to enter 10 Downing Street with no obvious ambition beyond fleshing out his CV.
I’ve said before that Chris Hedges’ observations on the US political scene…
Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.
Let’s stop pretending America is a functioning democracy
.. apply near equally to the West at large. So complete has been the neoliberal hollowing out of any meaningful democracy that the ‘carnival act’ Reverend Hedges speaks of is now fronted by two discernible types. One is the techno-managerialist for whom Fukuyama may as well have never recanted (nor ‘trickledown’ ever been disproved empirically) and for whom there really is No Alternative to ‘austerity’ for the poor.
The other is the buffoon.
At first blush Sir Keir seems decidedly techno-managerialist. Look a little closer though. Aren’t techno-managerialists supposed to actually know something? Could it be that, beneath the grey exterior …
… the man’s no less out to lunch than Mad Liz or Bullingdon Boris?
Here’s Owen Jones on the subject …
The elephant in the room is that it is not simply the Labour Party wing of the Uni-party which has no one (a) capable of tackling the issues facing the country and (b) which the vast majority of eligible voters consider to be capable of tackling the issues facing the country.
A few weeks back Stuart Campbell featured a YouGov poll on the wings over Scotland blog….
https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-great-hollowing/
….Which noted the following;
“– 50% of people who voted Labour don’t want the Labour leader to be PM.
– 68% of people who voted Tory don’t want the Tory leader to be PM.
– 70% of people who voted Lib Dem don’t want the Lib Dem leader to be PM.
And we really need to stop and take a moment to think about just how batshit crazy that is, because it’s definitely not a sign of a healthy, functioning democracy. Although of course we already knew we weren’t in one of those, because the most popular party in Britain – by an absolute country mile, with more votes than the next two put together – is “None of you useless tossers”.”
It was not only the so called £20 billion black hole in the economy which was being highlighted before last years GE. The lowest turnout for a century – another period of austerity after a European war in which the electorate at the time also considered the entire political class to be useless tossers – was being regularly anticipated and predicted across the Alt-media.
This is not going to end well.
No. If I were a young man I’d emigrate to China
John Balliol was king of Scotland from 1292 to 1296. He was generally known by the populace as ‘Toom Tabard’ i.e. ‘Empty Coat’ That would seem to sum up Starmer as well – a walking, talking vacuum, sucking the meaning out of anything it touches. However, it’s kind of reassuring that they had these sorts of numpties 1000 years ago too. I was beginning to believe there was something in the water supply. But we do seem to have an over-abundance of them lately.
Arise, Sir Toom