London Bangla A Force for the community…
WHETHER Keir Starmer was loyal to the Labour Party when he was Prime Minister was always in doubt. Now he has resigned as an MP, there is no more doubt.
Starmer’s press statement says that he had been considering his future all summer and has now decided to resign. Crikey: if this is how long he needed to think about his future, no wonder his government was so indecisive and took so long to get anything done.
Starmer will be remembered for being… nothing really – just not a success. He claims to have made the Labour Party electable after 14 years of Tory rule. Nonsense. He won a General Election because the voters were sick of the Tories after 14 years, not because they loved Starmer. The election campaign was full of right wing rubbish – such as his whimsical idea that the UK could send migrants who had come from dangerous countries back to those countries when the danger subsided.
The example he gave was Bangladesh – just before street protests forced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee the country. He apologised fulsomely: “I’m sorry I upset you about ‘Bangladeshi Removals’” read the headline in the Evening Standard. It was an apology with no admission of guilt – a concept familiar to lawyers but not one to win back political support.
Starmer sealed the deal by going on to refuse to call for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza (on which he later U-turned) and then saying that in his opinion, Israel had the right to refuse to let food and water into Gaza.
Starmer went on to make a series of unpopular decisions. He kept the Tory cap on benefits which allowed families to claim for only two children. He threw MPs who voted against this in Parliament out of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). Months (and widespread protest) later, he reversed the policy and instructed all MPs to vote for the policy U-turn. He let some of the MPs who had voted against the cap back into the PLP, but not all. Their crime was that they had been right too soon, before he was ready.
Worse was the introduction of means-testing to the Winter Fuel Allowance previously paid to all pensioners to help pay the cost of extra heating in winter. Perhaps he had forgotten the disaster of Gordon Brown MP giving pensioners a pension increase of 75p a week – a policy which Brown came to regret. Come to think about it, this happened in 1999, so Starmer was probably too young at the time to notice.
Starmer giving his usual enthusiastic Commons performance – inspiring languid indifference from those around him.
Those decisions were bad enough, but the worse decision Starmer made was to appoint Peter Mandelson the UK’s Ambassador to the USA. The decision unravelled over the best part of two years and left Starmer exposed as politically naïve and without a political vision of his own. Blairite pen-pusher Morgan McSweeney had to join up the dots for him.
Starmer drove hundreds of thousands of members out of the Labour Party: with his policies or, if members were too stubborn to go, by expelling them.
After he stood down as Labour Leader, Starmer did not stand in the subsequent Labour leadership election – because he knew he could not win. At the time he said that he would not stand down as an MP and would continue to represent the voters of Holborn & St Pancras – his Camden constituency.
He chose to announce his last U-turn on the day that the House of Commons reassembled after the summer break, Andy Burnham’s first Prime Minister’s Questions as Leader. The timing was designed to take headlines away from Burnham and put himself back in the spotlight.
Starmer’s statement wittered on about how he wanted to find a new career – possibly something in international relations. The man’s a narcissist: no one else cares about his new career – not even the voters of Holborn & St Pancras on whom he has turned his back. With failed Prime Minister Tony Blair now a member of US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, there may be a vacancy as US Special Envoy to the Middle East. You heard it here first.
Starmer has also turned his back on the Labour Party, which now faces a by-election which will be seen as a referendum on Andy Burnham and will attract everyone who wants to be a little fly in the Burnham ointment. Labour held Camden Council in May, so there are plenty of Labour voters who may still be prepared to give Burnham a chance. With Zak Polanski, Leader of the Green Party, having already said he is interested in standing, voters may prefer to use the by-election as an opportunity to keep Burnham on his toes rather than delivering a ringing endorsement of his first two months as Prime Minister. If Labour loses the by-election, Starmer’s betrayal may wipe out the Burnham bounce – leaving everyone wondering why Starmer thought it was beneath him to shut up and sit on the back benches for two more years.
●Read more about it:
More stories about Starmer
