Princetown in the snow

Things can only get better? Under Starmer?

 

Last week, as thousands demonstrated in the street outside his constituency office in protest against his refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, Keir Starmer unapologetically tweeted: “I've changed the Labour Party and if I’m given the opportunity, I’ll change the country too.” Yes, indeed. Keir Starmer has changed the Labour party, he has changed it into the Conservatives.

His Labour party occupies approximately the same political space as that which was occupied by the Tories a few years ago. Labour is now an overtly Anglo-British nationalist party which wraps itself in the British flag, opposes rejoining the EU, supports privatisation in the NHS, and heaps more misery on the poor and the marginalised.

During a recent episode of the i newspaper podcast, Labour’s Plan For Power, Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary said that, far from protecting the NHS in England from the creeping privatisation it has endured under the Conservatives, he wants to speed the process up and increase private sector involvement in the provision of healthcare on the NHS. Streeting said he would “hold the door wide open” to the NHS for the private sector if the Labour party was to win the general election. He said that NHS England had “started to move in the right direction” by increasing the amount of private sector involvement in healthcare delivery, but he wanted to see a Labour government “put our foot on the accelerator”.

We always knew that the NHS was not safe in the Conservatives’ hands. Now we know it’s not safe in the hands of Keir Starmer’s Labour party either. Labour will speed up the erosion in England of the core ethos of the founders of the NHS. 

Last week, the Tories announced that they are going to make the already difficult lives of those struggling to survive on benefits even more difficult in order to find extra cash which they plan to use for tax cuts for those who are already comfortably off. The plan is not to raise benefits by the rate of inflation, which is an effective cut in the already inadequate money that claimants have to subsist on. However, to heap on the cruelty even further, it was also reported that the government plans to stop the current entitlement of means tested benefits claimants in England, to free prescriptions and dental treatment. The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, said the move is necessary to stop “anyone choosing to coast on the hard work of taxpayers.”

This is an unspeakably vile and nasty move. Even former Tory Deputy PM Michael Heseltine has accused the Conservative government of fuelling ‘hate politics’ over its plan to strip the jobless of their entitlement to free prescriptions. It’s a measure which holds people’s health to ransom. Heseltine said ministers should not “use the health service as a sanction.” Former Conservative health secretary Stephen Dorrell also spoke out against the plan, saying that all governments face the difficult question of who should receive benefits, “but making a virtue of withdrawing healthcare support from people who, by implication need it, is deliberately unpleasant”.

Poverty has a major impact on health. People struggling to survive on destitution levels typically have worse health and suffer higher levels of illness than those living more comfortable lives. The Conservatives propose to deal with this by denying the unemployed access to vital medications and leaving them to suffer the agonies of toothache.

You might think that the Labour party would be loudly condemning this egregious cruelty that even former Conservative Ministers under Thatcher and John Major think is a hateful and unacceptable exercise in nastiness for the sake of nastiness, designed to pander to the basest prejudices of the far right media. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, you would be wrong. Not only has the Labour party said that it will not oppose this offence against humanity and common decency and will not reverse it when in power, but Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall reportedly told The Times newspaper that in her view the Conservative plans did not go far enough.

Labour’s move to the right is a consequence of the broken system of British politics and the first past the post system for Westminster elections so beloved of both the Labour and Conservative parties. It’s a system which repeatedly forces voters to choose the least worst option, as the Conservatives move to the right, Labour moves rightwards in order to appeal to the former Tory voters, whose support it needs to win the election. This, in turn, nudges the Conservatives to shift even further to the right, and with every election the depressing cycle repeats itself. We get the toryfication of Labour and the Conservatives slide into extreme right wing authoritarian populism.

Labour is now where the Tories were under John Major, while the Conservatives are now an extreme right party advocating policies which were beyond the pale of political acceptability only a few decades ago. Now many Tories advocate leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, something which not even UKIP dared to push for prior to the Brexit referendum. Meanwhile the Conservative assault on civil liberties continues.

The Tories have now normalised extremism, aided and abetted by a British media which is now presenting Nigel Farage as a colourful character on a reality TV show and not for what he is, a dangerous fascist. Labour refuses to undo Tory policies once it gets into power and the rightward decline of British politics continues unabated. Not in my name, not in my name.

You couldn't make it up.

Rishi Sunak’s big revelation was that he was the ‘change’ candidate. Remember, just a few short weeks ago he was telling the Tory party conference that British politics have been locked into a cosy and damaging short termist consensus for the past thirty years and that he was the guy who was going to change all that and shake things up. It was never a convincing claim at the best of times, relying as it did on us all collectively forgetting that the Tories have been in power since 2010 and that Sunak himself has been either Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer or a government minister since 2018. But then patronising the public and demanding that we ignore the evidence of our own eyes and ears has very much been the stock in trade of the Conservative party for many years now. That much at least did not come under the umbrella of those things about British politics that Sunak was determined needed to change.

However, Sunak can no longer pretend that he’s the ‘change’ candidate, as he has brought back David Cameron into a senior role in Government. Cameron, a man best known for being the architect of austerity, allegedly sexually molesting a dead pig’s head (I know he’s repeatedly denied this but…..), and holding the disastrous Brexit referendum in order to get himself out of some internal party difficulties with the spittle-flecked, Brexit-loving, frothing right wing extremist end of the Conservative party. As we all know he lost that referendum, and immediately ran away from the consequences of his failure, leaving the rest of the UK at the mercy of a Conservative party which had been fully taken over by the spittle-flecked, Brexit-loving, frothing right wing extremists. All of Britain is still paying the price for that, and by sacking the dangerously incendiary Suella Braverman from her post as Home Secretary, Sunak has given the spittle-flecked, Brexit-loving, frothing right wing extremists a new reason to feel aggrieved.

Braverman will now return to the back benches from where she will continue her manoeuvring for the party leadership after Sunak takes the Tories to inevitable defeat at the next general election. Now free from the constraints and discipline of the doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility, Braverman is likely to become even more extreme in her attention seeking pronouncements as a back bencher. Should the UK Supreme Court rule later this week that her plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is unlawful, she will be leading the Conservative calls for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which if successful would amongst other things allow for the restoration of the death penalty.

In Braverman’s eyes, if her plan is deemed to be cruel and inhumane and in breach of an international treaty on human rights which a previous British government was instrumental in designing and implementing, the problem lies with the legal guarantee of human rights, not with her performative cruelty. Braverman might have gone, but the constitutional and political vandalism she represents remain very much at the heart of the Conservative party.

Sunak had no choice but to sack her. But it wasn’t her calling homelessness a lifestyle choice favoured by people with foreign accents that did it for her. It certainly wasn’t describing asylum seekers as an invasion. It wasn’t calling pro Palestinian demonstrations “hate marches”. And it wasn’t even claiming that the police favour left wing protestors over those on the right and making the violence seen from fascists over the weekend more likely. No, what really signalled the end of her tenure as Home Secretary were the reports that she had, as protocol demands, submitted a draft version of her incendiary article in The Times to Downing Street for approval and had then refused to make the changes to it which the Prime Minister’s office had asked of her. It showed that Sunak was unable to control his own cabinet, reinforcing the already widespread impression of a weak Prime Minister who is being led by his party rather than leading it.

Braverman’s comments led to right-wing demonstrators going on a rampage in London on Saturday, but the BBC focused on the placards and chants of those protesting against Israel’s collective punishment of the people of Gaza. Now the Tories are once again talking about cracking down on the right to protest.

By bringing David Cameron back as Foreign Secretary, Sunak is making a desperate gamble. He is trying, rather desperately, to shift the political dial in his favour, given that his conference speech and the King’s Speech were miserable flops. He is almost certainly about to reignite calls from the far right of the party for his resignation. And while appointing Cameron as Foreign Secretary, via his hastily contrived elevation to the House of Lords, is certainly attention grabbing, ensuring that on the day of the reshuffle press attention was mainly on Cameron and less so on the sacking of Braverman, it’s a move which comes with many risks. The appointment comes just two years after a parliamentary inquiry found that the former prime minister had shown a “significant lack of judgment”over a lobbying campaign for a financial services company in which he held a personal economic interest, Greensill Capital, which collapsed in 2021. But not until after then Chancellor Rishi Sunak had pumped £5 billion in public money into the company as a result of Cameron’s lobbying. But never mind any of that, it's in the past and Cameron is a good chap. An old Etonian, don't you know?

The inquiry found that Cameron had not broken any rules in this sordid and grubby episode, but it was clear that the rules were woefully inadequate. Of course nothing has changed, and now the lobbyee has brought the lobbyer back into the heart of government, in a manner which ensures that Cameron will never have to face any democratic scrutiny or accountability. It’s all within the rules, and it’s the epitome of all that is wrong with Westminster, rules which Starmer’s Labour party has no intention of changing. But Sunak is gambling that this sleazy deal won’t come back to haunt him. Let's hope it will. What's that saying? "What goes around, comes around".

Now the man who gave us austerity and whose vanity gave us the Brexit referendum is back in the heart of government, still smug, still glib, still having learned nothing or having suffered any consequences for the havoc and chaos that are the lasting legacy of his term in Downing Street. That’s the real message of this reshuffle.

Just as Sunak’s claim to be the real candidate of change is a bad joke, fingers crossed that Starmer’s promise to be the ‘change Britain needs’ will be not revealed to be equally hollow.