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”.
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.
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