Honeymoon? What honeymoon?

Back blogging again after a few month's off. And it's straight back to an old familiar theme - Starmer and his chums.

Before Labour’s inevitable victory in July’s Westminster General Election, I, and many others, had the feeling that Starmer’s government would soon become very unpopular as voters realised that the ‘change’ which he had promised was no real change at all. It was 'Tory-light'. It was simply the continuation of the same old damaging Tory neoliberal nostrums, delivered somewhat less chaotically and corruptly. What I didn’t expect was just how unpopular Starmer and co would become and just how quickly it would happen. But then I don’t have the benefit of someone giving me extremely expensive designer glasses. Mind you, Keir Starmer does and he didn’t see the backlash coming either.

Normally when a party wins an election and forms a new government, it enjoys a honeymoon period often lasting several months. This is particularly the case when the new government has just won a landslide and it had taken over from a massively unpopular previous administration. Starmer won his landslide in July and, in the normal course of things, he could have hoped to be basking in his political honeymoon period until Christmas. Yet here we are, it’s only early October and already the sheen has come off his government. A new poll out recently found that 60% of voters believe that Labour will not win the next General Election. The poll also found that a majority do not think that Starmer will still be leading the Labour Party by then, which is not due until 2029.

Of course polls are not predictions, and that goes twice for a poll about an event which is not due to take place for almost five years. Nevertheless, this poll tells us that voters are already getting fed up with Starmer’s Labour party and do not seem inclined to give him the benefit of any doubt that’s going. People are rapidly making up their minds about the new Westminster government and their opinions are not favourable.

Starmer’s crushing Commons majority, impregnable as it appears to be, is built on sand. Starmer only won his 172 seat majority thanks to a quirk of the first-past-the-post system. The last election was the least proportional in British political history. Labour only managed to win 33.7% of votes cast but, despite that, took 411 of the 650 seats in the Commons. Under a proportional system, Labour would have won only 219 seats instead of the 411 they actually won while the Tories would have taken 154, the Lib Dems would have 79 instead of 72, Reform would have 93 instead of 5, and the SNP would have 17 instead of 9.

But that’s not the way Westminster prefers. Both Labour and the Conservatives are wedded to the current system, not despite, but because of its unfairness. The two largest parties are the beneficiaries of that unfairness, they have a vested interest in keeping things just as they are. It is telling that reform of Westminster was not even on the radar when Starmer was intoning his mantra of change, he would not countenance any change that might threaten his chances of absolute control.

With a victory won on just a third of votes cast you might think a prudent politician would ensure that he deepened and widened his support base. But we’re talking about Keir Starmer, so no!

The new regime started badly with the vote to retain the two child cap on benefits and the heavy handed suspension from the Labour party of the seven MPs who dared to rebel even though there was never any threat to Starmer not getting his way. The move smacked of intolerant authoritarianism and bodes ill for the next five years.

This was quickly followed by the decision to axe the universal winter fuel payment for pensioners. The dust had not settled and we were straight into a scandal over Starmer’s addiction to freebies. An investigation carried out by Sky News found out that millionaire Keir Starmer is, by a very large margin, the MP who has accepted the highest value of gifts from political donors and companies since 2019. The value of the largesse enjoyed by Starmer totals over £100,000 in value, more than twice as much as the next gift hungry MP and more than the total accepted by the next five MPs after that.

Starmer has accepted free clothing and the services of a personal shopper for his wife, free suits and designer glasses for himself, and thousands of pounds worth of free football and concert tickets. In any other field these would be called bribes. As Starmer was telling the rest of us that the poor and the elderly have to suffer because his government is wedded to Conservative spending rules. And, despite his large Commons majority, he is too afraid of the right wing media to raise taxes on the rich and introduce any measure that smacks of the redistribution of wealth. At the same time, he was cheerfully accepting thousands of pounds worth of gifts for things he’d have no problem paying for himself. Not a good look and calls his judgement into question.

The backlash led Starmer’s office to announce that he and government ministers will no longer accept gifts of clothing. As though there was a black bin bag for clothing donations on the railings of Downing Street and it’s a huge concession to take it down. Nothing was said about the other gifts, worth many times more than the gifts of clothing. Starmer will continue to help himself to these. Labour was outraged when Boris Johnson did this sort of thing, but when Labour does it we get Wes Streeting – who has accepted over £175,000 in donations from private health companies – saying: “I’m really proud of people who want to contribute…their money to our politics. It is a noble pursuit.” According to Wes Streeting, donors buying designer clothes, Taylor Swift tickets and lending luxury apartments is the same as giving money to charity. You don’t buy political influence when you give £5 to charity.

Streeting also said that he doesn’t think taxpayers should be paying for our politics. So let me get this straight, Wes Streeting thinks that politics should essentially be privatised and those with the most money get to run the show. In fact, that’s exactly how it ought to work, the taxpayers are supposed to be in charge, not large corporations, banks and private funders.

Bribing politicians, noble. How Westminster is that. We know who’s in charge of the Labour party and whose interests it really represents. That’s why Starmer’s tough decisions are never tough on the rich.

Meanwhile at the Labour party conference, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said that the Southport riots must not “silence a serious debate on immigration”. She added the government will bring net migration down, clear the asylum backlog, and end the use of asylum hotels. Only the Labour Party could look at a racist riot and think: “They kinda have a point though.”

I hold my head in my hands in despair. A Labour government caught up in a self-inflicted quagmire. Things can only get better?