Who can say whether Starmer failed to keep any of the 10 pledges he made to win the Labour leadership? We may never know the answer to this fantastically obscure question, so for now we will simply have to say that opinions differ
I again point out: “The Bolsheviks conspire with the untermenschen to sap our will to power, and - by hidden, sneaky means - to undermine and destroy the Reich” is not just similar to the content of Mein Kampf. *It is* Hitler’s sales pitch, right at the core of the project.
Nearly two decades of wage stagnation. Fifteen years of public sector neglect and infrastructural decay, while taxes on profits were slashed. Yet it is we, the public, who are living beyond our means.
This is what I'll remember of Starmer, beyond the indulgence of the far right, the sedulously mournful hounding of refugees & sexual minorities, the excruciating attempts to court reaction: the idea that Palestinian humanity is an indulgent bien-pensant fad to be mocked & derided
“Ronnie Campbell, Labour MP for Blyth Valley, said: 'James Purnell makes me ashamed to be a member of the Labour Party. It is a disgrace the way he is hitting the poor. Not even the Tories would try to do this.'”
Me at uni: *basically a social democrat*
Wise old people: “That'll change once you get a job and pay taxes in the real world”
Me, after working a few years: “My retirement plan is ďying in the communist revolution”
The "good and decent man" narrative is one of the weirdest elements of modern English politics.
There's no evidence for Keir Starmer being decent, and in fact, an abundance of testimony and evidence of actions that would indicate that he's a complete bastard.
It's bollocks.
I think the funniest thing about Starmer is even if you adopt a pragmatic Centrist viewpoint he was still a complete failure. He couldn't even succeed by their own morally-detached metrics. He told his own voter base to fuck off, I've never heard of anything like it
John Harris has done a piece attacking Starmer's "blankness". With grim inevitability, in 2024 he wrote that this was strategic cleverness that was concealing a quiet radicalism. Stealing a living.
Look around you. Would you say these clowns made Britain less racist, less cruel, less stupid, less unpleasant? You would not, because they fought for most of a decade to make it much dumber, nastier, harsher and way more cruel. They are not sorry they did, not a bit of it.
Another legacy of Starmer will be that no other prime minister has managed to make so many sensible politics understanders look like clueless blowhards in such a short space of time.