Open Threads

What I’m saying, in an uncharacteristically roundabout way, is that all of my bottles of fizzy vim had drained away into the sand and I was a million miles short of wanting to expose my raw nerves to all the pointless, preening toxicity of the boring old blame game, with its clamour of mulish certainties, foot-stamping victimitude and rude jostling for sole narrative authority. I was content just to live in the now. So, I did. Mostly. I’ve got a job I really enjoy (why did no one tell me such things existed?) that keeps me so busy I’ve even come to value the weekends again, and a lovely family who are always happy to see me. Also, if I’m going to be writing about good people facing down the forces of chaotic evil, I’d rather it be in a genre where I can at least envisage some kind of happy ending for them.

So, I did all that, and it helped. Then, after a while, I looked up and realised that the ever-present din of Shit They Are Pulling had stopped being too depressing to contemplate and once again become too annoying to ignore. Sure, in some ways it might be 1933 redux and 70+ million utter gobshites in the US with ONE SIMPLE FUCKING JOB THEY HAD TO DO have instead flipped a crusty middle finger to observable reality by serving up to the world a brain-addled mish-mash of Father Coughlin, Sequel Biff Tannen and a plate of gelatinous orange rinds, with a non-optional side order of the most venal shit-shovelers on the menu to blank-check his many imbalances, but realistically, what can I do about that? I’m not American. I didn’t vote for or against it, so I don’t have to live each day with the existential pain of knowing that I share a country with the kind of mental morlocks who’d much rather re-elect (not elect, fucking RE-ELECT) an openly malignant slurry of America’s worst mistakes to a position of Absolute Powah than suffer the castrating shame of being ruled over by a Vagina of Colour. I went through the British version of all that after 2019 and once was enough for me.

No, I thought, Spring is in the air, Liverpool FC are once again back on their perch as Champions of England, and the world is chock full of decent people trying to get to grips with how to fight back against the Darkness. In the greater scheme of things, what did I actually have to complain about?

Oh yeah. 80s-retro crapfashions, obligatory autotune, and British Politics.

Then again, I suppose if anything could bless you good people with a momentary distraction from the last two hundred plus days of unrelenting bullshit, it might just as well be stories of someone else’s country dashing blindly through the scrapheap of 21^st century ideo-cultural malaise, catching its collective rumpy rucksack on the barbed wire fence of political misadventure, and being left howling like the man who mistook a drill-socket for a glory-hole while swinging inches above the snarling jaws of societal chaos and right-wing populism. Maybe, maybe not, but looking around the national playbox that’s all I’ve got, so set waffle receptors to maximum and crank open those bile bay doors, this chunky monkey has to vent.

Right. Now. Okay. Focus.

You may or may not recall that July 4^th 2024 saw the UK electorate drag themselves away from Love Island and Homes Under The Hammer long enough to shamble on down to the polls and honour the spirit of American Independence Day by turfing out a bunch of pig-snouted Tory Royalists guilty of treating the rights of free men and women with contemptuous disinterest in favour of an ambitious coalition of lawyers, slaveowners and mercantile opportunists in the shape of The Corporate Franchise Opportunity Currently Trading Under The Name Of ‘The Labour Party’ (which I usually choose to refer to – because venomous shorthand amuses me –  as newnewlabourinc, or Hard Labour or Der Starmerpartei, or whatever other euphemism for Those Vile Twats suits my mood). A Party led – in a sense, but only in a sense – by that ghostly apparition of undignified wraithdom Sir Keir Starmer, a man so comically ill-suited to the role and demands of inspirational leadership that he needs a Peloton video and signed permission from three Party donors before he can wipe his own arse.

It’s doesn’t take a degree in any of the political sciences to note that an absolutely crushing Tory defeat in the last election was as inevitable as the drooler-in-a-wheelchair defence at a Weinstein sentencing. David ‘Pigfucker’ Cameron started that clock ticking back in 2010 when his Coalition Government imposed crippling austerity on a country still reeling from 2008’s Banker Bailout, and then by allowing his own Party’s lunatic Hard Right to use the 2016 Referendum on EU membership to shift responsibility for all of the damage the Tories had inflicted onto the EU and ‘The Foreigns’. Theresa ‘Grey-Bot’ May sped it up by continually shying away from a long overdue reckoning with her own Party’s out-of-control radicals and pointlessly dragging out the torture of Brexit ‘negotiations’ without ever being straight with the country about what these meant, an act of cowardice which, by the time she was ousted in 2019, left a great big populist shaped hole at the heart of the Conservative Brexit Project that only the most dishonest and grasping fantasists could hope to fill.

Yes ‘Boris’, you appalling floater, I’m talking about you, but not just you.

The catastrophic tri-disaster that ensued for the country, its relationships, its economy, and its overwhelmed sub-culture of politically based snark, finished the job, thanks to the 1-2-3 gut-punch of Flobalob Johnson, Lettuce Truss and Pinocchio Sunak leaving the idea of electing another Tory Government about as popular as thong-rot at a Burlesque festival. The clarion cry of this election, audible in every preceding by-election and opinion poll from Ultima Thule to Lyonesse, was ‘Anyone. Except the Tory’, and in hundreds of seats that’s exactly what the vote delivered. The brutal hammering they received was hailed by cheerleaders of the incoming newnewlabourinc regime as a sweeping mandate for the amorphous concept of ‘Change’ they’d campaigned on in place of any actual policies, but, as ever with the delusional group-masturbators of the Labour Right, their claims were a casserole of fishy offcuts and bovine excrement.

In reality, the pro-Right vote had been split between Sunak’s continuity Tories and the froggy, fag-smoking  fascism of Nigel Farage’s latest PR wheeze, a foreign funded, privately listed company branded as ‘The Reform Party’, selling the same boxed sets of white supremacy and misdirected resentment as his previous UKIP and Brexit Party vehicles, while newnewlabourinc itself, under the obsessive control-freakery of Starmer’s astonishingly unpleasant campaign chief Morgan McSweeney, was so laser-focussed on distancing itself from anything that actual Labour voters might get enthusiastic about that it had somehow managed to haemorrhage hundreds of thousands of votes from 2019’s ‘historically disastrous’ total, while still scraping by with slim pluralities of nose-holding tactical voters in enough seats to come out the other end with a ‘historical landslide’ on the lowest winning vote share since the 19^th century.

To put that into numbers, our First Past The Post electoral system had spat out a result that transformed 33.7% of a turnout of 55.9% of eligible voters into 63.4% of seats in Parliament and 100% of political power. Which is ten tons of bollocks in a two-ton bag, but that’s the undemocratic system the traditional parties love too much to change, and it meant that Der Starmerparteicame into office with a majority so big that, in our Winner Takes It All system, there was technically nothing holding it back from doing whatever it wanted. All of its online fanbois had spent the period before and during the election haranguing naysayers and doubters with injunctions to “Wait and see what they do in office before you judge them”, whispering comforting lies about the leadership’s ever-so cunning plan to tiptoe and shimmy into Government without giving our rabid media any distracting scandals to splash all over the front pages, before dramatically whipping off their dull grey camouflage to reveal the tight rose-gold spandex of social-democratic saviours hidden underneath.

Just give them a chance, was the mantra. Hold your tongue, swallow the shit-sandwich, let them do what they have to do, because before they can change anything they simply must gain power. Well, they did. Complete and unchallengeable power, with a parliamentary majority twice as large as Flobalob’s 2019 ‘landslide’. Job done, can I start judging them now? No? How about in three months? No? Six? No? How about in a year? No again? What a surprise. Tell you what, Starmerfanz, here’s a tasty bag of salted dicks for you to chew on, now go sit in the corner, because, like most of the country, I’m tuning your bullshit out.

Cards on the table, I’ve never made any bones about my deep and abiding distain for Starmer and his entourage of sneering asset-strippers and backstabbing hypocrites, and I’m certainly not going to start now. I expected them to be terrible because that’s who and what they showed themselves to be before, during, and after their takeover of the Party, but even I’ve been left rocked back on my snazzy Cuban heels by the historic awfulness with which Hard Labour have gone about the business of, well, everything, but mainly anything to do with the vital political art of making large numbers of people want you to stay in power. From day one of newnewlabourinc’s first term in office since 2010, from the very moment their Party issued alarm clocks (donated in bulk by valued Party donors Lumen Corp) lit up with a rousing chorus of “Believe in Keir – Or Else”, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they were driven, collectively if not always individually, by an intense desire, a burning lust almost criminal in its ferocity, to make themselves as despised and distrusted as possible by every single compartmentalised sliver of British society other than the ones that everyone knows will never, ever, ever vote for them.

Say you’re a red-faced racist Gammon with a shotgun in the attic and Ebony/Intersex porn clogging up your hard drive, they’ll be right on over to butter your scones and service your Bentley. If you’re a sharp-suited Interface Element extruded by the AI mainframe of a foreign tech conglomerate or blood-soaked ‘defence’ manufacturer, they’ll tear down all the curtains and lay splayed on folds of Venetian velvet for your indecent pleasure. And if you’re one of the ethical abscesses looming shroud-wrapped behind a top-floor desk at one of the four or five venal slime-drips we call the popular British Press, oh lordy, they’ll give you their firstborns wrapped in the skins of their first loves and ask nothing in return except the opportunity to occasionally place their balls in your claws and their names and mugshots above front page PR paeans to the wisdom and profundity of whatever Four-Minute Hate is being slopped out to the reading masses this week.

But if you’re anyone else? Not me, of course, I’m just a dirty Lefty who believed them when they told me who they were and set my expectations accordingly, but if you were, say, a mildly progressive middle-class voter on the softy-leftish side of centre who’d been put off in 2019 by the Media’s reinvention of Corbyn as a blood-soaked Red Hitler, but then voted for that nice Sir Keir hoping that, now he’d successfully carried the symbolic Ming vase of Labour’s campaign across the highly polished floor of electoral danger, he would take the huge majority handed to him and prioritise policies that would make the country a better place to live? Ha! As if! Get back behind the yellow line and assume a submissive position, Commie agitator, and be thankful if a firehose of nothing is all you get. Don’t you know that every time you think a bad thought about Sir Keir a Tory goblin climbs through a window to steal a human child?

Sigh.

This is the problem I have with talking about the Starmerite version of Labour. It’s so easy chatting shit about Tories because that’s essentially what they’re for. The decision each of them made to be a Tory is like a genetic marker for a propensity towards generalised vileness in every field, especially greedy self-advancement and irredeemable moral turpitude. In essence, they’re just a bunch of anamorphic stereotypes; posh private school dumbos and dyed-blonde social climbers ashamed of their roots, corporate stooges parachuted into rural seats and second-generation immigrant ladder-pullers determined to prove to the Right people that they’re the Right kind of darkie. A mish-mash of humanoid awfulness revolving around the gravitational pull of an eternal truth – the Conservative Party is always going to be the natural Party of Government, because the extremely vested Interests who own the UK will always need a conservative Party to sell the maintenance of the status quo to the have-nots, and the deal is simple, as long as you wave the flag and bash the trots, you too can keep your nose in the trough and your misdeeds out of the papers long enough for your children’s children to be considered ‘good sorts’. That eternal truth might, finally, be going the way of all the other formally eternal truths that litter human history, but for this era of Tories, it remains the simple idea that informs their actions.

But Der Starmerpartei? The Labour Right? They’re a much sicklier mouthful of bad medicine. Their essence is a cross between an entryist sect and a contractual failsafe. An invasive parasite of a non-ideological ideology that has systematically colonised the vital organs of its host and assumed control over its executive functions by aggressively attacking any rival cognitive centres. The heirs to St Anthony B’Liar’s revelatory credo that The Great British Public had been conditioned for generations by the infotainment assets of the nation’s most entrenched Interests to have a very blinkered view of what an ‘electable’ Party of Government should look like and talk about, so should any Opposition stray too far left of wherever the Establishment’s Tory favourites sit at any given time, then The Great British Public simply wouldn’t be allowed to see them as anything other than dangerous extremists. Their version of Labour can exist quite comfortably in this scenario because it’s pitched as the ‘dull but nice’ guy in the toxic relationship that is British politics. Sure, that slutty bitch Veronica Voter will keep on jumping into the sack with bad guy Tobias Tory, but when she’s left broken hearted and STD-riddled for the ten thousandth time, she’ll always come crawling back to Lennie Labour for a couple of terms of boring, suburban normality before falling off the wagon and back onto the other guy’s pox-pocked funstick.

It’s a sad, self-hating way to sell yourself, but it does come with a guarantee of short windows of access to the perks of Government for people willing to play along, and it provides an opportunity for ambitious high-achievers who simply couldn’t cut it for one reason or another as Tory made-men to wet their beaks and sow the seeds of profitable future relationships with The Money. The Labour Party membership and an ever decreasing number of its MPs may see things differently, some of them may even see themselves as the heirs to a progressive tradition that has effected massive, positive changes in British society by taking on the entrenched power of the elite Establishment and telling it to go and fuck itself with a frozen balloon animal, but as fans of Starmer and the wider Labour Right will tell you over and over and over again, usually while in the process of making some huge political error that a blinded mole-rat in a backwards balaclava trapped at the bottom of a lightless pit in the sub-basement of Darkly Manor with a broken torch and Paint It Black playing at half speed while Goth kids dance melancholically around a pile of tear-streaked Sandman comics could see coming, that kind of naïve Gay 4 Ché Student Union thinking is just performative  ‘politics of protest’, while grown-ups (like them) understand that this is a conservative country full of greedy, selfish liars who might say they want tolerance, equity and top-quality public services, but will always reject paying for them as soon as a smooth bugger with a side parting utters the dreaded curseword ‘socialist’, and that’s just how things are supposed to be.

But to quote an observer who knew more than her fair share about how exploitative wankers operate, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Now here, I’m cutting out about twenty paragraphs of bladed bile relitigating my opinion on how and why and with what assistance the Labour Right deliberately and with huge oodles of malice aforethought sabotaged any hope of ousting the Tories between 2016 and 2020 because Dog only knows I’ve said it all before and, frankly, I’m past caring whether or not some people feel the need to dispute the theory that 1 + 1 does indeed = 2 because Wilmer Sux or whatever. Discussing the right wing of the Labour Party makes me incoherently furious because they have – by force and deception – taken the only progressive mass-movement ever to challenge the power of the UK’s ruling elite off the table and replaced it with this hollowed-out husk of a relic, this ghastly vessel of painted skin stretched and pinned across a juddering framework of marrowless bones and bent paperclips, jerkily propelled over a field of screaming faces on wheels of malevolent greed, its tattered sails stitched together from broken promises and betrayed hopes catching the occasional gust of frustrated despair and grinding cruelty.

(Melodrama chip deactivated)

See? I simply cannot talk about these fuckers and the damage they’ve done to the cause of progressive politics in the UK without lighting my hair on fire and running around the parched fields of Toljaso Island toting a hungry scythe and crying out for blood and justice. Lives have been destroyed, communities deprived and wrecked, people have straight up died, all because an entire strain of ‘centre-left’ thinking has become so infested with factional spite that nothing in the world is more important to them than ‘owning the Trots’.

That’s not healthy, is it? So, I’ll just say this and move on.

These pus-swollen gonads and their midge-swarm of infinitely credulous defenders got where they are today because, when the choice before them was between a continuation of Tory Government or a Labour Party they didn’t control, they willingly fucked their Party over and made themselves into useful idiots for powerful Interests in the UK and abroad who shared their opposition to Britain having a leftwing Labour Government and were more than happy to help them burn the country down to prevent it. Shielded by a collusive media establishment with the same Teflon coating the Tories have enjoyed for eons, they had a five-year period where they were allowed to run riot across the political battlefields of post-Referendum Britain like rogue Medieval sell-swords with an indulgence from the Pope, leaving burnt fields and traumatised goats wherever they passed through. Nothing discrediting was ever allowed to stain their manufactured image of mature moderation, none of their skeletons were allowed out of the closet to impinge on the national consciousness, and every cynically dishonest yap emitted from their nethermouths was granted the unearned authoritative weight of a NYT Editorial and the cursory scrutiny typically given to a Walnut Kennedy infomercial about vaccines causing testicular discolouration in mice.

While they were waging their Unholy War to reclaim their Labour Party from the filthy Trots they were proffered a level of Establishment support and protection normally out of the question for anyone even nominally on ‘the Left’, and I think a lot of their current problems might stem from too many of them getting too used to playing the political game on Super Easy level. After the spine-jellying shock of 2017’s near thing, driving The Left out of mainstream political debate was the priority for a lot of otherwise incompatible groups, and the Labour Right were so richly rewarded for wielding their back-seeking knives without mercy or restraint that wasting time thinking about anything else, like what they’d actually do to fix the country if they stumbled backwards into power again, simply wasn’t on the to-do list (for most of them). But they did get into power again. They are the Government. The country is in undeniable need of genuine, radical change, and yet all this lot seem capable of dishing up is an endless Riverdance of Catastrophuckupery.

(head hits desk)

Right, let’s back up a bit. Put this in some context. What, exactly, have they done to earn this opprobrium? Why are they now posting opinion poll figures so dire that Starmer himself seems far happier tootling around the globe playing at international statesman than he does back here in the puddle of cold piss that is modern Britain?

Well, it goes like this.

In the run up to the Election, one of the things Starmer did to show how very mature and Westminster-attuned His Party (as Starmer charmingly refers to the 125-year-old Labour Party) had become was the recruitment of Sue Grey as his Chief of Staff. Those with good memories might remember Grey as the long-term Civil Service fixer whose hi-profile investigation into Flobalob’s Covid-Era partying at Number 10 never quite blew the tubby waster out of the Big Chair, but it did a lot to grease the wheels that churned him towards the exit. People were annoyed that she refused to pull the trigger, but no one who had followed Grey’s career should have been at all surprised that her priority was finessing the problem rather than tackling the root cause. Her speciality was always helping Ministers and their staffs negotiate the complex Whitehall/Westminster System in such a manner that the right secrets got kept and the wrong people took the blame for any distressing fallout. Appointing her his COS over the squeals of the Tories at once displayed strength in a way the Media understood and signalled to the Interests that His Party would not be rocking any of their boats. As COS she reportedly took a tight grip on Starmer’s office and started prising The Hollow Man out of the sweaty grip of the coterie of young, ball-swinging lads-in-suits McSweeney had established as his Praetorian Guard, controlling access to the PM and beginning the process of retooling the cogs and wheels of a fractious political machine into something that slotted into the well-worn grooves of British Government.

Civil-Wars in virgin-field Governments tend to slow-burn into conflagration, this one went up like Casey Kasem’s wig in direct sunlight. McSweeney was NOT a happy chappie, and so the leaks started almost instantly. The Media were soon gobbling down leaks that Grey (a woman!) was paid more than her Boss (a man!) but the inciting event was the revelation that Starmer – always appreciative of the good things in life his lofty status entitled him to – had been ‘gifted’ clothes, accommodation, VIP tickets and even designer glasses by wealthy Labour Party donors and seemed to think that because he’d belatedly declared his receipt of Rich List largesse, no one of importance could possibly consider it an issue.

As has so often been the case with this leadership team, what Sir Keir considers appropriate and uncontroversial is not in the same hemisphere as the opinions of other, warmer-blooded life forms, like, for example, the middle-of-the-road swing voters who had believed his ever-so-sincere promises about restoring probity and dignity to public office in the wake of Tory sleaze. And of course, it was red meat to a News Media only too happy to play the Both Sides card now that the country was safely in the hands of comfortably Centrist careerists. The craziest thing was that this was all in the wake of the scandals about Flobalob accepting gifts from rich donors, something he’d been endlessly (and rightly) castigated for by Starmer’s team. The very clear link between accepting ‘gifts’ from wealthy patrons in return for a welcoming ear and future ennoblement had been made in the minds of the public, so for them to turn around and dismiss concerns as confected nonsense was just the first warning that the Labour Right’s infamous tin ear for advice it didn’t want to listen to was in full effect.

Grey got the blame for allowing the scandal to blow-up, which added to the leaks from McSweeney’s team about how controlling and power-hungry she was (projection being a well-thumbed card in the Labour Right deck) was enough to make her position untenable, so Starmer took McSweeney’s advice and replaced her with… McSweeney! I know!! Proper Dick ‘Dick’ Cheney vibes there. The fallout from all these behind closed doors shenanigans was that newnewlabourinc’s first faltering steps in power were being orchestrated, not by a long-tenured veteran of the wood-panelled back rooms and well-trodden corridors of power, but by an angry Irish chaos-monkey with a pathological hatred of The Left and an entirely inflated view of his own genius. Everything that newnewlabourinc has done in office since this mini-coup has been guided by the McSweeney credo that Blair didn’t go far enough in acknowledging the privileges of the Haves, and that if ‘Labour’ wanted to be in power for any extended period of time, they had to do two things – show the Establishment that they were its only defence against a progressive Left, and position themselves to the electorate as the only viable option on the polling card other than out-and-out fascism.

And so, it began. Badly.

As soon as the close-packed berserkers of Der Starmerpartei’s victorious horde swarmed off the decks of their corporate-branded war-galleys and into Parliament’s legislative firing-ranges, their mission statement seems to have been to grab the nearest blunderbuss and start blasting away at their own feet, because that’s what they did. As time has gone on and natives of central London have become inured to the frequent rain of smoking toes, the only thing that has changed has been the calibre and rapidity of the self-inflicted barrage d’pied.

Pretty much the first major thing they did in office was to announce to a nation desperately hungry for some kind of positive change that they intended to end the Winter Fuel Allowance, a couple of hundred-pound seasonal bump to all pensioners introduced by Labour under Gordon Brown to help old people not die of hypothermia over Christmas. It always should have been tapered to exclude richer pensioners who actually don’t need it (not the brick and stone ‘millionaires’ who just happen to live in houses with exploded resale values thanks to our insane housing market, but the real cash rich ones) but since it was always intended as a fudge to avoid third-railing about with the state pension, that didn’t happen.

There could, of course, have been discussion and debate, a well-thought-out media campaign to sell the public on the rationality and fairness of making sure only poor pensioners got the WFA as part of a wider message about reallocation of public funds according to need, but that would have been too ‘progressive’, too ‘Lefty’ for these buffoons. They just made the announcement, told everyone how inspirationally amazing they were for making these ‘tough but necessary decisions’, paused expectantly for the required applause to start… and then reacted to the tidal wave of public shock and outrage with the kind of snippy, dismissive ugliness that is the hallmark of the Labour Right and its online defenders. All pensioners were now relabelled as presumed millionaires who spent their WPA funds on foreign hollibobs and expensive cookware, greedy parasites sucking on the teat of ‘working families’, which is an absolutely astounding way for those supposedly hyper-efficient mavens of electoral realism running newnewlabourinc’s comms to insult the most reliable voting group in the country, but given that they’re actually a circlejerk of solipsistic focus-groupies with all the political nous of that guy who stands on a box at Speaker’s Corner dressed like the Childcatcher and holding up a sign reading ‘ASK ME ABOUT MAN/BOY LOVE’, it’s entirely in character, because after the backlash got too loud and painful, they were forced to announce a fucking U-turn! WFA payments would be restored, with those given to pensioners with an income of over £35.000 getting clawed back in tax – which is exactly the solution opponents of the cuts suggested before they ever went through, but Starmer’s coterie of powder-sniffing vein-poppers refused to even consider.

Because. They. Are. Knobheads! (incoherent howling of frustration)

It’s been more of the same ever since. If there’s an issue on the agenda crying out for kindness, newnewlabourinc have always chosen to be cruel. Like when the Scottish National Party introduced an amendment in Parliament that would have removed the Two Child Cap that limits child support payments to families on benefits to the first two children, a decade old Tory policy that has been proven to drive families deep into poverty and to keep them there, in the process costing the country something like £39 billion actual pounds in order to ‘save’ £1.3 billion in benefits, Starmer’s goons just decried it as a partisan political trap to embarrass The Leader and ordered all Labour MPs to vote against it. When seven decent Labour MPs did find the moral courage to represent their constituents by voting for the SNP’s amendment, they were immediately punished by having the whip removed, meaning they were suspended from being Labour MPs and had to sit as Independents. Some of them have since been given the whip back, but other haven’t and simply never will.

That kind of thing just doesn’t happen in proper democratic parties. Even in Blair’s day, MPs were allowed to vote their conscience as long as it wasn’t a vote the Government could lose, but the control freaks running Hard Labour under Starmer couldn’t see past another opportunity to make ‘tough decisions’ and punch down at the few left-wing MPs they hadn’t managed to expel from the Party. Once again, the needless cruelty of it all went down like a cup of cold sick, and newnewlabourinc reacted in the same way, attacking critics as naïve idiots who just didn’t understand grown-up politics, and defending the policy itself using language that could have been (and thanks to their reliance on ChatGPI, probably was) cribbed from Heritage Foundation press releases.

Back when they were in Opposition, and during Starmer’s own abysmally dishonest leadership campaign, the injustice done to the WASPIs (Women Against State Pension Inequality) was something Labour were definitely going to redress. It wasn’t a manifesto promise, but candidate after candidate – including Sir Say-Anything himself – lined up for photo ops with the WASPIs and were eager to associate themselves with their cause. Basically, the passage of the Pensions Act by the Tory/Lib-Dem Coalition in 2011 meant that a lot of older women born in the 1950s would have their pension plans thrown into chaos by the rapid introduction of pension-age equivalence, and report after report has concluded that they were given insufficient guidance and support by the Government, leaving them financially robbed.

So, of course, once they were in a position to actually do something about it, the Brainless Trust in charge of newnewlabourinc proudly announced that they were, once again, ‘making the tough decision’ to renege on their election promises and leave the WASPIs with nothing. Same post-betrayal rulebook came out. The WASPIs were smeared as greedy and feckless wenches who wanted decent taxpayers to foot the bill for their refusal to do due diligence, anyone disputing the latest underbussing was, since helping the WASPIs had been part of the 2019 Labour manifesto, dismissed as a Corbynite wrecker, and/or a Tory enabler (those terms being pretty much interchangeable for the bots stationed at newnewlabourinc’s Brown House) because the need for flashbang-bright projection and a slight variation on Cleek’s Law seem to be surgically imprinted into the brains of Starmer’s team during the same process that sees ethical conscience and the ability to learn from mistakes consigned to the chum bucket.

Like me, it just goes on and on and on.

A particularly egregious example, and the one (other than supporting genocide in Gaza) that’s done them the most damage, is the announced ‘reforms’ to the eligibility criteria for the Personal Independence Payment, changes that newnewlabourinc tout as saving £5 billion a year in ‘waste’ in return for £1 billion in funds to ‘help disabled people find work’. Short version, disabled people in the UK have already had their support payments cut to the bone and been forced to jump through hoops for what they do receive. The PIP is a benefit that is supposed to support disabled people who are already in work to stay in work. A disabled-friendly car? Help with electricity payments to charge your wheelchair or breathing equipment? Money to hire a carer to help you get dressed and at work on time? That kind of thing. The new eligibility criteria Hard Labour were planning would require applicants to score 4 points just once on a questionnaire, except everyone who had seen the new criteria said it would be basically impossible for most disabled people to score 4 points in any of the categories. So, in actuality, the changes would mean millions losing their PIP payment, and with it their ability to live independently and function in the workplace. Throwing productive working people onto the Dole, which is the opposite of what they still insisted was the purpose of the ‘reforms’.

But even more insidious than that, eligibility for PIP is effectively a passport to a ton of other benefits. Making it impossible to qualify for PIP is a backdoor method of making swinging cuts to the disability budget without admitting you’re making cuts. Don’t have to pay out for benefits no one can claim, do you? High-Fives all around. Sure, lots of people will die and the country will end up paying a lot more in unemployment benefits and medical treatment for the millions forced out of work, but that’s a problem with a similar Cut and Slice solution, isn’t it?

Once again, when disabled groups and charities and anyone with a conscience said that this Bill was the very epitome of a false economy and to disability rights what the Coldplay kiss-cam is to the expectation of discrete infidelity, the kneejerk newnewlabourinc response was to attack the disabled as greedy leeches, lie about what the policy did, and then, when the scale of the discomfort on the Labour benches skyrocketed with over 120 MPs saying they were going to vote for an amendment that would basically kill the planned Bill stone dead, a plunge into high-handed arrogance with Starmer, in his trademark unbearable nasal monotone, delivering a sneering dismissal of opposition as ‘Noises Off’, a theatrical term meaning unimportant offstage sounds that the important actors in any performance have to be professional enough to ignore.

Maybe it was this encapsulation of the withering contempt Starmer’s inner circle of callow young murgatroyds have for Labour’s MPs that broke the camel’s back in twelve places, because by the next news cycle Party whips were in a blind panic over how resolute the ‘No Fucking Way’ camp were. Meetings with the Work & Pensions Minister were offered, but they went so well that more MPs threatened to sign on to the amendment. Anonymous spokescreeps around Number 10 started threatening that they would consider the vote on the amendment to be a de facto confidence vote on Starmer’s leadership, so even more MPs let it be known they were considering signing on to the amendment. In the end, they had to strip more or less everything out of the Bill that the rebels didn’t like – pushing any changes off to a later date and only after some kind of to-be-confirmed consultation and advice period – in order to reduce the rebellion to manageable numbers and get something passed, but it was a humiliation on every level.

This disaster encapsulated everything that is driving disgust with newnewlabourinc. Bad policy that punches down on the weakest. Tone-deaf comms that are always pitched arrogant and clueless. A Plan A of threats and bullying, then when that fails to work, an uncoordinated collapse as they all look around the cabinet table at each other and realise that there actually is no Plan B, this is all they have. The habitual ‘all resistance is punishable by expulsion’ brutality that they were allowed to get away with when it was aimed at non-Starmerite Party members and elected officials simply wasn’t fit for purpose any more, not now that the formerly cowed legions of centrally selected Labour MPs all had mailbags bulging with angry voter commentary and were looking down the barrel of electoral wipeout at the next election if they didn’t put a stake through the heart of PIP ‘reform’. So, Der Starmerpartei got the worst of both worlds – they forced through gutted reforms that saved no money (which was their main selling point), and trashed Labour’s reputation with millions of disabled and disabled-adjacent voters, and for what? So that Morgan McSweeney wouldn’t have to admit he’d fucked up? Again!

Now, before we go any further, let’s get one thing clear. Everybody and their maiden aunt knew going into the last election that fourteen years of Tory austerity and corruption had left the country face down and drowning in a financial riptide that would take some rough swimming to get out of. You couldn’t not know it, since “£22 billion blackhole in the public finances!!” was all you ever heard from Rachel Reeves, newnewlabourinc’s then Shadow-Chancellor (now Chancellor, in charge of The Treasury) whenever she was asked what, exactly, newnewlabourinc planned to do about it that was different from the Tories or, you know, maybe a bit better? And it’s true. Years of austerity and decaying infrastructure, added to the suicidal throat-cutting of Brexit, added to the bill for Covid, added to the industrial-scale one-way suction pumps successive Tory (and Tory-Lite) Governments have fitted to the public purse for the benefit of private corporations, the UK is a LOT poorer than it was a decade ago. Cuts will have to be made. But what cuts? Whose ox gets gored? That’s the question. Would it be the undertaxed millionaires and billionaires who have seen their wealth skyrocket since the Credit Crisis? Or would it be the little people? The ones with the least to give and the least chance of bending the right ear at the right meeting or backroom party at DAVOS? Mmmmmnnnn. Now let me think, what kind of person is Rachel Reeves?

A joyless energy-vampire and foot-shuffling fan of bands like The Market Is God and Silence In The Prole Pens, Reeves was selected by the donors and lobbyists ‘advising’ Starmer to spearhead newnewlabourinc’s fast-paced ideological redeployment away from the previous leadership’s centre-left, worker-centred, moderate progressivism and towards a more ‘grown-up’ embrace of budget-cutting, down-trickling, philo-corporatist orthodoxy not too dissimilar from that of pre-Brexit Tory Governments. And redeploy she did. Hard Labour would no longer be, in Reeves’ own words, ‘the party to represent those who are out of work’, but ‘the party of Growth and Opportunity’, because there’s nothing in the world the Labour Right loves more than offering zero-downside financial incentives to rooms full of nice-smelling Business Leaders with cold eyes and predatory smiles, and nothing it despises more than the smelly scroungers and lazy layabouts of the Urban Working Classes with their perpetual pleas for more and bigger handouts that they’d only spend on fripperies like food and rent and clothing for their granny-mugging spawn.

Still, say what you like about her ideological biases, no one could ever deny that Reeves had the gravitas and credibility to underpin her faith in the untapped potential of private finance, given that she was, according to her CV, a former Senior Economist at the Bank of England and Halifax Bank of Scotland with years of high-level experience guiding the flows and surges of financial…. (checks notes) oh, hang on a minute, no, sorry, there must have been some kind of perfectly understandable administrative error in the processing of Ms Reeves’ CV, because in reality, it turns out she was just a former graduate scheme entrant at the Bank of England and then a customer service manager at Halifax Bank of Scotland in the run up to 2008’s global banking crash. Still, who better to run herd on the rabid beasts of the City of London than someone whose job it had been to advise people on issues around their mortgages between 2006 and 2009, eh? Especially when that someone had lost their job (Ed – Ahem!) sorry, had taken voluntary redundancy from that job by mutual agreement in a decision that had nothing at all to do with her being one of three senior managers under investigation for taking the piss with expenses claims so extravagant that even HBOS thought they crossed the line.

In the banking world.

In 2009.

So, yeah, that’s who Rachel Reeves is.

Anyway, while Starmer himself has been moulded by McSweeney into the outlet for a lot of the terrible shit newnewlabourinc have flushed onto the country, Reeves has, if anything, outdone him in the lavatorial sourcing stakes. Her mantra from the start has been Growth = Future Recovery, based on the idea that the Tories had so thoroughly denuded the public finances that any long-term upturn in spending could only come after a period of belt-tightening and reorganisation to make the UK more attractive to private investment. In other words, if the UK wanted nice things in the future, it just needed to do what all the hot, young countries were doing these days; powder its cheeks, raise its hemlines and go shake its booty on the street corners where Mr Job Creator and friends go looking for short-term company. A very familiar line, sure. There are old cassette tapes of it being droned out in the same management-speak monotone at corporate funded business conferences from 50 years ago, but it’s how she’s gone about it that has left economists baffled and many figures in the wider Party shaking their heads. Austerity and performatively cruel cuts for the ones who have the least, tongue baths and the deepest respect for those who have the most. If the last forty years have taught us anything (other than you pretty much can lie to all the people all the time if you have enough money, and that fruit does not belong on pizza) it’s that that particular spreadsheet will never balance.

Reeves isn’t the only member of the Cabinet to give off distinct Peter Principal vibes. She may hold the purse strings, and her ‘iron-clad fiscal rules’ may be the tightening noose around the throat of public spending, but there are plenty of other Ministers all too eager to make their bones showing how ‘moderate’ they are by being as cruel and dismissive to non-VIPs as they can. Two in particular really get my billy goat very gruff indeed.

The PIP changes and other cuts to disability benefits are the life’s work of lizard-brained nightstalker Liz Kendall, a double-dipped acolyte of the Cult of St B’Liar the Toothsome whose 2015 campaign to be Labour Party leader was so cartoonishly right-wing that she only received a humiliating 4% of the vote. Her campaign manager in that debacle was the same Morgan McSweeney whose billionaire-funded Labour Together grouping would later become the binding-force and command centre of first the ‘Destroy Corbyn’ project, and then its ‘Choose Starmer, Choose Lies’ and ‘Ain’t No Party Like A Purged Party’ successors, before becoming Starmer’s Chief of Scat. Kendall’s 2015 campaign had proven her to be so out-of-step with Labour Party feeling and unappealing to actual Labour Party members that Starmer, when he was finally in a position to make good on his own leadership election promises to ‘unite the Party’, just had to stick finger number elebenty-billion in the eye of Those Dirty Lefties by appointing her Work and Pensions Minister. Getting someone as gleefully repugnant as Kendall to present the ‘moral case’ for denouncing the disabled as workshy frauds who just need to be tipped out of their wheelchairs and ‘incentivised’ through the workhouse gates with whips and tasers was always going to be vomit-worthy, but it takes a special kind of diamond-plated effrontery for the millionaire wife of a former Merrill-Lynch banker to stand outside Number 10 affirming the desperate need for benefit cuts while flashing a watch that, at its cheapest, retails for more than the average PIP claimant would lose in a year if her cuts took place. That’s newnewlabourinc in a nutshell, though. Arrogant. High-Handed. And as prickish as Fergus the Fifty Phallussed Penisaur in the final round of the Jurassic Jerk-Off Championships.

The high-profile Health Ministry, with its control over the NHS, went to Wes ‘Utter Twat’ Streeting, another testicle-headed graduate from the Peter Mandelson School of Griftcraft and Complicity who came to prominence acting as the squeaking front-arse of the anti-Corbyn media campaign, always just a phone-call away when Fleet Street needed a ‘moderate Labour MP’ to validate their latest antisemitism smear, and he traded that exposure, plus a tight relationship with the moneymen behind McSweeney’s Labour Together and the Trump-friendly ‘Blue Labour’ lobby group, into a secure Cabinet posting within knifing distance of Starmer’s back. Imagine a sly fart in a crowded lift being given a tailored suit and the face and voice of an 18^th century Earl’s overindulged bastard son, that’s Streeting, and he’s currently the blue-eyed boy of the faction that wants to replace the Tories as the de facto Party of the Centre Right. As Health Minister he’s brought with him a snot-trail of ties to Peter Thiel’s Palantir and a range of US Healthcare corporations, along with a ‘unique’ management style built on attacking the very concept of a taxpayer-funded health service, smearing its overworked staff for the failures of upper management, turning a blind eye to the huge profits being made by private companies chosen to fill gaps in the NHS’ crumbling infrastructure, accusing junior-doctors of holding the country to ransom for demanding the wage hikes he’d already agreed to, and dismissing the ongoing mental health crisis with an airy handwave about “an epidemic of over-diagnosis”. The only fly in Wes’ mercury-based skin ointment is the fact that he only barely held on to his Ilford constituency in the last election, coming within a few hundred votes of being unseated by a pro-Palestinian Independent candidate, and his popularity hasn’t exactly kept pace with his public visibility in the year since. Come the next election, whether he’s still at Health or has been installed as Starmer’s replacement, Wes will either have had to find another seat to squat in or take advantage of the Government’s brutal anti-protest laws to jail any potential opponents, because his shiny, round, dead-eyed face is on the target list of a whole range of groups who see him for the soulless bottom-feeder he truly is.

Yuck. I feel dirty just writing about those two. I swore only to use my typing finger for good and now look at me. What a fraud I turned out to be.

Anyway, it’s not just newnewlabourinc’s catalogue of nasty cuts or its Cabinet full of Monster of the Week cast-offs that have made re-election a toss-up. It’s their wider platter of right-lurching policy decisions, some revolving around money, some around principles, or their lack of them, but mostly revolving around the likes and dislikes of the very narrowly structured focus groups of ‘hero voters’ (three fat, white drunks from a Wetherspoons pub in Folkestone, by all appearances) that Labour Together relies on to keep the Party steering firmly rightward. Even when the policy itself is something popular enough to garner a lot of bi-partisan and pan-factional support, they either can’t resist the temptation to load it up with toxicity or they just plain want to make the rest of the world gobble down a shit-sandwich.

Take Ukraine, for example. Everyone but the Putin-fondlers over in Reform wants to see them lay the Russian Bear out flat and secure their freedom, and with President Putin-fondler over there in Washington squirting tantrum-juice into everyone’s eyes the urgency has ratcheted up a lot of notches. Taking on more responsibility for directly supporting Ukraine? Check. Reaching out to European allies to establish a solid pro-Ukrainian coalition? Check. Wrapping the whole shebang up in nauseating flag-waving militarism, using it as an excuse to pay tribute spend billions on buying tactical nuclear weapon platforms from Trump’s America, and funding it all with brutal cuts to the foreign aid budget? That’s the kind of Ra-Ra, let’s make the foreigns cry ugliness that went out of fashion with Flobalob, but that’s newnewlabourinc, always refighting the last war with their weapons cocked and pointed down the front of their own pants.

Trans-rights? Same tack taken. After that steeply fallen icon (whose full name is, serendipitously, an anagram of ‘A Long Wanker Line, Then Jo’) and her fellow X-chromosome goons in the Sorority of Intolerant Scolds for Trans Exclusion and Removal from Society lost a couple of legal cases where they claimed that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act referred only to Women just like them, the Dark Lady’s expensive lawyers took it all the way to the UK Supreme Court, which gave them the win they wanted. The Court’s judgement was that when the Act was passed in 2010 no one was in any doubt about what was meant by ‘woman’, which I’m sure came as a surprise to the many, many trans people who were alive and living as their proper gender in that far-off Antediluvian epoch, and definitely came as a surprise to the people who actually advised on the drafting of the Act. We know that because they said so, pity the Court never thought to ask them. Eh?

Nevertheless, that was the judgement. Combine it with the ‘greased pig out of a water-slide’ rapidity with which Baroness Kishwer Falkner, noted transphobe and the Flobalob-appointed head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission moved to demand that every single public and private body in the country immediately start interpreting the judgement to mean that Women’s toilets were now high-security zones from which anyone who failed to pass a biological spot-check had to be excluded on threat of future legal action, it was enough to give Der Starmerpartei licence to drop the act and sidle gracelessly towards the retrograde side of yet another Kulturwar issue. Starmer was straight out of the gate thanking the Court for bringing ‘much needed clarity’ to the issue and doing a textbook 180 on his previous ‘deeply held beliefs’ by insisting that he’d always believed that only biological women were women.

‘Clarity’ was the buzzword all of His Ministers were ordered to use when talking to the Media, which, of course, got them into all kinds of trouble when they were asked some of the obvious questions, like, could you explain what was supposed to happen to trans men now? Were they supposed to use women’s toilets? How did this square with the claim that women needed to be protected from ‘men’ invading their toilets? Would they have to ‘prove’ themselves to be a biological sex they didn’t belong to? What was to stop a predatory Cis male from going into a women’s toilet and claiming to have been born a woman? Where, exactly, was this ‘Clarity’, and did the Government, which claimed to be supportive of Trans rights, plan to amend the Equality Act to add language specifically acknowledging Trans women as women so they wouldn’t be put in the horrible position of using Male toilets or pissing themselves in public?

Cue the inevitable bulging eyes and panicked gobbling as Minister after Minister ran smack bang into the hard contradiction at the black heart of the newnewlabourinc project. You can pander to the biases of the revanchist Right in a fruitless quest for a new voter base or you can promote the policies of the progressive Left voters your Party is supposed to represent, you can’t do both, not without looking like a hypocritical moron. Every time a stiffly uncomfortable Starmerpartei mouthpiece tried to push the scripted line that everything was just fine and there was no gulf between what the Government was saying and observable reality, it just made the people living in that reality frustrated and angrier. The Right didn’t really want women ‘protected’ from mythical pre-op rapists, they wanted the Trans community tagged, targeted and turned into an Other they could eternally save the country’s easily corrupted children from. While the side demanding inclusion, equality and all those other things that are part and parcel of building a better society, were under no obligation to pretend that Hard Labour were being anything other than mealy-mouthed cowards who should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for leaving the Trans community out to dry.

It was the uproar on the progressive side, and not any action by Starmer’s Government, that led to the EHRC backing off from its initial slavering haste to ostracise Trans people and belatedly agree that a period of consultation – in which Trans voices would actually be included this time – was a necessary prerequisite before any legal guidance was actually issued. Yet again, the cunning überbrains over at newnewlabourinc central had stuck the Party’s head into a beehive looking for the sweet, sweet honey of Reform-curious votes and came out with nothing to show for it but a faceful of stings and a near-fatal case of anaphylactic shock.

On Immigration? Same depressing story, familiar to anyone who’s been paying a modicum of attention to the how and the why and the who of the world’s current ‘glass half-full of Santorum’ condition. Far-Right billionaire-fuelled troll-farms have been helping Farage’s Reform Party with its 5 MPs (oops, no, now it’s only 4, turns out they’re not so hot at the whole ‘don’t recruit barely civilised slugs with fascist-tourettes’ thing) by flooding social media with cut-and-paste horror stories of strapping young bucks of military age coming over here on ‘The Boats’, being handed the keys to luxury penthouse suites in 4-star hotels, monopolising all of our goods and services to leave nothing but scraps for ‘traditional’ British people to fight over, imposing Sharia Law on whole cities and forming predatory rape-gangs that roam around the unpoliced no-go areas targeting innocent British virgins to the alien sounds of the muezzin’s plaintive call.

You’d think that a confident, centre-left Government with a huge majority and an official Opposition as astonishingly badly led as Kemi Badenoch’s Tory Party (don’t get me started, that’s a 20,000 word extended gulp of disbelief all on its own) would hop, skip and jump at the opportunity to tell the Public that they’ve been lied to about all of this since Brexit, wouldn’t you? That criminal gangs are only able to exploit the people who risk their lives to come over here on small boats because of the Brexit Farage campaigned for. Or that none of these people are ‘illegal migrants’, but rather asylum seekers who have had all of their legal routes to entry – and the concomitant facilities for processing their claims handled quickly – slammed shut by the Tories. Or that without immigration the goods and services the British people rely on to eke out their existences in Austerityland would crumble overnight. Or that the Right’s recent obsession with ‘Asian paedo grooming gangs’ is just dog-whistling racism and frantic squirrel-waving to draw attention away from the fact that the vast majority of child sexual abuse in this country is carried out by white family members or white, wealthy pillars of the Establishment. Or that the UK would be immeasurably better off if we just acknowledged what a disaster Brexit has been and started the process of reconnecting our economy with this massive captive market on our doorstep.

You’d expect that. But since this is only a proper, centre-left Government in the same way that Dean Cain is a paragon of Truth, Justice and The American Way (fictionally), you’d be advised not to hold your breath too long waiting for it. Instead, what we’ve had is everyone from Sir Starmer the Concerned Llama on down the pecking order validating Reform’s obsession with The Immigration Crisis by bleating on and on about how very tough Hard Labour are being on ‘illegals’ and how much tougher they can be if that’s what their focus-groups want. Rather than defend human decency, they’ve capitulated to Reform’s demands for pointless inquiries into how rapey the browns are that, let’s face it, Farage will just dismiss as a fake-news cover-up anyway when the conclusions don’t suit his need for outrage, and they simply won’t talk about Brexit other than as something that they’ve got to ‘respect’ and ‘make work’. Instead of pulling MI5 off their ‘infiltrate dangerous Lefty pacifist groups’ missions and unleashing them against the well-funded bastards busy poisoning the minds of hundreds of thousands with straight-up Race War porn, Hard Labour prefer to see the ‘totally valid concerns’ of brainwashed white rioters who want to murder asylum seekers as a political opportunity for them to open up murky blue water between themselves and the Party’s hippy-dippy past.

Starmer himself, always on the lookout for a rake to step on, stunned a lot of his most obdurately loyal defenders in the Church of the Ever Moving Centre with a frankly disastrous speech on the topic in May, when he channelled the corrosive poison of Enoch Powell’s ‘River of Blood’ rhetoric from the 1960s into a Party Political Broadcast for the Reform Party. Jaws dropped when he warned that mass immigration risked us becoming an ‘Island of Strangers’, attacked immigrants for not integrating into British culture, spoke of recent immigration as ‘a squalid chapter for our nation’ that had done ‘incalculable damage’, and promised to ‘take back control’ of our ‘open borders’.

If you’re unfamiliar with Powell and his shameful place in British history, imagine if a Democratic President gave a speech on ‘The Border’ that contained language directly echoing Governor Wallace’s ‘Segregation Now. Segregation Tomorrow. Segregation Forever’ speech. That’s the kind of timeless original Starmer was riffing off. Being as obdurately incompetent as they are, Hard Labour’s comms team responded to the outrage by sending Sir Pirouette d’Flipflop back out there to defend his choice of language and tut-tut at anyone claiming he could possibly have been echoing one of Britain’s most famously divisive racists. Then, when that didn’t win the news cycle, they tried throwing the speechwriters under the bus, because it’s quite believable that anyone with a political bone in their body could have written, edited or delivered a speech on Immigration using that language without one of them thinking, “Hang on, are we sounding a bit like the Baddies here?”. Eventually, as has so often been the case since Hard Labour took power, Starmer had to change tack and sort of half acknowledge he’d fucked up by saying how much he regretted giving nasty people an opportunity to misinterpret his totally non-divisive words, but as has so often been the case since they took power, the damage to their credibility was already well and truly done.

Now, I get it, sort of. The McSweeney/Blue Labour roadmap for the transformation of Labour into a centre-right Party requires a seismic shift in its traditional positioning on issues like this. They calculate they can take Immigration away from the Right as a vote-winning issue by re-making Hard Labour into the Party of closed borders and hostility to Illegals, and if this offends and drives away Labour’s minority support – well, great, they’re all smelly Lefties whose aggressive swarthiness puts off ‘traditional working-class voters’ (wink wink) anyway. They think they can step right over the broken mess of Badenoch’s Tory Party and park their tanks directly on Reform’s lawn, promoting Farage’s openly fascist Volkspartei as Hard Labour’s main opposition in order to consolidate the split on the Right, while earning enough anti-immigrant credibility of their own to force Farage and his supporters into increasingly nutty xenophobic claims that might appeal to some uneducated white communities and the Yaxley-Lennon fringe, but will turn off millions of former Tories who are ‘concerned’ about immigration, but don’t currently feel all that comfortable with the idea of concentration camps and lynchings, leaving Der Starmerpartei the default option in enough marginal seats for them to scrape back in at the next Election. The doubters remaining in Hard Labour’s mushy middle will either jump ship or will see that newnewlabourinc really doesn’t need the Left to stay in office, and most importantly, the UK stays on the right side of the people who have all the money and power.

Purely as an exercise in political theory, I can see where they’re coming from, but in the real world I think they’re wrong on a level alongside whoever is advising Sydney Sweeney. They might not think that Farage has the special sauce to maintain his Party’s current polling lead for the next four years (yes, that’s right, a year into their glorious reign Hard Labour are polling well behind the UK version of MAGA) and they might not think that the rump Tories have it within themselves to recover while nutters like Badenoch are the best they can offer, and they might even be right about that right about now, but let’s not forget, THIS. IS. ENGLAND! Only five short years ago Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson was King of all he surveyed and the apple of the Media’s eye, firmly in place for a decade of jolly fun and frivolity. The fluid cultural shifts now underlying British politics can change the rules really bloody quickly, and once a Government’s popularity goes down the pan, the Opposition doesn’t need to be Pedro Pascal in a powder blue suit sitting across from you on a moonlit balcony to seem a more attractive option, they just need to have a pulse and to not be the sitting Government. One thing that is certain is that we’ll definitely find out who’s right at the next Election, but by then it’ll be too late. In the meantime, the whole debate about Immigration is being carried out on Reform’s terms and using Reform’s divisive versions of ‘facts and figures’, which only gives Reform, already well on its way to being anointed 2029 Election Champions by the BBC and the wingnut media, a ton of unearned credibility with a nervous electorate.

And then, of course, there’s Gaza. The whole issue of Israel/Palestine generally, but specifically how Hard Labour have responded to the Israeli Government’s cynical decision to exploit Hamas’ Oct 7 atrocity as cover for Netanyahu’s long-stated desire to stay out of prison and the wider Israeli Far-Right’s even longer stated desire to permanently solve their ‘Palestinian Problem’.

Where do I even start with this comprehensive disaster? To say that Der Starmerpertei have shit the bed here is like saying that the NYT made a small journalistic boo-boo in hounding Joe Biden for non-existent dementia when Donald Trump was drooling fetid arse-gravy out of his facial orifice every time he got in front of a camera. The bed in question very much did not shit itself. It was shit upon. From a very great height. Repeatedly. With gaps between each shitting for three course meals consisting of room-temperature oysters, suspiciously sourced ‘meat-based products’ and coffee laced with cod liver oil. And the people doing the shitting came to the bed on pre-booked buses with their schedules cleared and no pants on. This was very much not a case of anyone being caught short, defecation was always the plan.

It’s not even that surprising that Hard Labour have taken the line they have on Gaza, how could they not? For a start they are terrible, terrible people, but they’re also in an even worse bind than the UK Media Establishment, the slightly less toxic organs of which have spent the period 2023 – 2025 trying to quietly decouple themselves from their 2015-2020 editorial stance of mainstreaming some of the most extreme pro-Israel lobby groups in the UK and backing the formerly fringe campaign to force every institution in the UK (starting with the Labour Party) to adopt the Israeli Right’s maximalist take on what constitutes antisemitism. The FTF Guardian, for example, has quietly tippy-toed back to something like its pre-2015 take on the Israeli Right and their reflexive accusations of antisemitism, ending its cozy relationship with propaganda rags like the Jewish Chronicle now that Corbyn’s threat to the political system is safely disposed of, and is trying its best to pretend that it didn’t spend years treating the Chronicle’s stable of bankrupt liars as The Guardian’s story editors.

Der Starmerpartei can’t do that. They don’t have the same ability to simply wipe the board clean of incriminating evidence. There are already books out there where journalists who knew what was happening at the time are revealing (in non-judgemental, passive-voice mode) how the Labour Together bastards decided just after they lost their 2016 leadership challenge to Corbyn to make fake antisemitism accusations the bedrock of their new scorched-earth offensive. Were they to piss off the wrong people there are no doubt recordings of meetings and WhatsApp conversations from the period that could be leaked, with disastrous effects on certain very important careers. When they allied with the Israeli lobby to destroy the Labour Left, they also gave extremist groups like the Jewish Labour Movement official authority to decide what did and did not constitute antisemitism within the Party, leaving themselves no legitimate avenue through which to dispute their assessments. As events during the Election proved, that was an elementary mistake. Like when Starmer loyalists had to be thrown under the bus after secret recordings were leaked of them having ‘clear the air’ meetings with furious Muslim Party members and referring to the widely held and pretty well-established belief that Netanyahu deliberately ignored warnings that the Oct 7 attacks were about to happen. When you declare ‘Your Party is closed to ‘antisemites’ as code for ‘purge the Left’, but you appoint watchmen who see any questioning of Israel or concern for Palestinians as ‘antisemitism’, you kind of put your nick-nacks in a vice that will be snapped tight on their schedule, not yours.

My heart bleeds. Obviously.

Starmer himself irredeemably stained his own reputation back in ’23 when he said in an interview (yes, he is a former human-rights lawyer, why do you ask?) that of course Israel had the right to violate international law by cutting off food and electricity to the Gaza strip. After that shocker it was clear that newnewlabourinc’s stance on this issue was going to stink like Russell Brand’s bed after a three week pity-party. Against the backdrop of rising public horror and with the example of Russia’s daily slaughter of Ukranians to act as a counterpoint, Der Starmerpartei stubbornly ignored legal and national opinion in order to press on with its policy of sticking like a limpet to whatever line Washington DC was taking. So, they’ve continued selling arms to Israel, providing the IDF with intel and data from RAF surveillance flights and even used its bases to train IDF forces, all despite clear and indisputable evidence that Israel has been openly committing war crimes from the start of the conflict. You don’t have to be a dirty Lefty to recognise that the extreme bias shown by Sir Keir ‘unapologetic Zionist’ Starmer towards Netanyahu’s vile Likud/Lunatic regime has been shameful and disastrous for the Party’s standing, you just have to be an honest observer.

How bad has it got? There have been pro-Palestine marches here for years, cranking up in numbers and frequency once the obliteration of the Gaza ghetto started in earnest and the UK Government donned its thickest Whatabout blinkers in order to pretend that Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ trumped everything. Public opinion polls have only got worse for Israel and her backers with every upward crank in the obscenity level. Blowing up ambulances. Murdering journalists. Bombing schools. Targeting medics. Levelling hospitals. Hijacking aid ships. Deliberately causing famine. Herding starving people into free-fire zones and sniping at different body parts to turn executions into a ‘game’. It would take a soul as black as George Hamilton’s hair dye to turn a blind eye to all that, but Der Starmerpartei have proven themselves up to the task. Always available for displays of crocodile tears and mealy-mouthed condemnations of some specific acts when the occasion demands it, but they’re never backed up by anything concrete until all other options have been exhausted.

But when it comes to domestic opposition to all this, in whatever form, they suddenly veer into “Hulk Smash!” mode. Palestine Action, a direct-action group opposed to Britain’s pro-Israel policy, recently broke into an RAF base and threw red paint into the engines of two airplanes they claimed were off to aid the Israeli war crime effort. Back during the Iraq War a certain Keir Starmer was the lawyer who defended a member of the Fairford Five, another direct-action group who broke into an RAF base to try and stop US bombers heading to Iraq. His argument back then was that criminal action (like breaking and entering, trespass, and property damage) was justified in prevention of war crimes. He must have argued it well, because the accused were acquitted of the charges. As Prime Minister, his thinking on the issue has clearly ‘evolved’. Rather than let the Police and the Courts deal with Palestine Action, he and his Home Secretary Yvette Cooper chose to dump all over the very concept of proportionality by shoehorning PA onto a list of banned terrorist organisations, sandwiched between the homicidal Maniacs Murder Cult and the neo-Nazi Russian Imperial Movement.

This, to be undeservedly kind, is fucking obscene. It’s exactly the kind of politically influenced abuse of the Terror Laws opponents said would happen back when they were passed. Palestine Action isn’t in any sense of the word a terrorist group. But now that it’s been labelled one, this Government has effectively labelled all pro-Palestinian advocacy as potential terrorism. Not hyperbole. Seriously. Just writing those words here is probably a criminal offence in the UK. People have actually been arrested for having the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Action’ near each other on placards or for holding copies of a page from the satirical magazine Private Eye mocking the Government’s authoritarian overreach. People have been arrested for waving Palestinian flags. People have been arrested for saying Israel is committing genocide. And not just arrested, but held in cells overnight, interrogated about their ‘terrorist activities’ while their homes are being raided, and then being put on curfews and watch-lists for their ‘crimes’.

I suppose all this police-state bollocks makes perfect sense to the inhabitants of Fuckhead Fascistville, the suburb of Know Your Place City where most of our baton-swinging brethren sleep at night like steroided-up babies in their Judge DreddPJs. Palestine Action wave Palestinian flags, don’t they? Palestine Action say Israel is committing genocide, don’t they? Now that it’s illegal to ‘display support’ for that one group, the Police have all the ‘reasonable suspicion’ they need to infer that anyone supporting Palestine or opposing genocide is a supporter of a banned organisation, don’t they? Yeah, it might look like straight up security-state madness out of the Putin handbook, but it’s just common sense, innit? Have Hard Labour’s leadership raised so much as a quizzical eyebrow at these baseless arrests? Of course not, because this has nothing to do with ‘fighting terrorism’ and everything to do with criminalising opposition to their support for Netanyahu’s regime in the most cynical and cowardly way possible.

It’s all of a dreadful piece with the shameful way Der Starmerpartei’s leadership have decided to address the widespread and growing disgust with their policy of appeasement. And it’s not even going to work. The stupid fucks have just had the London Met drag in extra police from all over the country to mass-arrest over 500 peaceful protestors for daring to oppose this stupidity, and are doubling down by stamping their feet and insisting that Palestine Action are too a “very violent” organisation (they just can’t tell us why because of ‘national security’, which I’m going to go out on a limb and conclude translates to “Israel say they are, but haven’t given us any actual evidence”) and that those they’ve had arrested are going to ‘feel the full weight of the law’ crashing down upon them. Images of 80 year old civil-rights activists being manhandled, handcuffed and dragged into Police vans for opposing the slaughter of children isn’t a good look, any more than harassing punk bands from Ireland for daring to equate the Palestinian struggle with that of their home country, or demanding that rappers at Glastonbury calling out ‘Death to the IDF’ be banned from public view, or even threatening the BBC (the fucking Tory-run, pro-Farage, desperately in need of a wholesale management clear-out BBC!) with cuts in funds for not sacking the staff who didn’t immediately censor footage of the above. It’s ham-fisted at best and long-term it’s electoral poison.

Breathe. Breathe. Think of them naked, oh, ye gods no!

If it was just Gaza, the wankers at Hard Labour could do what they always do and sneeringly dismiss all this anti-genocide protest as irrelevant, but added to horror at their hard-line on Immigration, disgust with their nastiness to the Trans community, anger at their policy of ‘Cuts to Welfare, Billions for Warfare’, fury at their attacks on pensioners, the disabled, and ridicule over their kowtowing to Trump, it all adds up to a majority of the public coming to view newnewlabourinc as just another untrustworthy mob of Tories in red ties who, IMHO, seem to think that, if they just pick the wrong side of every argument, they can somehow lay claim to the equivalent of the 17.5 million moron votes that ‘won’ Brexit and stay in power interminably.

Sigh. It’s fucking idiots all the way down. Idiots standing on the backs of knobheads standing on the eyeballs of lunatics.

So, what’s the future? Are newnewlabourinc going to continue on this death march towards rule or ruin? Are the voters of the UK really going to close their eyes and push the button for the frog-faced fascist just to ‘try something different’? Are the Tories going to wise up to the opportunities they’re missing and tack back towards the centre-right? Are the owners of the UK Media going to allow whatever the new ‘Leftwing’ Party turns into to put its case without a barrage of concocted smears (okay, now I’m just being silly)?

We don’t know. But we can guess. As long as the McSweeney faction remains in control of Starmer and the wider Labour bureaucracy, there will be no diversion from the roadmap set out by Blue Labour. MAGA in the bedroom, Tory in the boardroom, and no room at all for the wider centre-left. The Tories simply have to get rid of the almost mesmerically terrible Kemi Badenoch (she’s out there today beating the drum for common-sense concentration camps, FFS), but she’s just a symptom of their malaise, not the root cause. As with the period when Blair was in power, they’re stuck defending the sins of their past and the electorate don’t take them seriously, but unlike the period Blair was in power, the UK is in a seriously depressed state, economically and culturally, and the Tories have a rival Party to their (far) Right that is occupying the space their most influential MPs and a dangerously large chunk of their actual Party membership want to move into. They – could – make an alliance with Reform, though that mob are so closely associated with Farage himself that it’s hard to see him playing second fiddle to whatever Tory leader gets coughed up after Badenoch gets moved on. They could also take the radical road pioneered by Cameron and Osborne in the early 2000s, pretend to move back towards some kind of mythical centre ground and suggest that they’ve learned from their mistakes. The mainstream media would love that, probably, and this would give them space to shed the hard-right to Reform and work hard to recruit non-lunatics as candidates. Chances are, though, they’ll try to fudge it and wait to see if Reform burns out over the next year or so before making any moves. Badenoch is awful, but who else have they got right now?

The Lib-Dems under Davey seem to have peaked. He’s just not charismatic enough to cut through, has the weight of his past service in the Lib Dem/Tory coalition dragging on his nice-guy image, and despite having something like nineteen times the number of MPs that Reform can muster gets something like 0000.1% of the coverage, because the News Media are all-in on the drama of breathlessly reporting on everything the itinerant MP for Clacton-on-Sea vomits up, but haven’t been interested in anything the Lib Dems say or do since they were ‘Jo Swinson’s Lib-Dems’ back in 2019 and it was tactically useful to promote that nutter’s anti-Corbyn diatribes. The Greens have done well out of newnewlabourinc’s lurch to the right, picking up a lot of protest votes, but if this new Party of the Left emerges out of what Corbyn and Zara Sultana are doing a lot of those votes will probably dry up and they’ll return to being a very small-scale threat to the status quo. A semi-official alliance and some kind of tactical voting agreement between all of these smaller parties might be a way forward, but our electoral system renders that incredibly complicated, and none of them will want to open the way for a minority Reform or Reform/Tory Government.

Whatever happens, it can’t go on this way. 2029 might be a long way off, but when you’re tumbling downhill like a mint-condition Tesla, velocity gobbles up distance faster than you’d think. And thanks to last November, it’s all taking place in a world that has also to deal with the very unnatural disaster polluting your White House.

You know, sometimes, I even depress myself.