There has never been a Labour Leader so betrayed by those who rode his shirt tales as Corbyn.
Ironically after campaigning so much to stop HS2, Sir Keir Starmer is now attacking the Tories as the Government confirms that the Leeds leg of HS2 will be scrapped.
By now we are all used to Sir Keir Starmer flipping on his promises, from the ten pledges he made during his Leadership contest to public ownership, or reversing support for £15 an hour down to £10. Not forgetting, instead of abolishing the House of Lords, he’s now calling for change, a little tinkling.
However, the stand out change for most was his flip on Brexit. As Diane Abbott put it: ‘Having been Mr Remain’ you ‘don’t hear much about remain now’
Starmer’s Leadership election left a trail of broken promises.
Starmer appeased the Left, masses of members that had joined the party on a promise of socialist change. He needed their vote. With his platitudes towards Jeremy Corbyn, he gave the impression of support. His expressing that Jeremy Corbyn was demonised by the press during the election campaign, appeared to many that he was a faithful Lieutenant.
Starmer, endorsed this thinking while being the frontrunner to be the next leader of the opposition when he told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Sunday that there had been “vilification of Labour leaders” in the past, with Mr Corbyn faring worse at the hands of the media than previous leaders.
In his interview, Sir Keir Starmer– who the month before had told Labour supporters in Liverpool that he would not be giving any interviews to The Sun (well not then at least)– said voters who did not like Mr Corbyn had developed negative judgements of him because of information fed to them by unbalanced reporting.
The one promise Starmer has not broken was that of unifying the Party but little did anyone Imagine that unification would take the form of mass expulsions, the purges of socialist and left-wingers that have dared lift their heads above the parapet, now just an everyday accordance carried out in an ever decreasing Labour party. All be it as promised, a unified party, however, substantially reduced to the meek and Blairites, old and new alike.
Nowhere throughout the Leadership campaign did Starmer attack or undermine Corbyn, Now of course 18 months later not only has Starmer removed the whip from Corbyn his betrayal goes to the point of denying him. Starmer’s mask has decidedly gone, he feels safe in the knowledge that voters have two choices, his brand of Tory or the Tories.
It was during an interview on HS2 Starmer was asked would Jeremy Corbyn make a better prime minister than Boris Johnson?
The Labour leader was asked the pointed question on Corbyn being a better PM by a BBC interviewer and swerved – saying while a Labour government was better than a Tory one, he’d turned the party round from its 2019 election disaster.
Asked a third time, he said: “What I’ve been doing is I’ve recognised the scale of what’s happened.”
Asked a fourth time, he replied: “Well look, what have we got in the Prime Minister? We’ve got a Prime Minister who has…”
Asked why he would not answer the question, he replied: “A Labour government is always better than a Conservative government”.
Asked if that meant Jeremy Corbyn would have been better than Boris Johnson, he replied: “We lost very badly in 2019, and my job as leader of the Labour Party has been to change our party, turn it round, and that’s what we’ve been doing.
“I appreciate the rule changes we had at conference are boring process, but they don’t have show we’ve changed the Labour Party and set out a positive case for the future.
Starmer blanking Corbyn is an attempt to place the blame for Labour’s loss at Corbyn’s feet, his silence is a finger pointed at Corbyn alone not even a sniff of collective responsibility.
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels, it seems a shame a Labour Party Leader is using the same technique once carried out by such evil men on its own membership.
The illusion of truth effect.
If repetition was the only thing that influenced what we believed we’d be in trouble, but it isn’t. We can all bring to bear more extensive powers of reasoning, but we need to recognise they are a limited resource. Our minds are prey to the illusion of truth effect because our instinct is to use shortcuts in judging how plausible something is. Often this works. Sometimes it is misleading.
Starmer declined five times to answer whether Jeremy Corbyn would have been a “better Prime Minister” than Boris Johnson.
Labour’s leader said “a Labour government would be far better than the government we’ve got”, but swerved talking about Jeremy Corbyn – who has since been suspended from the party whip.
Starmer goes on to suggest the British public rejected both Jeremy Corbyn and the socialist policies the Labour Manifesto of 2019 presented, the same manifesto Starmer stood on to be elected, the same Leader Starmer was supposed to have supported and had the confidence in to become British Prime minister.
Of course, we all understand why Sir Keir Starmer would have us all believe it was Corbyn and socialism that caused the disastrous collapse of Labour in 2019, but we all know different and why he wants us to think that.
It’s insulting that Starmer thinks the British electorate have such short memories, every voter in the Labour Heartlands that former Red wall understands the finger of responsibility points to the architect of the disastrous Labour Brexit policy. That policy pushed onto the manifesto by Labour shadow Brexit Minister, Sir Keir Starmer.
Starmer has avoided the Brexit issue so much he must seriously think it’s gone away. The truth is like so many things in Starmer’s past they just keep popping up every time he puts his foot in it.
Facts speak louder than the repeated lie.
Labour lost 60 seats in total, 6 in Scotland and 54 in England, out of those 54 English seats 52 voted to leave the EU at that Labour was lucky, other leave voting seats with solid majorities are now marginals.
It was the vote losing second referendum that lost Labour any chance in the 2019 election, a policy pushed by the then Shadow Brexit minister, Sir Keir Starmer, now Labour Leader.
Understanding the biggest change from the vote winning 2017 GE was the decision to no longer respect the result of the referendum to a vote losing second referendum, which killed Labour’s chances of any success.
You cannot tell the people to vote again they were stupid because they did not vote your way.
Yes, Corbyn can take the blame but only for his bad choices, his appointing Starmer to such a position in the first place was questionable. Starmer had been an MP for a little over a year before he had not only played a part in the original coup in 2016 trying to remove Corbyn as leader three days after the referendum to leave the EU but unwisely Corbyn showed his magnanimous side appointing Starmer to shadow Brexit minister.
Starmer used the position to undermine Corbyn and start the official ball rolling for a second referendum.
Turning a composite motion to campaign for a second referendum only against a bad deal or no deal, Starmer really played the game on that one during the 2018 Labour conference. Not satisfied with the composite motion as it stood, he added the words to campaigning for remain in a speech, going against Loto and the agreed terms, as I wrote in 2018 this was Starmer’s first speech in his leadership campaign.
From that point, he set his stall out at becoming leader of the party but that would come only after he steered Labour into a defeat that would leave Corbyn no choice but to resign his position.
It was a combination of Starmer’s Brexit policy with his vote losing second referendum and Peter Mandelson’s Peoples vote that crashed Labour, not Corbyn and definitely not socialist policies.
Of course, Starmer is now Labour Leader, Peter Mandelson, the ultimate Blair-era strategist now firmly within the inner circle. Two Trilateral commission members running the British Labour Party, and all was made safe as the establishment chuckled at the games it played.
It is now obvious, if people want change, if they want socialism of any kind, the Labour Party is not the vehicle to bring that about.
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