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Is This the End of Keir Rodney Starmer (As UK Prime Minister)?

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Starmer’s rapid rise and (apparent) fall are symptomatic of a broader trend unfolding across the Davos regimes of the collective West. 

Following the Labour Party’s drubbing in last week’s local elections, Prime Minister Keir Starmer needed to do something big and/or bold to salvage his crumbling “leadership” (for lack of a better word) — something that might have conveyed to his disenchanted voters that their welfare actually mattered. He did neither.

Instead, he brought Harriet Harman back into government as his “adviser on women and girls”. In the 1970s, Harman wrote a paper for the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) defending child pornography. As The Canary notes, “Starmer’s first act of his reshuffle, after months of scandals over his knowing appointment of paedophiles’ pals to senior positions”, was “to appoint a woman linked to a notorious paedophilia advocacy group.”

Starmer’s next move was to bring back former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as the government’s “special envoy on global finance and cooperation”, which, again, was an interesting choice. Besides failing quite abjectly as prime minister (2007-10), Brown is probably best known for two things:

  • Selling nearly 400 tonnes of UK gold reserves between 1999 and 2002 at a 20-year market low, in what famously came to be known as the “Brown Bottom“. By announcing the sale in advance, Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer, helped trigger a 10% fall in the market price of gold before a single ounce has been offloaded.
  • Helping to unleash the “animal spirits” of financial liberalisation during his tenure as chancellor (1997-2007), only for his tenure as prime minister to be marked by the 2008 crash — a crisis often described as a collapse of those same spirits. That painful history wasn’t enough to prevent Starmer from pledging last year to “bring back the animal spirits of the private sector” by reducing the regulatory burden on businesses.

Starmer’s third move was to (try to) deliver a skin-saving speech that would, if not inspire the nation, at least put paid to any internal stirrings within his government. But impassioned, inspirational speeches are not exactly Starmer’s forte. As the veteran political analyst Andrew O’Neil put it in the wake of yesterday’s speech, “there’s rarely been a situation so bad that it can’t be made worse with a Keir Starmer speech”:

It certainly wasn’t the Gettysburg Address. But nobody expects that from Keir Starmer. In places it was a familiar walk down memory lane, with the PM bigging up, yet again, his alleged working class credentials. As if we care.

There was plenty of emoting with working people. Though much good it has done them so far. There was a lot of talk of the need for radical change. But no concrete examples of what that would entail. The three policies he announced were simply a rehash of existing policies.

And there were a few outlandish claims, including the assertion that he’d stabilised the economy — and that our economic ‘fundamentals are sound.’  Yes he actually said that.

Normally, when a sitting PM is thumped as badly by the voters as Starmer was on Thursday, they feel the need to say something to the nation.  But Starmer wasn’t speaking to us today. He was speaking to the Labour Party, especially its MPs who hold his fate in their hands.

Hence the Labour crowd-pleasing sections on renationalising British Steel — it’s already under state control —  taking Britain back to the ‘heart of Europe — whatever that means — and more apprenticeships for young folks — already party policy. So far Starmer’s efforts to save his own skin have been a textbook case of how NOT to save your own skin.

At this point, the only thing that could possibly save Starmer’s skin is the absence of a clear successor within the party’s senior ranks. Labour’s neo-Blairite health secretary, Wes Streeting, appears to have already mounted a leadership challenge. But Streeting is even more exposed than Starmer to the Labour Party’s “prince of darkness”, Peter Mandelson, who is now under criminal investigation over his associations with Jeffrey Epstein.

Streeting is also about as characterless and as devoid of integrity as Starmer and is even more craven to corporate interests (see below). Labour’s soft-left members, like John McDonnell, will stop at nothing to prevent a Streeting premiership. If they fail in that task, Streeting’s ascendance would represent the ultimate coup for the Blairite wing of the Labour Party that sabotaged Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership with the bogus charge that Corbyn was anti-Semitic.

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As of writing (Monday evening, GMT), the odds of a Streeting challenge appear to be rising.  According to Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham, the prime minister looks in increasing peril as several of Streeting’s allies, including his PPS Joe Morris and constituency neighbour Jas Athwal, have called for Starmer to stand down:

— Labour MPs and aides say developments could now happen quickly if momentum continues to build. A loyalist says it’s now a matter of when not if.

— A Labour official says they believe several Cabinet members are ready to tell the PM he has to set a timetable for his departure if it becomes clear he has lost the authority of the backbenches. They think if the number of public dissenters heads toward three figures that will happen.

— However Cabinet aides insist we are not there yet and they don’t think the whole Cabinet is yet ready to move. One notes that Streeting’s allies appear to have gone after markets closed, after gilts dropped on Monday on the political instability. There will be a lot of attention on market open tomorrow.

— Streeting is silent but there appears to be an orchestrated plot by his supporters to call for Starmer to go so he can move. There was disappointment among some of Streeting’s allies today that he has not moved already but it now feels increasingly inevitable.

Another possible successor is — or at least, was — Manchester City Mayor Andy Burnham, but he would need to become a member of parliament to be able to run as Labour leader. And the Labour Party leadership recently blocked him from being able to stand as a candidate for the by-election in Gorton and Denton. According to Wickham, “Burnham’s allies say he will soon be ready to show he has a route to parliament.”

Burnham, who was formerly a junior minister under Tony Blair, has already run for the party’s leadership twice before, with underwhelming results. Like Streeting and most other high-ranking party members, he also has close ties to Labour Friends of Israel and other Zionist lobbies. Indeed, if Starmer were to fall, one thing we can be totally certain of is that there will be no meaningful change in UK relations with Israel.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party, like the Conservatives before it, is haemorrhaging support — both to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party on the right and the Green Party on the left. This is not a surprise given the scale of Labour’s betrayal to its core voters, beginning with the proposed scrapping of the winter fuel allowance in Starmer’s first months of power, as well as the authoritarian excesses of Starmer’s rule, writes Yannis Varoufakis:

The crux of their debacle lay, first, in a distinctly dictatorial, authoritarian reflex. And second—crucially—in a seething contempt for those who lent them their votes, while simultaneously performing a grotesque pantomime of flattery toward those who never would, and never will, support them.

Having exorcised from the Labour Party its most authentic voices—people of unimpeachable integrity, such as Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, a purge that eluded even Tony Blair’s repertoire—Starmer embarked on a rampage:

He slashed disability benefits; armed and fed intelligence to the Israeli government as it executed genocide in Gaza; channeled his own inner Farage, perhaps his inner Enoch Powell, to vilify migrants and treat refugees as vermin; gutted international aid to masquerade as a defender of defence spending; bulldozed wildlife and their habitats; unveiled a new lexicon of draconian anti-protest laws; left trans people suspended in legal limbo; clung with religious fervour to absurd, socially ruinous fiscal rules; allowed Rachel Reeves to squander £100 billion covering the Bank of England’s outrageous and wholly unnecessary Quantitative Tightening losses—a gift that keeps giving to the City’s banks—while imposing yet another round of austerity on government departments and public services.

Once the great hope of the downtrodden, Starmer’s Labour has become the villain – the genuinely nasty party. Once a human rights lawyer, he has single-handedly plunged Britain into a shoddy, incompetent authoritarianism.

We have covered that creeping authoritarianism in some depth in our two-instalment post, “Just How Dystopian Can Starmer’s Britain Become?” (here and here). Indeed, arguably Starmer’s most important legacy is the way he has instrumentalised the law, particularly the anti-terrorism laws, to arrest and intimidate pro-Palestinian journalists, activists and protesters.

With ruthless zeal, his government has criminalised public opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza while lending support to the furtherance of said genocide, including through the provision of more than 100 RAF spy flights over Gaza. In Starmer’s Britain, merely expressing critical views about the political ideology of Zionism in a private conversation can get you arrested…

Even before his election as prime minister, in July 2024, Starmer had shown his colours on the Israel/Palestine question. Starmer had already played a key role in bringing down his former, pro-Palestine boss, Jeremy Corbyn. On October 11, 2023, Starmer, then leader of the opposition, told LBC that Israel had the right to collectively punish Gaza, including by cutting off water and power to the enclave, in response to Hamas’ Oct 7 attacks.

After Corbyn’s downfall, Starmer then began the task of purging the Labour Party of any remaining left-wing thinkers. It is a task he may have been assigned by the Trilateral Commission, a trans-Atlantic forum set up by US billionaire David Rockefeller in the 1970s to help steer Western democracies by prioritising corporate interests over those of labour.

Starmer was the first ever sitting British member of parliament to join the Commission, according to Matt Kennard, which he did behind Corbyn’s back.

Since Starmer’s election in July 2024, the Blairite faction of the Labour Party has wielded outsized influence over government, through the appointment of Blair acolytes like Streeting and Peter Kyle, the science secretary, as well as through Blair’s think tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), as we warned in our our May 3, 2024 post, Tony Blair and His Associates Are Waiting in the Wings to Take Back Power in UK:

One of the great contradictions of British political life over the past 15 years is Sir Tony Blair. The three-term prime minister is broadly reviled by the British public, even among many Labour Party voters, yet he continues to be feted and fawned over by the British establishment and media. Even after the “crushing verdict” (in The Guardian‘s words) of the Chilcott Inquiry — that the Blair government’s case for the Iraq war was “deficient” — was finally made public in 2016, Blair remained a go-to person for the British and international media on all manner of topics, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is a very different story for the British public. In a recent YouGov opinion poll, only 22% of respondents said Blair had had a positive effect on the Labour Party, with 38% saying his impact was broadly negative. Even among Labour Party voters, only 26% labelled his impact as positive compared to 38% who saw it as negative. According to another YouGov survey, this time from 2022, a mere 14% approved of his knighthood and only 3% strongly so, while 63% disapproved, 41% strongly so. Over a million people signed a petition demanding the knighthood be revoked.

In other words, the last thing most people in the UK want to see is Blair making a political comeback. Yet the former PM is closer than ever to regaining political power, albeit through a proxy Labour Party government led by the current party leader, Keir Starmer, who is hotly tipped to win the next general election… Starmer is favourite to win not because of a groundswell of support for his vision or candidacy — the UK public view the party under Starmer even less favourably than under Ed Miliband — but because support for the governing (if you can call it that) Conservative Party is in freefall…

As the FT reported in 2023, TBI has in effect become a global consultancy to the UK government, giving advice on a whole host of issues. It has over $100 million and is currently active in 40 other countries, including the United States. Most, however, are in the global south/majority, where TBI advises governments on DPI such as digital vaccine certificates, digital identity and central bank digital currency.

Since coming to power, Starmer’s government has prioritised the digital authoritarian solutions peddled by TBI, such as digital identity; the mass sharing of the UK’s digital health data, which would hugely benefit TBI’s main paymaster, Larry Ellison; and the nationwide deployment of facial recognition cameras, a project that was begun by the Conservatives but has been massively expanded by Starmer.

Blair’s latest grand proposal for the people of Britain is to scrap the state pension’s triple lock, which will help further impoverish struggling pensioners…

A Streeting government would pursue these with even greater vigour. As an FT exposé revealed just yesterday, the Streeting-run NHS England has granted external staff from companies including Palantir “unlimited access” to identifiable patient data. This is in direct contradiction to NHS England’s previous assurances that under Palantir’s management of the NHS’ federated data platform, all keys and data would stay under NHS control.

It’s unclear whether Starmer will survive this leadership crisis, but one thing is for sure: he will hold on for as long as he can. Even if he does survive this particular challenge, he is unlikely to last much longer given his historically low levels of public support.

If he ends up falling, as is most likely, the UK will soon have its seventh government since the Brexit referendum 10 years ago. As The Times‘ Matthew Syed notes, the next leader, whoever he or she is, “will be subject to instant leadership speculation and the next, and the next, whether Labour, Reform or Tory. Britain is becoming ungovernable.”

As political instability rises, one can’t help but wonder how it will affect the UK’s economy, precisely at a time when the knock-on effects of the war in West Asia are beginning to be felt worldwide. With UK unemployment already close to COVID-era highs, productivity stagnating, stagflation looming, and 10-year gilts topping 5% in recent days and 30-year gilts just hitting a 28-year high, the warning signs are already flashing.

Meanwhile, the hollowing out of the Labour Party risks opening the door to much darker forces, as the late Labour grandee Tony Benn presciently warned in the 1980s:

“If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media – having tasted blood – would demand next that it expelled all its Socialist and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed off the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.”

Ultimately, what is happening in the UK — the rapid rise and fall of mediocre leaders, the degradation of living standards, the unquestioning support for Israel, even as it commits two genocides, the inability to find a new place in the emerging multipolar world, and the rapid roll out of digital surveillance and control systems — is symptomatic of a broader trend affecting the “Davos Regime” across the collective West, as Armchair Warrior notes in a twitter thread:

We’ve actually seen this for years now in the West, electoral cycle after electoral cycle. Party A takes a certain paraliberal policy course – let’s call it the Universal Davos Policy – that heavily favors special interests and globalism, and which is wildly unpopular with citizens because it necessarily entails continued degradation of Western standards of living (via self-destructive economics from war and/or green policy) and cultural cohesion (via mass migration and official woke nihilism). Party B then campaigns against this state of affairs, scores a massive win in a protest vote, and continues the Universal Davos Policy unchanged, sneering all the while at anyone who suggests they should actually fulfill the campaign promises that got them into power. Party A then takes advantage of voters’ short memories to get back into power on another landslide protest vote, or in more fractured political systems Party C wins the protest vote… and they continue the Universal Davos Policy unchanged.

Thus we have constant political churn in the West, with political blocs switching off essentially every election – and no policy turbulence at all because the entire political establishment is a wholly owned subsidiary of Davos and ignores voters to do their bidding on ALL substantive policy issues. Anti-Davos political forces are ruthlessly branded as extremists, coopted to promote the Universal Davos Policy should they assume power, or even criminalized and destroyed. Democracy itself is no object, as elections have begun being cancelled and openly rigged in the West when the wrong person could possibly win.

This is as true of Europe, where the EU, which Starmer is desperate to re-join, has interfered in national elections in Romania and Hungary, as it is of Latin America, where it is the Trump administration that is doing most of the meddling.

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31 comments

  1. Uwe Ohse

    This posts title reads like click-bait. “Is This the End of Keir Rodney Starmer?”

    No, hopefully it is not his end. Though it may be the end of his political career.

    1. Nick Corbishley Post author

      This posts title reads like click-bait.

      Wasn’t my goal. Have added in parenthesis: (As British Prime-Minister). Thanks for the feedback.

      1. Michaelmas

        Time for Starmer to take a malt whiskey and a service revolver and go in the library alone.

        Waste of a malt whiskey, but there you are.

  2. The Rev Kev

    Is This the End of Keir Rodney Starmer? Not likely. The guy is like a cockroach and always gets promoted no matter what damage he does. If he gets the boot, I expect two things to happen. One, he will be sent to the House of Lords. Either that or he will serve on the board of some major bank.Two, somebody even worse will follow him. Wes Streeting would be a disaster but I heard that Andy Burnham was once one of Tony Blair’s lieutenants. Not a great choice. As for taking Britain back to the ‘heart of Europe’ I am pretty sure what that means is to undo the Brexit Referendum. Starmer has been pushing for the UK to be once more enmeshed into the EU again and to give that august body primacy in UK affairs. It is what his masters have told him to do.

    1. Michaelmas

      Maybe Starmer’s masters. There are substantial factions in the City that now want to stay out.

  3. John Merryman

    While Israel seems like the psychotic hit man of the Western crime cartel, it would seem England is the high end prostitute slash trophy wife. That is starting to show her age.

  4. Colonel Smithers

    Thank you, Nick.

    No one should be surprised by how Starmer’s premiership unfolded.

    Let’s go back decades.

    Starmer was educated at fee paying Reigate grammar school, Surrey, south of London, but claims it was free. He grew up supporting Crystal Palace, south London, but claims to be a lifelong Gooner, .i.e. supporting the pride of north London, my beloved Arsenal.

    His father owned a small factory, making tools, and a few acres of farmland, but Starmer claims the father was an ordinary worker.

    Starmer was known as a ladies man in the London legal profession and is reputed to have sired a child with a younger legal colleague. This is not Baroness Chapman as is often alleged.

    As chief prosecutor, Starmer’s leadership was found wanting in employee engagement surveys. His extravagant lifestyle and expense fiddling, regular visits to Washington, micro management and political approach to prosecutions (vide Jimmy Saville, serial rapist John Worboys, Ian Tomlinson, Jean Charles de Menezes, Greville Janner, Mohammed Fayed and Jeffrey Epstein) upset colleagues.

    Britons, included remainers who think Starmer is a remainer, can thank Starmer for a hard Brexit. Corbyn was in regular contact with May and Barnier. As late as the Monday before the Thursday election in December 2019, Corbyn rushed to Brussels to agree a Norway plus deal (EEA membership with add ons like financial services supervision). Corbyn went with an idea from me, using the Basel Committee and college of banking supervisors in return for City access to the EU). Starmer’s grandstanding over a second referendum and alliance with Change UK, the Greens and Liberals to scupper May’s proposals baked in May’s demise, Johnson’s rise to power and hard Brexit. Starmer has been in league with neo cons and Brexiteers since the noughties.

    Starmer’s wife is Jewish. Starmer has claimed his parents are Jewish. He makes no secret of being an Israel Firster and has prioritised dual citizens in key government positions.

    1. paul

      As one wag put it somewhere “Starmer’s father certainly produced one complete tool”

    2. Bugs

      Thank you, Colonel. Was counting on you for the inside knowledge.

      And thanks Nick for a bravura breakdown of the Starmer mess. A tangled web of willfulness, unburdened by intelligence or virtue.

      1. Colonel Smithers

        Thank you.

        All of that information was available before the 2020 leadership contest,, but many, if not most, Labour Party members can’t be bothered with homework.

    5. lyman alpha blob

      I find it extremely hard to believe that Starmer, who comes across as having a box of tissues shoved up his nose to stop the drip, and as having a rod up his posterior for the same reason, could ever be a ladies man. Are we sure these “ladies” were actual members of homo sapiens?

  5. PlutoniumKun

    Starmer is toast, but the problem is that the Labour Party has been so hollowed out as an organisation it seems unable to manage a sensible transition. The professional insiders and their funders have worked so hard at eliminating alternatives they have ensured that there is no possibility of an electorally appealing candidate winning the leadership. They have created a negative reinforcing circle, whereby anyone with the potential to enthuse the grassroots and/or the public at large is, by definition, ruled out of contention. It is the exact opposite of how a political party is supposed to operate.

    1. Colonel Smithers

      Thank you and well said, PK.

      May I, please, add that many of the 2024 intake, e.g. Chris Curtis, and some of the older cohorts, e.g. Chris Bryant and Ed Balls, were card carrying Tories.

      It’s a mixture of careerism and a realisation, often at university, that the Tory party is not that welcoming if one is without means and connections and, whisper it softly, if one is Jewish.

    2. Michaelmas

      PK: They have created a negative reinforcing circle, whereby anyone with the potential to enthuse the grassroots and/or the public at large is, by definition, ruled out of contention.

      And not just in the UK.

      To bring home your implicit point, this was the conscious strategy of neoliberalism carried out over decades in the West, and was designed precisely to eliminate capital from democratic accountability, is now largely accomplished and the reason that the West is collapsing in the face of Asia’s rise.

    3. hemeantwell

      You’ve summarized the situation pretty well, PK. It may be a predictable evolution of what Peter Mair and others discussed as the rise of entrepreneurial politics, where deracinated parties, freed of constituent linkages and obigations, sell policy chunks to the highest bidder. Starmer’s Labour party seems to epitomize this trend, with political entrepreneurs undermining relinking efforts by actively attacking free speech in order to quash popular remobilization. From this angle, anti-anti-Zionism is only the tip of the spear. Next up: does Britain have the equivalent of German laws prohibiting statements that offend politicos?

      And this is another valuable post, Nick. Thanks for your work here.

      1. Michaelmas

        hemeantwell: does Britain have the equivalent of German laws prohibiting statements that offend politicos?

        The Starmer government has worked persistently towards that with unprecedentedly expansive readings of Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which criminalizes threatening or abusive words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm, or distress. From Human Rights Watch —

        https://www.hrw.org/report/2026/01/08/silencing-the-streets/the-right-to-protest-under-attack-in-the-united-kingdom

        https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/01/08/uk-protest-crackdowns-undermine-democracy

        In fact, a primary cause of the animus against Starmer from all demographics in the UK has been that he’s perceived not only as a authoritarian protofascist, but as one who’s too stupid and arrogant to to hide it.

        Every country has its shibboleths that may seem incomprehensible to some other cultures, like the right to bear arms in the US. In the UK it’s been the right never to have to carry IDs to show the police. To the extent, forex, that while the UK had compulsory IDs during WW2, in 1950, after the war ended, someone got arrested to trigger a lawsuit and the Churchill government repealed the compulsory ID law with much talk from all segments of society about ‘how we didn’t fight the bloody Nazis to have a totalitarian state here.’

        This was only over ID cards. Now, this attitude has its downsides: it’s one reason Brexit happened, since in effect any number of foreign nationals from the EU could enter the UK and work unidentified for as long as they wanted to, without there being any way to effectively identify them all or even know how many hundreds of thousands — even millions — were here. Tony Blair’s government, who opened the EU cheap worker floodgates, tried after the fact to bring in compulsory IDs partly for that reason, but — again — were defeated.

        This British attitude held up even through the IRA bombing campaigns under Thatcher. Naturally, Starmer, being stupid, has tried again in an even more authoritarian tone-deaf manner and gotten defeated so far.

  6. Quintian and Lucius

    Live updates: Hmmmm nah I’m good I think I’ll stay.
    What a roach. I think one of the Duran’s Alexes suggested yesterday he might just be holding out for a better landing spot from Blair and friends, knowing that Labour really do need his cooperation to actually oust him (being that they, internally, are a basket case). In any case this man has as far as I can tell enjoyed no confidence from the British voter since…month 1? So why is it then that this current crisis should sink his ship? The damn thing’s been made of rotting wood since the beginning and the captain’s been drunk (on horilka, he’d like to make clear, not the similar product just to the east) perhaps longer.

  7. Fazal Majid

    According to The Guardian, Shabana Mahmood (Home Secretary) and Yvetter Cooper (Foreign Secretary) have privately told him to consider his position, a deliciously British euphemism for resigning. That’s two of the four Great Offices of State (the other being the PM himself and his handpicked Chancellor of the Exchequer, who knows if he goes, she goes).

    Regarding the Winter Fuel allowance, it had not been cut, but means-tested, albeit probably too low a threshold. Cutting it would not have been a betrayal of Labour’s base as only Pensioners get it, not working families, and they vote overwhelmingly Conservative (2/3 of them did in 2019), and probably for Reform nowadays. Considering all the other exorbitant perks they get, like a guaranteed pension increase indexed to inflation, working wages increase or 2.5%, whichever is greatest (no worker got anywhere near 10% salary increases when inflation was that high a couple of years ago), that was actually far too timid a reform.

    What’s interesting is what got cut from the government agenda, i.e. revealed preferences:

    – No abolition of leasehold, the feudal practice whereby half of Brits don’t own the land under their homes

    – No “duty of candour” (Hillsborough Law) for government employees, who will continue covering-up as they always have (the Establishment always takes care of its own, up to protecting the treasonous Cambridge Five because they went to the right school)

    – No reform of planning law which allows NIMBY Tory rural councils to veto critical infrastructure projects like power lines, necessary to bring cheap, clean and plentiful renewable wind power from Scotland or East Anglia to be shipped to South-East England where most of the demand lies. It’s so absurd they are actually building underwater cables hugging the coastline to work around this obstructionism.

    – No nationalization of Water utilities privatized by Thatcher, and who will continue extracting whatever they can plunder for shareholders’ benefit

    Instead we get obscenities no one asked for like criminalization of protest, ID cards and the abolition of jury trials because juries refused to apply iniquitous laws (one old lady was even prosecuted for holding a placard informing juries of their right of nullification).

    Finally of course they had explicitly ruled out applying property tax to the old feudal aristocracy and new oligarchic money-laundering classes who hold vast property holdings and pay zero tax on it (see the reform of leasehold, again). Will no one shed a tear for the poor downtrodden Duke of Westminster, or Chuck von Battenberg, Sachsen, Coburg und Gotha, and their unearned billions at risk of taxation?

    1. paul

      Don’t forget the unbecoming enthusiasm for the assisted dying private members bill. Perhaps that ‘s what they saw as an answer to their alleged pension problem (I tend to think the triple lock is a good idea).

      1. GrimUpNorth

        Not long until the state pension overtakes the tax free limit, as this limit has not been increasing with inflation for many years. So the triple lock will not be fully passed on. I am also a fan of the triple lock, but I have a vested interest.

      2. Fazal Majid

        I may be biased because Esther Rantzen was my neighbor (former TV presenter and charity campaigner with terminal cancer, who is the most notable promoter of the assisted dying bill). Absolutely lovely lady, the private person matches the public persona for once.

        That said, religiously motivated politicians telling the terminally ill they must suffer excruciating pain to assuage the politicians’ ick factor disgust me, they are no different from antiabortion zealots, just more hypocritical.

    2. Michaelmas

      Fazal Majid: Regarding the Winter Fuel allowance, it had not been cut, but means-tested….

      Yes, but that was done in as patently brutal a manner as possible as one of the first items on Starmer and Reeves’s agenda precisely to signal to the markets that the Starmer-Reeves version of ‘Labour’ would be as hard or harder than those nasty Tories.

      Simultaneously, it became clear that Starmer and Co. believed the electorate should be satisfied simply because they weren’t the Tories and thus by definition the ‘nice’ ones, and so entitled to pocket as many ‘gifts’ as possible from donors as they because it was ‘their turn’.

      Indeed, their corruption has arguably outdone the Tories. In the first year of a Labour Government ‘committed to cleaning up Governmen’: ·
      The Homelessness Minister Rushanara Ali quit over rent hike claims as landlord on her house rental; ·
      The Anti-corruption Minister in the Treasury, Tulip Siddiq, resigned over an anti-corruption investigation taking place against her in Bangladesh; ·
      The Transport Minister (ex-police) resigned over lying to Police in a historic theft case; ·
      Angela Raynor, the Housing Minister, was caught not paying sufficient stamp duty on a house purchase and resigns;
      Lord Mandelson, the BritIsh Ambassador to the USA was fired because of his association with a convicted sex offender.

      There was more. Finally, it became very clear that Starmer-McSweeny-Labour Together were so incompetent that they’d done nothing to prepare any policies or think about how they would govern if they won.

      1. Fazal Majid

        Indeed the corruption of this Labour government vs the previous Tory one is just a matter of degree, but you understate the Tory corruption. Starmer and Reeves took donations to pay for suits and Starmer’s designer eyeglasses. Nowhere as blatant as Boris Johnson’s donor-funded redecoration of Downing Street, but still corrupt. I always laugh when UK newspapers write “Newest scandal brings Starmer’s integrity in question”—he’s repeatedly demonstrated a total lack of integrity, or indeed human decency.

  8. eg

    I was fortunate to have not only Naked Capitalism on the case, but also early warning from the UK independent outlet Novara Media which regularly covered the shenanigans behind the betrayal of Corbyn by the McSweeney/Starmer cabal in order to foist a return from the crypt of Blairite “Labour in Name Only” upon a British public already suffering under more than a decade of Tory misrule. Prominent among its guests was (and continues to be) Paul Holden, author of The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199373647-the-fraud

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