After fifty-odd minutes of painfully listening to Keir Starmer this past week, I suddenly remembered why I cannot stand these leaders’ keynote speeches and I will intentionally avoid the rest of them for whatever remains of this party conference season.
But seeing as we are already here…
I think we know what to expect from most Starmer speeches these days.
Starmer: droning on as always
A monotonous drone is an absolute certainty. You can bet your life savings his lowly commoner dad with a thing for making tools will get a mention. And if you could bottle up his rhetorical flair you could pitch it to the big pharmaceutical companies as a rival to Valium.
Keir Starmer has a remarkable habit of giving me the impression that he is desperately searching for a personality update that never actually downloads, if you know what I mean?
Starmer has always had the delivery of a particularly damp spreadsheet. He could make the most riveting and radical policy point sound like he is reading out the fine print from the terms and conditions of a two-year toaster warranty.
But that’s enough of his good points.
What about the speech that had the client journalists swooning and the rest of us grimacing?
Starmer’s lengthy address was heavy on meaningless rhetoric about “national renewal”, but where on earth were the concrete policies to deliver on that?
Where was the wealth tax on the super-rich to fund the eradication of child poverty? What about real public ownership of energy and water utilities? Perhaps scrapping the two-child benefit cap was worth a moment of the prime minister’s time?
Instead, the speech recycled uncomfortably familiar Blair-era vibes and we were left in absolutely no doubt that Keir Starmer’s Labour government has capitulated to the status quo.
Mimicking Reform is not going to work
The main attack line from the speech was aimed at Nigel Farage and Reform UK, much to the delight of the liberal media, and the publicity glutton, Farage himself.
But not one of the fuckers is in possession of the balls to admit that Keir Starmer is the very reason the flat-cap-fash Farage and his band of hard-right wasters are riding high in the polls.
I knew it was going to be a Starmer stinker the moment the ‘lucky’ delegates got to wave their little flags. This performative patriotism is a betrayal of Labour’s internationalist values, and let’s be honest, utterly cringeworthy.
Starmer’s people need to realise that aping Reform UK’s cultural nationalism isn’t the vote winner that they think it is.
Look at the polls, real PM McSweeney.
You’re utterly fucked.
Mimicry isn’t going to defeat Farage, and chasing Reform votes is a futile exercise.
The votes are already out there to be won. The apathetic can sway the result of a general election.
Engage with them. Offer hope, social justice, and a better kind of politics that serves the 95% of us that aren’t foreign lobbyists or capitalist cronies looking to cash in on our very existence.
The dithering, contemptible hangdog of a prime minister lurches from one disaster to the next with an alarming ease. I wonder who told Keir Starmer that he would make a great Prime Minister, and what was in it for them?
Starmer may well have rallied the hall with talk of taking the fight to Reform — the centrists are very easily pleased — but for the rest of us outside of the conference gathering, it was a funeral oration for what Labour once promised to be.
Starmer’s idea of “renewal” is little more than managed decline dressed as progress, prioritising fiscal restraint and neoliberal tweaks over genuinely transformative and desperately needed investment.
Blair is back
Unless I dozed off, mid-speech, I don’t actually remember Gaza getting a single mention. But then why would he? Why would he mention Britain’s horrifying complicity in the Gaza genocide?
He doesn’t need to now. It doesn’t take much to turn a certain section of the public’s attention away from the gravest and most deadly assault on humanity that we have witnessed this century.
Many of us have been genuinely traumatised by the horrific spectacle of a live-streamed genocide. The haunting image of a devastated parent holding up the remains of their headless infant child doesn’t just go away.
To forget that child, to do and say nothing, it just isn’t an option for the real patriots of this hateful and divided little island.
The Middle East’s favourite war criminal-turned-life-coach, Tony Blair, is back with a plan so absurd we may as well just get Mandelson in on the gig to add some credibility.
Blair, the man who turned “New Labour” into a synonym for “new imperialism” is yet another Western saviour that has been parachuted in to “fix” what they’ve helped break.
The architect of the Iraq catastrophe that unleashed hell on the Middle East is now the chief overseer of Palestinian reconstruction?
Jeffrey Dahmer running a vegan supermarket springs to mind.
The slithering, wretched shape-shifter cosied up to Bush for oil. Now it’s Trump’s turn, with Gaza as the prize.
Starmer et al – catastrophic
According to THEIR surveys, the people of Gaza are crying out for international oversight.
Do you think these surveys were carried out mid-airstrike? “On a scale of one to house flattened, how much do you fancy a British overlord?”…
Give me fucking strength.
Jeremy Corbyn, bless his jam-making heart, nailed it last week:
Tony Blair’s catastrophic decision to invade Iraq cost thousands upon thousands of lives. He shouldn’t be anywhere near the Middle East, let alone Gaza. It is not up to Blair, Trump or Netanyahu to decide the future of Gaza. That is up to the people of Palestine.
The road to peace runs through justice, not through the man who bombed it away. Free Palestine from this imperialist pantomime – and keep Blair in history’s darkest dustbin where he belongs.
Featured image via Rachael Swindon
This post was originally published on Canary.