The Panderer

[smokingboot]

I read Keir Starmers speech yesterday. As the child of immigrants, I'm going to put aside my feelings of indignation at the tone implicit in the words, and try to pick apart what he is doing. Because I would rather do this than the thing I must do today. Any minute now. But not yet!

OK, so he's never going to win the far left of his party and he never was. They haven't forgiven him for Jezzah, they think he's tory-lite etc etc. He probably is tory lite. He made himself presentable to a country that was sick of the terrible parade, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak. He did not so much win as the Tories lost. He inherited a country that didn't really care for him but was beyond weary of the alternative. To the far left he's the Unforgiven, to the far right he's the Unbearable and anyway, the far right are nabbing tory votes at what seems like a rate of knots. They need nothing from Starmer except his departure. They are the enemy I think he sees, though of course parties like the Lib Dems and the Greens can bite a chunk out of Labour and Tory majorities alike. So where's his battle ground?

His language in this speech will please the far right, some of the centrist right, and certain elements of the left. It may also please President Trump's govt, as a kind of echo in understanding, diplomatically sealing a sense of kinship, but there's also been a historical root among the demographic Formerly Known As The Working Class*. People forget that protectionism has sometimes been a part of the Left's defence of workers rights. British workers have often worried about being undercut by cheap labour from overseas. The issue then, is that they must be ready to be that cheap labour themselves and my totally amateur suspicion is that they are not.

To the untrained eye the Prime Minister appears to be constantly playing a double game. He made this speech about clamping down on immigration, but he has signed a trade agreement with India which, it will be argued, benefits Indian immigrant workers at the cost of British workers. I don't know enough about this to know whether it's just more of the same old racist hysteria that threads its way so often through our political discourse. I do know that, on the surface at least, his speech and his trade deal may be seen to contradict each other.

Of course, people see what they want to see. There may be an active balance, an equity within these seeming paradoxical approaches, but ostensibly they give off a shifty vibe as does he. His only way out is to make the voter richer. Comfortable people do not vote for change.

I found that speech antagonising. This guy panders to those he needs, ignores those he thinks he's got in the bag. He relies on people like me to hold our noses in the vein of NeverFarage, forgetting that NeverTrump failed for the Dems, and Wheesht For Indy failed for the SNP.

There may come a temptation, for the first time ever in my life, to just spoil my vote at the next election, and if a Reform/Tory alliance ends up as the fulcrum in parliament, badger my patient hombre into getting some position as far away from this cavalcade of goons as possible. I hear Dubai is nice pretty much all year round.

*With apologies to Prince.