“Sir Keir Starmer has all but withdrawn his previous calls for Boris Johnson to resign as he said the country needs “unity” in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Putting down a Vote of No Confidence in Boris Johnson’s Leadership
Sir Keir Starmer QC does what he does best, arguably all of which he is capable, and takes Boris Johnson to pieces at the Despatch Box.
Johnson has to sit for hours and endure a debate about himself and his character.
Many Tory MPs have to squirm to give Johnson vocal support, even those who have come to hate him.
Fabricant and Dorries make themselves look prats, again.
The Tory whips use up more of their power to intimidate recalcitrant backbenchers, threatening and pleading with them to sit throughout the debate and vote for Johnson.
Tory MPs known to have submitted letters to the backbench 1922 Committee, calling for a vote on the fitness of Johnson to lead their party would be taunted by Opposition MPs to speak in support of Johnson in the debate.
All of this would take place before the world’s media and attract way more interest amongst voters than any performance of Starmer’s at PMQs.
But Starmer would lose the vote cry Starmerites who frequently whine about Labour not getting enough media coverage.
Attlee and Morrison did not expect to win the division during the Norway Debate in May 1940 when Chamberlain had a bigger majority in the House of Commons (242 seats) than Johnson has today (81 seats) and we were actually at war.
They knew they were putting down a marker.
“In view of the gravity of the events which we are debating, that the House has a duty and that every Member has a responsibility to record his particular judgment upon them, we feel we must divide the House at the end of our Debate to-day.”
If you do not think Sir Keir Starmer QC would win the argument in the light of the world’s media and screw Tory MPs to the sticking place, even those who have come to despise Johnson then maybe it is about time Starmer resigned in favour of, say, Yvette Cooper?
One has to question the future of a leader of the Labour Party who is a moral coward, who knows sod all about electoral politics and is in thrall to a bunch of white, mostly elderly, many Leave voting, some racist folk in a Leigh café.
Incidentally, no one ever dared to say to Major Clement Attlee, the second to last man off the beaches at Gallipoli, that he was any sort of coward.
Aneurin Bevan did not join the wartime coalition Government. He remained on the Opposition benches and sometimes even criticised the Government not for continuing to fight the war, but for the manner in which they were going about it.
He reminded people of that for which they were fighting, suffering and dying, a functioning democracy even in a time of war. Something we have seen in Ukraine where Parliamentarians have met under the threat of death from Putin’s thugs to carry out their democratic duties.
Sir Keir Starmer QC’s instinct at the first whiff of grapeshot is to beat a sensible retreat when past Labour leaders would have marched towards the sound of the guns.
Someone once said that wars are not won by evacuations.
Sooner or later Sir Keir you have to turn and fight.
Better to do it on a ground of your own choosing than on a field of battle that favours Johnson.
“Lord Patrick Cormack, who had been an MP for 40 years before joining the Lords, said the setting up of a national government should be considered given the huge significance of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“I think the time is coming when we should think of a national government,” he told ITV News Political Editor Robert Peston, as he praised Mr Starmer’s response to the Ukrainian president’s address.”
“Sir Keir Starmer has all but withdrawn his previous calls for Boris Johnson to resign as he said the country needs “unity” in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Putting down a Vote of No Confidence in Boris Johnson’s Leadership
Sir Keir Starmer QC does what he does best, arguably all of which he is capable, and takes Boris Johnson to pieces at the Despatch Box.
Johnson has to sit for hours and endure a debate about himself and his character.
Many Tory MPs have to squirm to give Johnson vocal support, even those who have come to hate him.
Fabricant and Dorries make themselves look prats, again.
The Tory whips use up more of their power to intimidate recalcitrant backbenchers, threatening and pleading with them to sit throughout the debate and vote for Johnson.
Tory MPs known to have submitted letters to the backbench 1922 Committee, calling for a vote on the fitness of Johnson to lead their party would be taunted by Opposition MPs to speak in support of Johnson in the debate.
All of this would take place before the world’s media and attract way more interest amongst voters than any performance of Starmer’s at PMQs.
But Starmer would lose the vote cry Starmerites who frequently whine about Labour not getting enough media coverage.
Attlee and Morrison did not expect to win the division during the Norway Debate in May 1940 when Chamberlain had a bigger majority in the House of Commons (242 seats) than Johnson has today (81 seats) and we were actually at war.
They knew they were putting down a marker.
“In view of the gravity of the events which we are debating, that the House has a duty and that every Member has a responsibility to record his particular judgment upon them, we feel we must divide the House at the end of our Debate to-day.”
If you do not think Sir Keir Starmer QC would win the argument in the light of the world’s media and screw Tory MPs to the sticking place, even those who have come to despise Johnson then maybe it is about time Starmer resigned in favour of, say, Yvette Cooper?
One has the question the future of a leader of the Labour Party who is a moral coward, who knows sod all about electoral politics and is in thrall to a bunch of white, mostly elderly, many Leave voting, some racist folk in a Leigh café.
Incidentally, no one ever dared to say to Major Clement Attlee, the second to last man off the beaches at Gallipoli, that he was any sort of coward.
Aneurin Bevan did not join the wartime coalition Government. He remained on the Opposition benches and sometimes even criticised the Government not for continuing to fight the war, but for the manner in which they were going about it.
He reminded people of that for which they were fighting, suffering and dying, a functioning democracy even in a time of war. Something we have seen in Ukraine where Parliamentarians have met under the threat of death from Putin’s thugs to carry out their democratic duties.
Sir Keir Starmer QC’s instinct at the first whiff of grapeshot is to beat a sensible retreat when past Labour leaders would have marched towards the sound of the guns.
Someone once said that wars are not won by evacuations.
Sooner or later Sir Keir you have to turn and fight.
Better to do it on a ground of your own choosing than on a field of battle that favours Johnson.
“Lord Patrick Cormack, who had been an MP for 40 years before joining the Lords, said the setting up of a national government should be considered given the huge significance of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“I think the time is coming when we should think of a national government,” he told ITV News Political Editor Robert Peston, as he praised Mr Starmer’s response to the Ukrainian president’s address.”
It is a classic journalist’s and politician’s mistake to measure the importance of manufacturing to the economy of the United Kingdom by the number of direct jobs within it.
The latest politician to make that error is Sir Keir Starmer QC, who recently went Oop North to the very part of England in which a significant number of manufacturing jobs and companies just happen to be located, to pledge a revival in manufacturing under a Labour Government he led.
Well for a while, Nigel Farage too used to run UK manufacturing down, in fact, in 2014 Farage made much of ukip’s plans to make our country a great trading nation again.
To be fair to Farage, he did, a month or so after announcing his party’s trade ambitions, do something few in the media or politics ever do and revised his view of UK manufacturing and its place in the world.
Sir Keir Starmer QC’s chief policy adviser, Claire Ainsley, whom he appointed on becoming Labour leader, is a Brexit advocate.
Ainsley has no background in trade, commerce, industry, economics or, it would seem, basic research.
Ainsley’s last taste of political campaigning was at university when as a member of the Socialist Worker’s Party, she campaigned against the Labour Government elected in 1997.
Ainsley compared the conflict in Kosovo to the Vietnam War and tried unsuccessfully to convince her student union to formally condemn the US-led intervention in Kosovo. “People see that what Nato is doing is wrong,” she told Nouse, the university’s student paper, at the time.
I trust that she is now in line with Labour’s position on NATO in 2022.
One would hope Lisa Nandy and Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor, with their Parliamentary seats in the North West and Yorkshire, respectively, would be better informed about the state of UK manufacturing at least in the places they represent.
Seemingly not, given Nandy was Starmer’s minder during his procession through the North and Reeves recently told the Financial Times that Labour was now pro business, planned to reverse a decade of lost growth with capital (not revenue) spending and wanted partnerships with businesses, but that the UK would not rejoin the Single Market in her lifetime.
A renaissance in UK manufacturing when manufacturing in the UK is being hard hit by the Hard Brexit Labour has now adopted as policy seems highly unlikely.
Would our economy be safe in the hands of folk who seem woefully ignorant about its fundamentals?
Did Farage change his position, because he thought he might come across as unpatriotic in a place like Leigh, perhaps be seen as running Britain down or because he knew he was making one claim too many about the benefits of Brexit or a combination of both?
Whatever the reason for Farage’s change of position in 2014, Sir Keir Starmer QC’s pledge in 2022 to revive a relatively healthy industry sector, slowly being ground down by Hard Brexit, is hardly grounds for folk in business in England to vote Labour at a General Election.
And just to confuse matters further, there are currently 1.298 million unfilled vacancies in the UK as of March 2022.
And, despite that, the leader of the Labour Party and his advisers want not to fill those jobs, but to create more vacancies …
Late Breaking News
“Research carried out by the Labour Party has found that more than 230,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost across the UK since 2015 as Angela Rayner prepares to set out the party’s vision to “make Britain work for working people”.”
“This is our climate moment. Our opportunity to build back better by creating millions of good paying, union jobs, investing in clean energy infrastructure, fighting for environmental justice, and tackling the urgent threat of climate change.”
“When I talk to all the people who have children who’ve had to move hundreds of miles away for work, who don’t know they’ll see their grandchildren and are growing older alone at the other end of the country. It breaks my heart.”
Standing there in public like you suddenly realise you have got your flies undone; apologising for your principles; reinforcing victimhood and despair, reflecting back the worst natures of some of the electorate, like you might just be agreeing with them is not leadership.
I call that an abrogation of responsibility, a lack of leadership.
Leadership is about setting out that for which you stand; making, arguing your case and ensuring it is the right offer for the country, the whole of the country.
If I were regenerating Leigh, I would want to involve the locals in the process from beginning to end.
I would want to take an inclusive approach and that means not biasing the process of engagement in favour of one particular group.
It also means having a conversation not simply taking down dictation.
And a conversation sometimes means, sensitively, challenging what you hear, and undertaking sense checks.
For those of us who have worked in socio-economic regeneration over the years, the participants trotted out the usual guff, the usual prejudice; the odd pearl of insight; the odd revelation; the useful alternative view; the usual ignorance about where they live and the usual evidence of how little they know about business and their local labour market.
Sir Keir Starmer QC has begun to mouth some of the lines from those focus groups.
The wrong lines.
The Blue Labour, Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be lyrics, singing a song that was a hit before many Leigh voters were born.
Now, as it happens, I was born and brought up in Birmingham and have lived here most of my life.
For much of my 27 year career in the Civil Service, I worked in socio-economic regeneration, what we adults like to call levelling up, as a Jobcentre official.
And for a lot of that time, Erdington was in my bailiwick, especially when I was the Employment Development Manager for the East Birmingham and Solihull Regeneration Zone, a regeneration vehicle of Advantage West Midlands, the Regional Development Agency for the West Midlands.
Oh, and I am a lifelong member of the Labour Party, sometime activist, as well as having worked as a volunteer in Jack Dromey’s office for a good few years, ending my time there after the 2017 General Election.
I campaigned in the constituency whilst working for Jack Dromey.
Both sides of my family are from Kingstanding, a Red Wallish council ward within the Erdington constituency and I live just across the border from the ward in a neighbouring constituency.
However, even I lack the arrogance, sorry, the confidence of a Nandy to knock out a regeneration plan for a by election campaign.
“First, jobs. Good opportunities must be spread throughout the country and indeed throughout our big cities, so young people have choices and chances and don’t find themselves having to get out to get on. With the right investment and community-led regeneration, jobs and opportunities will begin to thrive. Last week I saw exactly this in Grimsby, where a major local employer was investing in green technology for the future and providing secure, well-paid jobs for local people.
Labour in government would take this example and put clean-energy rocket boosters on it. We’d invest £28 billion each year in green projects across the country, creating more jobs and apprenticeships in industrial and coastal towns.”
We wait with bated breath for the detail as to how the ex SpAd with no background in business would honour these pledges in the context of a Hard Brexit.
Nandy does at the beginning of her article describe, “Places that once powered the country have been neglected. GKN on the Chester Road in Erdington is moving operations abroad. Dunlop Goodyear moved out of the area years ago.”
Incidentally, as of March 2022, the UK has growing labour and skill shortages and 1.298 million unfilled vacancies, a UK record, but Nandy clearly likes a challenge so she aims to top that number.
“Second, thriving high streets. We need to see local economies growing, with good local businesses. That means no more papering over the cracks. It’s why Labour has set out plans to help 100,000 new small businesses get off the ground.”
The attrition rate for new business start ups is about 60% by the end of the third year after commencement.
Nandy’s 100,000 might be 40,000 by the start of their fourth year of life.
I am assuming we are talking about 100,000 new start ups across the United Kingdom during a four, maybe five year Parliament.
There are 2,480,140 micro-enterprises in the UK.
“Third, our suburbs, towns and villages must be better connected through better transport links, digital infrastructure and affordable housing. For too long, we have missed out or seen promises rowed back on.”
Hard Brexit limits what may be practically achieved.
You may not lay bricks in a time of scarce bricklayers, HGV drivers and, well, bricks. Neither Labour nor the Tories are willing to publicly admit how much circumscribed they are by the deal the one negotiated and the other endorsed.
Labour and the Conservatives are trying to con voters into believing they may deliver outside of EU and in the context of a Hard Brexit, many policies that are only really deliverable with EU or at least SM/CU membership.
At a time when sizeable numbers of Leave voters say Brexit is not working for them.
“Fourth, power. For years, people have felt that politics simply isn’t interested in them. That too often, politicians come in and tell them what they need. This must end. Labour would hand communities the power and money to decide for themselves, ending the system where they had to go cap-in-hand to Westminster to do things they knew would work.”
Twice recently in a list of places Nandy says are ripe for levelling up, she has included nowhere below a line between Wigan and Grimsby, but has included Aberdeen which the last time I looked was still in Scotland.
Michael Gove too hankers to extend his brief beyond England and is using the United Kingdom Shared Prosperity Fund as a means to sideline the devolved administrations.
Do we see an area of common ground developing between Nandy and Gove?
Nowhere in Wales features on Nandy’s lists, but there be dragons or more accurately adults (in the Labour Party) who know about taking a measured, informed, inclusive approach to socio-economic regeneration.
“And finally, safety. Labour will bring back neighbourhood policing to ensure our town centres and shopping areas are safe and welcoming rather than plagued by anti-social behaviour. The Tory record on crime is appalling, with criminals being let off and victims let down.”
Machiavelli once wrote that “The first opinion that is formed of a ruler’s intelligence is based on the quality of the men (and women) he has around him …”.
The ramblings of a former DWP Civil Servant ... 