Senior Labour sources have said that Sir Keir is frustrated with the democratic process so:
The hereditary peers would leave the House of Lords and be replaced by as many if not more Labour life peers to get Sir Keir’s legislative programme through the Lords with the minimal amount of obstruction. Sir Keir, anonymous sources say, is unhappy with the traditional constitutional roles of the Lords in revising Bills, acting as a counterweight to the House of Commons and holding the Government to account
When Sir Keir Starmer KC eventually removes the hereditary peers from the House of Lords, he will leave the 26 hereditary Anglican Bishops therein. It would be odd to remove them when Sir Keir is bringing at least 20 unelected and/or self appointed faith leaders into the heart of his Labour Government
Already twenty Labour MPs are each working with an unelected and/or self appointed faith leader ahead of playing a key role in Sir Keir’s Government. How many of those faith leaders are socially conservative; middle aged, if not elderly; male and white. The patriarchy will be back in government, but then it never really left, did it
Sir Keir will alongside the faith leaders bring in unelected and/or self appointed community leaders to play a key role at the heart of his Government. One assumes one of those community leaders will be the chair of Stonewall. Stonewall will be back at the centre of government in the UK to the dismay of anyone concerned about the human rights of biological women. How many of these community leaders will be socially conservative; middle aged, if not elderly; male and white
And, Sir Keir’s Take Back Control agenda sounds less inapt when set in the national context of taking planning decisions about major projects, however defined, away from local government and placing them in the hands of an anonymous group of civil servants, possibly leavened with businessmen from the City of London (see below)
Sir Keir’s enhanced devolution for Scotland package, drawn up ‘inclusively’ by Labour grandees and supporters is on a take it or leave it basis to be enacted by Act of Parliament with no input from the Scottish Parliament or the Scottish People in a referendum
Labour has been considering its take on the current Government’s Rwanda scheme. It must be cost effective; credible enough to deter migrants and avoid the legal challenges that have delayed the Rwanda plan
Rachel Reeves has said that she aims to place her British Infrastructure Council with representatives from some of the biggest UK and global investment funds, and her Industrial Strategy Council on a statutory basis, whatever that means. Both bodies will have a significant number of members drawn from outside of government. The history of bringing business people into government is a chequered one. It worked well for David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in World War One and World War Two, respectively. It damaged for all eternity the reputations of Sir Keir’s and Reeves’s spiritual Labour predecessors, Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden.
I think it was a nice touch that the work with faith leaders was ‘leaked’ to the media in time for the Guardian to cover the story on Easter Sunday.
Sir Keir has ruthlessly centralised power within his Labour Party so it is perhaps hardly surprising that he appears to plan to do so in Government?
A recent front page of the i carried the story that all of Labour’s directly elected mayors are bracing themselves to stand up to Sir Keir’s centralising tendencies.
A Labour insider said, according to the i, there is already “distrust” between the party’s HQ and some mayors.
Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham once spoke about the potential for a UK Government with a large majority to become an elective dictatorship.
And how does Parliament hold a group of business leaders on a statutory decision making Treasury committee to account?
The ramblings of a former DWP Civil Servant ... 
Where have you been? I’ve missed your emails, insights, news. Great to have you back. Apparently 30+% people think Starmer will be more radical than his campaign has suggested. And hope that he will be more socially oriented. Of course he was used to running the DPP within strict organisational rules and regulations and with a team of 4000 employees. Running a country of 68million most of whom are not employees and many of whom, such as the Regional/City Mayors are elected will be very different he’ll find.
Perhaps he has prepared the ground already with COEs of big business to work for workers’s security, health rights and conditions along Finnish/Swedish lines. That’s what he has hinted at.
Re Community Leaders, I have always believed that they could be one of the keys to better community relations – that certainly seemed to be the case in places like Bradford in the early Blair years. Recently I attended on Zoom Stronger Things 2024 arranged by the New Local. What a power house of people conducting research such as John Denham on local financing, and working with communities to help them build better lives for themselves: an amazing group of highly experienced, highly motivated, highly creative group of people working across the country to achieve solid, positive change and in part obliged to be so innovative because of severe budget cuts. They achieve miracles! They are the people who show how devolution can work effectively across the country at the local level where it has to happen.
The people that you cite as those Starmer is gathering about him can’t effect such outcomes. That is not to say that they can’t be required to deliver good social outcomes through astutely designed contracts and memoranda of agreements with strict financial and legal penalties for failure to deliver agreed programme commitments.
We wait and watch and will demand satisfaction.
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Ah, the sweet refrain of Sir Keir will be different when he wins.
He has only turned his Labour Party into a Right Wing English Nationalist Labour Party to con Brexit supporting, white racists in small English towns into voting Labour.
Community and faith leaders are often unrepresentative of the people they claim to represent. Apart from anything else, they are quite often male, like John Denham.
I do not think those people should be sitting in Whitehall in Government Departments.
By all means, let them participate in the full range of consultation exercises already open to them, locally and nationally, but do not play favourites and elevate some groups above others, giving them preferential treatment.
The Chief Rabbi, for example, may be the Jewish community’s shop steward, but he is always white, male, middle class, middle aged and often socially conservative.
How many female Roman Catholic bishops do you know?
On Friday 5th July, if Sir Keir has a commanding majority he will not need the wet liberals or the membership of the Labour Party.
City of London bankers are not suddenly going to become cuddly bunnies because Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer KC are bending over backwards for them with the help of the last chair of Stonewall.
Sir Keir decimated and demoralised his Crown Prosecution Service.
The decision not to prosecute Jimmy Savile did take place on his watch, but Sir Keir says it had nothing to do with him. He was at the time only the best Director of Public Prosecutions ever and an exemplary leader and manager of his Crown Prosecution Service.
If you ask a woman who cannot claim benefits for a third child what she would want from a Labour Government, I suspect it would not be the community repurposing a closed pub, but Rachel Reeves scrapping the Labour Two Child Benefits Cap.
Tony Blair in 1998 enacted the National Minimum Wage.
Sir Keir Starmer KC will in 2025 enact a law making misgendering a crime, punishable by up to two years in prison, against a backdrop of rising child poverty, caused by his Labour Government’s deliberate policy decisions.
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Seems the final word in the Labour team often goes to a woman and a former civil servant. She’s the one who sorted out more robust policies on gender and on Palestine and she’s already winning wider public appreciation as she did in NI. More important to have a woman like that in a central position than jobsworths filling quotas.
And with the Deputy Leader and Chancellor women who have the courage of their convictions, Labour unlikely to disappoint the many women who support them.
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Rachel Reeves, a born again Anglican God botherer is, to all intents and purposes, a man.
It is how a woman gets on in the City of London where Reeves says she feels most at home.
Unsurprisingly, Rachel Reeves has an aversion to poor people.
Angela Rayner is a working class Judas Goat, talking up trickle down, when she is not seeing the good in Adam Graham, the convicted male rapist who self ids as Isla Bryson and according to Rayner, rapes women with her penis.
Sir Keir Starmer KC has yet to apologise for saying that it would be regrettable, but what could you do, if it were legal for Israel to starve out the Palestinians in Gaza and actually did so.
The Nuremberg Laws were passed into law by a popularly elected, legally constituted assembly, the Reichstag and applied following due process.
Legal is not always moral.
Was it an act of disrespect for Sir Keir to send Sue Gray and David Lammy in his place to meet with senior Muslim Labour leaders after his microphone malfunction on the legitimacy of the Israeli Government starving the Gazans out?
I guess it rather depends on how you define disrespect?
Gray, who has spent most of her Civil Career in the Cabinet Office is working out fine.
Just imagine how much bigger the public revolt over the Gaza ceasefire vote would have been if Gray had not persuaded Liam Byrne and Khalid Mahmood to go through the lobbies in the House of Commons and vote against a centre right Labour leader?
Sir Keir has disrespected the Muslim community since last October, but he was blowing a silent dog whistle on race long before that.
Sir Keir still believes in women with penises and aims to maintain the position whereby a transwoman, a biological male with a valid Gender Recognition Certificate issued under David Lammy’s Gender Recognition Act 2004 is a woman in law under the Equality Act 2010 with, in the first instance, an unhindered right of access to the single sex spaces of biological women.
Sir Keir does plan to make it easier for biological males to obtain GRCs.
In the Scottish Parliament, Scottish Labour voted for convicted criminals, including paedophiles to have the legal right to apply for a GRC under Nicola Sturgeon’s fast track, light regulatory touch, £5 per application process as set out in her Gender Recognition Reform Bill.
Sir Keir had his Labour Party at Westminster abstain in the vote to deny Sturgeon’s Bill Royal Assent.
A group of Labour MP’s voted against Labour’s whip and Sir Keir turned a blind eye.
Sir Keir’s Labour Party is a threat to the rights of biological women.
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Reading the ramblings below leaves one feeling so glad that we have a Labour leadership that’s united most of the left with much of the centre, while the would be leaders of the right tussle with each other over a diminishing share of public esteem. Imagine if it were the other way round, then we’d really have things to worry about.
The British system is set up to enable governments to act and it’s about time we get one that tries to do so in the national interest rather than a ragbag of special interests. That means bringing people together in a ways that will not be immediately subject to piecemeal accountability, thank goodness. One could never attempt, let alone achieve anything much. Remember how Britain’s world leadership sank beneath the waves a hundred and fifty odd years ago because MPs were unwilling to trust anyone with more knowledge than them? We need broader stakeholding than that and there are plenty willing to contribute at the moment demanding little in return. An auspicious moment to reinvent the public domain as a springboard for shared interests.
The country will judge on results and in the medium term as long as there are some in the short. Starmer’s big issue is getting the rebuilding process moving and the key issues are the likely tradeoffs between different ways of doing that. Empowering council chiefs increases aggregate agency but that has to be reconciled with community and civil society agency and booting the average effectiveness of public spending and the spread effects of investment of all sorts. Denham style place based budgeting might be less effective than the kind of central/local/individual dynamics embodied in the redesigned Supporting Families Programme, which so impressed Mr. Gove when it was still in his department.
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Reading the rambling above, I had to check I was still in the reality wherein Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer KC have taken Sir Keir’s Labour Party so far to the right that Labour is now to the right of both Neil Kinnock and Margaret Thatcher on disability benefits and Suella Braverman on what is now Labour’s Two Child Benefits Cap.
I have to snigger when I read nonsense like that above.
In their heart of hearts, Sir Keir Starmer KC, Rachel Reeves and Labour’s Shadow Cabinet must know that achieving most of their policy pledges is incompatible with lower levels of migration, but that is what they have promised their heroes:
“There are notionally scores of seats in play at the next election, presaging a potentially seismic shift in the political landscape. But both of the main English parties have their sights set on a narrow slice of the population. Deborah Mattinson, Starmer’s director of strategy, calls them “hero voters” – the ones who swing directly from Tory to Labour, effectively having double the impact of anyone who moves from a third party. The profile of these voters is Brexit-supporting, older (but not retired), economically precarious, socially conservative, white, not in big cities and without higher education.
The anxieties and prejudices of those people exert a magnetic pull on national debate to the exclusion of other voters.”
“So British politics must be bent out of shape to make some opinions prominent and fold others out of sight: the idea that leaving the EU was a mistake, for example, or that migration is good for the economy, or that mass indefinite detention of asylum seekers is not a practice for civilised democracies. Those views are widely held, but they will not be visible on a campaign trail mapped by Labour and Tory strategists. Anyone who believes such heresies must simply wait and see what kind of coalition we get next.”
Spare me the twaddle about Sir Keir governing in “the national interest rather than a ragbag of special interests” when he has been pandering for over four years to white racist (sexist, homophobic, misogynist, ableist, suspicious of, if not downright hostile towards formal education) Leave voters in small English towns who still gag for Hard Brexit.
Around my way, they thought they would get their pub back if they voted Leave.
They did not and, if they ever started a campaign to reopen it then I would start up a counter campaign to keep it closed.
Thankfully, it is now being bulldozed.
Where is Sir Keir going to find the construction workers and businesses to build his New Britain, given we have an ageing, shrinking domestic workforce; business class and pool of entrepreneurial talent and Sir Keir wants to send the migrants packing?
Are you brushing up on your DIY skills?
Labour seems to believe there is an army of young people on sickness benefit with mental health problems who are also waiting for elective surgery on the NHS.
And, if they have surgery, their mental health will improve to the point where they will be able to lay bricks.
According to Torsten Bell, a policy wonker who has been parachuted into a Labour safe seat by Sir Keir, the proles may serve you a drink this evening and lay bricks tomorrow morning.
The proles being homogenous labour units.
Never enters the head of this member of the officer class, who may or may not have got a degree from Oxford, that some proles can do the one job, not the other and that many can do neither.
A significant proportion of the economically inactive are students.
Perhaps if we scrapped Mickey Mouse degrees, like Oxford University’s Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree we might free up some folk to lay bricks, work in care homes, become engineer’s mates and work in IT.
Silly me, the middle class youth would expect managerial jobs from the off.
I fear it is going to come as a great shock to many amongst the middle class, including Sir Keir when they discover the proles are not homogeneous labour units, capable of shaking a cocktail during happy hour before getting up in the early hours to build a brick archway.
Of course, British politicians could say to voters as they did not during the Brexit referendum campaign that they will reduce migration on the understanding voters accept a smaller economy and poorer quality of public services.
Instead, they invented a reserve army of untrained labour and assured the incurious and Leave supporters we might have our Hard Brexit cake and eat it.
Who will Sir Keir Starmer KC and Wes Streeting blame when NHS England waiting lists do not reduce under their Labour Government?
NHS staff unwilling to work longer hours, do extra overtime and work more at evenings and weekends than they do now under Rishi Sunak’s Tory Government.
That paltry 40,000 extra appointments per week are to be delivered on overtime.
And it will be hard to reform NHS England when it is over 15% understaffed, meaning staff routinely cover for colleagues who do not exist and that before one factors in staff on leave; attending training courses; dealing with domestic emergencies and, cough, being off sick … when Sir Keir wants to reduce the number of migrants working in the NHS and when Rachel Reeves insists public sector workers must accept below inflation pay rises.
Wes Streeting used to pledge Labour to fill the current 130,000 or so Full Time Effective vacancies in NHS England; address natural wastage and retention whilst increasing the headcount by an unprecedented amount within the context of below inflation pay rises and fewer migrant NHS staff.
Who knew the failed Price Waterhouse Coopers public sector management consultant was such a miracle worker when he is not being a complete arsehole.
Incidentally, I have a background in the theory and practice of socio-economic regeneration so I could give John Denham a few practial lessons about community engagement.
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Well, I agree with more or less all of what you write. I could add Assange to your list as well as the young boy whose mother took him to a police station after he looted a bottle of water during the Tottenham Riots and he was sentenced to 6 months in prison as a result. Apparently Cameron asked Starmer to be tough with everyone who participated in the riots. A misjudgment in my view. I follow MMT, especially Michael Hudson, so am under no illusions about the way the finance sector (FIRE and MIT)work.
Maybe we have to wait for the BRICS+ group to show the way on the control of the international financial system. At least for the majority of non- Western states.
In the meantime we will have Starmer and as I said in my earlier post he won’t be able to have an iron grip on the population. People will refuse to accept it. Surely?
You call Starmer a dictator. I think Oliver Eagleton would agree with you. I don’t know yet. He’s certainly a novice politician and he hasn’t yet won the trust, never mind appreciation of the UK population. He still has that task ahead and that’s important. I don’t know whether he is a dictator, petty or not. He is apparently authoritarian. Starmer calls Putin a dictator. However Putin is rebuilding his country with better working conditions, better pay, more support for families, new housing, thousands of kilometres of road and railways, new universities, community developments across the whole of Russia, and of course to support all such development an increasing GDP. And thus he has huge support in Russia. He also currently appears to have the trust of 87% of the world’s population!
We’ll wait to see what Starmer can achieve.
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Ex KGB operative, Vladimir Putin is a fascist gangster who started a war to distract the Russian people from the worsening state of their economy and society.
I have no idea from where you have got that propaganda, but even Vlad the Impaler might blush at it.
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The biggest skeleton in Sir Keir Starmer KC’s closet during his time as Director of Public Prosecutions is that he ran the Crown Prosecution Service into the ground, slashing the staffing budget by 25% in 18 months, to win the approval of George Osborne.
The quickest way to cut the staffing of the CPS that Sir Keir settled on as DPP was to encourage the most experienced, brightest and best to quit.
Sir Keir did irreparable damage to his criminal justice system as a result.
Sir Keir did not defend the staffing budget of the CPS when he was DPP.
Sir Keir did encourage the brightest, the best, the most experienced of his staff to leave his CPS when he was the best DPP ever.
Sir Keir, having been given a target by George Osborne to reduce the staffing budget of the CPS by 25% within 36 months, chose as DPP to slash the CPS staffing budget by 25% in 18 months.
Sir Keir believes that during his time as DPP, the head of the CPS, he was the very exemplar of good leadership and management, despite decimating and demoralising the staff of the CPS, weakening its capacity to function.
There are leaders who accept bouquets and receive brickbats on behalf of their organisations, who share credit in public with their staff and deal with failings within their organisations, mostly beyond the view of outsiders.
That is not Sir Keir’s idea of good leadership.
In the wake of his CPS deciding not to prosecute Jimmy Saville, Sir Keir did issue new definitive sexual abuse guidelines to his CPS staff.
That was before Sir Keir asked his staff to comment upon them in open meetings with him, their DPP.
Sir Keir issued new definitive sexual abuse guidelines to the staff of his CPS when the brightest, the best, the most experienced of them were being asked to consider whether or not they still wanted to work for him, their DPP.
Shadow Justice Secretary Sadiq Khan in April 2012 said when Sir Keir was decimating the staffing budget of the CPS, “Government cuts … are going too deep and too fast … having a hugely negative impact across the criminal justice system”.
Just 21% of Sir Keir’s staff in 2012 believed the actions of Sir Keir, their DPP, and his senior staff were consistent with the CPS’s values.
Only 12% believed the CPS as a whole was managed well.
Only 7% believed Sir Keir’s planned reforms would improve prosecution rates, while just 8% felt change was managed well in his CPS.
When Sir Keir learnt of the results of the internal CPS staff survey, instead of engaging with his staff about them, Sir Keir ordered them to attend re-education courses.
Would it have been better for the health of his CPS, if I as DPP Sir Keir had stuck to George Osborne’s timetable of 36 months in which to cut CPS staffing by 25% rather than doing it in 18 months?
Clearly, yes.
Did Sir Keir care about the state of his CPS by April 2012?
No, because he had decided to step down as Director of Public Prosecutions.
It would be for his successor to pick up the pieces.
In effect, Sir Keir set up his successor as DPP to fail.
Sir Keir has said since becoming Labour Party leader, “We’ve got to have battles. I ran a public service – the Crown Prosecution Service – for five years as part of the criminal justice system and I reformed that.”
The only person willing to go on the record to say Sir Keir was the best DPP ever and an exemplary leader and manager of the CPS is Sir Keir, himself.
I would not leave Sir Keir in charge of a whelk stall at the end of a decaying pier, in a fading seaside town over a half hour lunch break on a dreich Sunday in February.
I fear for the integrity of our public services if he uses his proven skills on reforming them.
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