Stop the press. I found myself feeling a little bit sorry for the new prime minister, Keir Starmer, this morning.
Not because Britain’s 58th prime minister Starmer has the charisma of a freshly-filleted and boned puffer fish, or even because he is so boring he makes the dead want to die again.
But surely even Starmer deserved to go out this past Friday evening for a few beers with the lads, following Labour’s ‘big’ victory on Thursday night?
To be fair to the new prime minister, he only seems to have a beer on a Friday night when he is ‘working in Durham’, which does make me wonder what they put in the water in the North East because Dominic Cummings also thought it was an ideal place to take his car for a drive to test his eyesight during the height of lockdown restrictions in 2020, on his wife’s birthday.
Anyway, the editor has suggested I “reflect” on Thursday’s rotation of the ruling class, so I will reflect in a way that would have client journalists from the corporate media clearing their desks overnight.
I’m sure my editor meant “toast that Starmer bastard”…
Anyway.
Corbyn was right even under our batshit democracy
So let me start by getting this right. Keir Starmer got around a half-a-million less votes than “the worst Labour performance at a general election since 1935”, but won a sizeable majority that could keep Labour in power for a generation?
And just to double check. Less than 20% of those eligible to vote actually voted for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, but the new prime minister is sat in Downing Street holding 100% of the power?
And for absolute clarity, despite Starmer’s deeply damaging and entirely intentional 2018 Brexit shift, and the greatest McCarthyite witch hunt and smear campaign in the history of British politics, Mr Corbyn *still* built a Labour manifesto that got more votes than the new government with the 174 seat majority, proving once again that the British people aren’t afraid of socialism?
I’ve said it many times before and I will say it many times again. Corbyn — the new history-making independent MP for Islington North — was right.
Don’t you just love general elections and the batshit British democracy though?
Well no, I don’t. This is the literal antithesis of a healthy, functioning democracy. Our democracy is as corrupted and compromised as the politicians that sit in the mother of all parliaments.
Sour grapes? I have been an advocate of proportional representation before I was able to spell it, and pronounce it without sounding like a five-year-old with a fizzy cola bottle stuck to their top gum.
Our system of democracy is utterly broken and the neoliberal political class has thrown away the tools we need to repair it.
The question now, that needs to be answered by the numerous left-wing factions, organisations and movements, is how on earth do we go about it?
We need unity – and quickly
Bringing people together is the key that will at least allow us to unlock the tool shed. We then strengthen our combined forces so we can have a thorough look inside the shed to see what other tools we possess that might even go some way to repairing the broken and battered British democracy.
I think you know what I mean. Unity.
We don’t have to like each other. We encounter people throughout life that we tolerate because we just want an easier time. Surely we go through enough struggles already with our day-to-day lives without the need for an ideological battle of purity?
The morally destitute Starmerites have got nearly everything that they wanted, despite pulling off THREE FUCKING MILLION less votes than the general election of 2017.
We’re not going to beat these dangerous red Tory establishment pawns without playing a little bit of chess ourselves.
Starmer isn’t invincible, he is a weak leader, guided by a coercive oxygen thief that used to go on shopping trips with Jeffrey Epstein.
Did you watch Starmer’s first speech outside Downing Street on Friday afternoon? The new prime minister had to check his notes more than 150 times during his brief speech. I do worry when a politician needs an autocue or a script to tell them what they are supposed to believe in.
We all know Starmer’s Labour takes millions of pounds in perfectly legitimate donations from the proponents of an aggressive colonial American outpost that is currently having its genocidal arse dragged through the international courts.
You can’t honestly be telling me Keir Starmer — an anti-socialist dog whistler that wants to clamp down on lawful protests such as Stop The War Coalition — is infallible, can you?
An undeserved majority in our ‘democracy’
The simple truth is this: Starmer’s undeserved parliamentary majority — secured with just 33.9% of the popular vote — is the result of a Tory collapse across the country. No Tory collapse, no Labour government.
The Labour Party has not been endorsed by the British people. The Conservatives have been rejected by the British people.
The Starmerites that have spent the best part of four years demanding we support their centre-right fraud of a leader will now get the chance to prove they were telling the truth when they insisted Starmer would head back to the left-wing once he lied his way into power and the Tory-lite agenda was just a ruse to secure the votes of middle England and the North.
Seriously folks, don’t hold your breath.
The corporate media needs to wean itself off its unhealthy addiction for Nigel Farage.
The Liberal Democrats — not a party I find myself agreeing with very often — must be absolutely miffed as to how they get 12% of the vote share and 0% of the media publicity while the Farage party picks up just slightly more with 14% of the vote share but attracts 100% of the publicity.
An unhealthy Farage addiction
Nigel Farage isn’t the box office attraction the media seem to think. But they are happy to over-promote the hateful boil, wilfully pushing the British public further to the right.
If using racism, xenophobia, sexism and Islamophobia to stir up division is your kind of thing, Farage is your man.
If you want an elitist politician that has deeply toxic connections to extreme and far-right figures across the world, and Thatcherite beliefs that he keeps quiet from communities in deindustrialised towns, Farage is for you.
Mr Farage is the son of a wealthy stockbroker, and attended Dulwich College, one of the most elite schools in the country, which several family members had also attended. Farage is not an anti-establishment insurgent. Farage *is* the establishment, and Reform are funded by the establishment.
Let us not castigate the four million Reform voters. Let us educate them. Whilst I have absolutely no doubt the Reform Party has more than its fair share of uncouth, bigoted louts, they’re not all nasty little racists in the mold of the narcissistic nationalist, Nigel Farage.
We do not live under a democratic system
As this weeks period of reflection comes to an end, the Canary team takes a well-earned breather, and the new prime minister steps up his search for a Secretary of State for Genocide, most likely in North Durham, I only have a bit more to add.
Tony Benn’s final speech to the House of Commons as MP was an appropriately eloquent farewell, in which he talked widely on his view of the role of parliament and the wider question of democracy:
In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person–Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates–ask them five questions: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?” If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.
Friends, loved ones, and anyone else that’s managed to digest the previous twelve hundred or so words with just the slightest hint of agreement, we do not live under a democratic system.
Featured image via Rachael Swindon
