The Canary only had a week-or-so off, and in that short period of time we have seen Donald Trump survive an apparent assassination attempt, Joe Biden addressing the Ukrainian comedy guy as “President Putin”, football fail to come home for the umpteenth time, and the new prime minister Keir Starmer prancing around on the global stage as if little insular Britain is recognised as anything more than a good place to buy arms and launder dirty money.
I also vaguely recall the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, posing for a photo with a man that is facing an arrest warrant from the Hague for crimes against humanity, but nobody gives a fuck about that because it’s not Jeremy Corbyn dining with the corpse of Osama Bin Laden.
So, just sixteen days into Keir Rodney Starmer’s prime ministership and I feel like it is time for me to apologise, because I got it wrong.
Rachael Swindon: an apology to Keir Starmer
Even I didn’t think Keir Starmer would be enough of an intolerable, foolish shithouse to give the thumbs up to supplying billions of pounds worth of arms to the Ukrainian regime, every year, “as long as it takes”, while so blatantly allowing British children to languish in poverty and hunger, within a week of being in office.
Is this what you red Thatcherite relics call “patriotism”? To me, it would appear Starmer’s loyalties lie with Washington, Tel Aviv and Kyiv before Warrington, Telford and Kettering even get a look-in.
The public antipathy towards the deliciously-routed Conservative Party isn’t going to disappear at the drop of a Rees-Mogg bowler hat, but if you are expecting an end to the politics of short-termism, instability, and division, I think you are going to be extremely disappointed.
Keir Starmer’s quicksand majority could be put to excellent use.
Plenty of options
Instead of a Border Force Control, build council houses. Ask not who we can blow out of the water, but what these human beings can offer our exhausted and broken society.
Instead of arming and enabling war and genocide, lead the way in searching for peaceful and just resolutions to global atrocities. We do not have to slavishly sign up to this bomb-first-ask-questions-later strategy favoured by the neocons. This is a political choice.
Instead of rubbing shoulders with the elite, try doing a shift in your local foodbank or homeless shelter, but away from the ghastly spectacle of self-serving publicity.
Starmer doesn’t need to put your future on the never-never with huge corporations when he can adequately tax the same huge, obscenely rich corporations to pay for it.
The 2024 Taxing Wealth Report demonstrates to Labour just how simple it would be to make some tweaks to existing UK taxes to raise up to £90 BILLION of new tax revenue – every single year.
Better still, Mr Starmer, these easily-made adjustments would be raised only from those who are already well off or who are absolutely fucking minted, which only applies to people that are lucky enough to be in the top 10% of income earners.
But you know as well as I do, there’s more chance of Keir Starmer ditching the public-purse-funded private jet — that carried his over-privileged arse to the Euro 2024 final to watch England lose to Spain — than there ever will be of Keir Starmer taking a meaningful bite from the very hand that feeds his lust for power, free from morals, ethics and principles.
Labour corporatocracy
This new Labour government has seamlessly picked up the corporatocracy baton from the Tories with an alarming ease.
Despite promising to “get a grip” of the huge water companies, Starmer has wasted no time in rubber-stamping bill increases of up to 44%. The new prime minister has the majority to crush these disproportionate price hikes, simply by renationalising water companies.
I am old enough to remember the time Keir Starmer said:
Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders. Support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water.
That was pledge number five of the infamous ten pledges that Keir Starmer put forward to Labour Party members back in 2020.
Keir Starmer is a proven liar. I give zero fucks for the size of his majority and even fewer fucks if I have to keep calling out this malignant, fraudulent, servant of the immoral elite until I turn blue in the face.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the UK’s broken ‘justice’ system…
As reported earlier this week in the Canary, five Just Stop Oil supporters were sent to prison for a combined TWENTY ONE YEARS for doing nothing more than attending a Zoom call.
Is it not quite incredible that in the week the new government are forced to announce they are having to release some 5,500 prisoners to “avert disaster”, some creepy batshit judge is locking up climate change protestors for having the temerity to attend a Zoom call, or am I missing something blindingly obvious?
In my humble opinion, and my opinion alone, I believe the judge in question — Judge Christopher Hehir — is a climate-change-denying, paedo-sympathiser, and the fact he is dishing out ‘justice’ is a grave injustice in itself.
Is this the kind of good old fashioned British justice that Keir Starmer will continue to support without reservation?
If society begins to accept the imprisonment of climate protestors is of greater importance than the non-imprisonment of a man found to be in possession of three category A images, the most serious type, and five category C images, which depicted victims aged eight to 12, as well as accessing a website known to contain indecent images of children 393 times, would it be wrong of me to suggest we are heading down an extremely dangerous path?
Same judge, very different sentences.
I’ll pass on your ‘national renewal’, thanks Keir Starmer
All of this talk of “change”, “national renewal”, and “doing things differently”, may well convince the 20% of those eligible to vote that voted for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to run the country, but your average Joe isn’t going to feel, or be any better off than this time last year.
It should go without saying, we shouldn’t judge Starmer’s tinpot government on what they have or haven’t done in the space of just two weeks, but we can certainly begin to get a good idea of which way the river is flowing, merely reinforcing our judgement of Starmer and his cabal of metropolitan spinners before they managed to get anywhere near the corridors of power.
If your idea of “change” looks like a guaranteed £3 billion every year for Ukraine to fight a proxy war on behalf of the West, I’m not interested in your idea of change.
If your idea of “doing things differently” looks like offering out another £700 million worth of NHS contracts to the private sector, I’m not interested in your idea of doing things differently.
And if your idea of “national renewal” looks like bowing down to Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel by refusing to withdraw your objections to the pariah state being dragged kicking and screaming through the International Criminal Courts, you can go to hell.
Featured image via Rachael Swindon
