Labour

Keir Starmer isn’t working

Silence. That is what we heard during Gloria de Piero’s recent focus group which she held for her GB News show in her old constituency of Ashfield, one of many Red Wall seats that fell to the Conservatives in 2019. Most participants had been Labour voters up to that election but felt the party had somehow let them down and ceased to represent the working class, especially with Jeremy Corbyn as leader. De Piero found them most talkative about how Boris Johnson had once appeared to be a different kind of politician, one whose promises they had believed but who they now felt had let them down, thanks to partygate.

Is Boris Johnson planning an emergency Budget?

Boris Johnson is running out of time to produce things the Tories can show the voters at the next election. The theme of his Queen’s Speech – if there was one – was an attempt to fix that. That next election campaign was countered by Keir Starmer in the chamber this afternoon. The main focus was on the cost-of-living crisis and how much worse things are going to get. Funnily enough, Starmer didn’t mention the members of the government who’d broken Covid rules The Labour leader repeatedly accused this government of not being ‘up to the challenge’, with the Tories producing only a ‘thin address bereft of ideas or purpose, without a guiding

Why Keir Starmer isn’t living up to the dream of 1997

‘A new dawn has broken has it not?’, asked Tony Blair as the sun first blinked over London’s South Bank on the early morning of 2 May 1997. Blair was addressing a crowd of supporters following Labour’s first general election victory since 1974, an election that saw the party win 43.2 per cent of votes cast and achieve its biggest ever Commons majority, even bigger than Clement Attlee’s in 1945. It was a victory that laid the foundations for an unprecedented 13 years of Labour government. After this year’s local elections nobody in the Labour party is talking about a new dawn. In reality, the results are nowhere near good

Could the Liberal Democrats become kingmakers once again?

The narrative around the 2022 local elections looks something like this at present: Labour is strengthening their vote share in London, even taking former Tory citadels like Wandsworth and Westminster. Yet they are doing less well outside of the capital, where there is growth from the Corbyn era but it’s looking much smaller than they had hoped. If similar dynamics continue, the next general election is going to be close, probably hung parliament territory. This makes the Lib Dem performance interesting. If the next general election is as close as today’s result, then a few seats here and there can make all of the difference to who gets to be Prime Minister.

Labour are right – let’s do away with ‘non-dom’ status

Any Conservative who doubts that Labour’s promise to abolish non-dom status could seriously damage the government needs to look at the fate of Rishi Sunak. So recently the heir apparent to the Tory leadership, Sunak has this week plunged to bottom in a poll of the most popular cabinet members. It comes, of course, just a couple of weeks after the revelation that Sunak’s wife was living in Britain as a non-dom – a status which according to one estimate could have saved her up to £20 million in tax over the years. And this was a poll of Conservative party members, so goodness knows how much the revelation has

David Lammy gets it wrong (again)

Oh, those rotten Tories. You’ve got a PM being fined for parties, a Home Secretary making a mess of our borders and a Culture Secretary who can’t even spell the name of the Channel 4 star she’s berating. Sleaze is rife, inflation is back: it’s like the nineties without the hope. What could be worse? Well, there’s always the Labour party.  Jeremy Corbyn may be gone but Sir Keir Starmer’s barmy army is still stuffed with socialists of the hard-of-thinking variety. Richard Burgon is banished to the backbenches but there’s always good old David Lammy, the ardent Europhile handpicked by Starmer to shadow Her Majesty’s principal secretary of state for foreign and Commonwealth affairs. Lammy generously took

Is Labour behind Rishi’s tax woes?

Who’s out to get Rishi? That’s the question allies of the Chancellor are asking after a week of revelations about the Richmond MP. They include the non-domiciled tax status of his wife, Akshata Murthy, Sunak’s decision to hold a US green card and pay tax in America for his first 18 months in No. 11 and his own alleged links to tax havens. There have also been leaks over briefing battles, including the Treasury’s opposition to insulating homes in the energy strategy and a proposal to double the energy rebate. The timing of such stories – coinciding with Boris Johnson emerging from the darkest period of his premiership – has raised suspicions about Johnson loyalists seeking revenge for Sunak’s

Starmer changes Labour’s slogan… again

Given the Tories’ current woes with everything from parties to ferries, surely now is the chance for the long-awaited Labour revival? Keir Starmer has been talking a good game recently but polls still show the two main parties in close contention. To aid his chances in the upcoming local elections, the Labour leader has unveiled a new slogan: ‘On your side’ – a battlecry that will echo down the ages like Ed Miliband’s ‘Better Plan for a Better Future’ and Gordon Brown’s ‘A future fair for all.’ Reading the latest PR speak from party HQ, Mr S was struck by a sudden realisation. For Keir Starmer’s latest effort appears to

Starmer won’t talk about sex and gender. That’s a problem

Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t want to talk about penises. He’s going to have to do it anyway, and he’s not going to be alone. The Labour leader was interviewed by LBC’s Nick Ferrari on Monday, becoming the latest journalist to test Starmer on questions of sex and gender. Ferrari asked, can a woman have a penis? Starmer’s verbatim response, offered with a pained expression and sorrowful intonation: Nick, I’m not… I don’t think we can conduct this debate with… you know… I just… I don’t think, erm, discussing this issue in this issue helps anyone in the long run. What I want to see is a reform of the law as

Sunday shows round-up: Sunak says Ukraine and Brexit are not ‘analogous’

Rishi Sunak – Brexit vote and Ukraine resistance ‘are not analogous’ The Chancellor was in the TV studios this morning, ahead of the Spring Statement that he will deliver on Wednesday. Economic issues, like much else, have been cast into the shadows over recent weeks as the spotlight has inevitably focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Even today was no exception, as in his interview with the BBC’s Sophie Raworth, Rishi Sunak was first asked to address a stir caused by the Prime Minister’s remarks at the Conservative’s spring conference yesterday in Blackpool: Government’s energy support ‘will make a difference’ Turning to Sunak’s brief, Raworth asked about the rising cost of living

Coming soon: Barry Gardiner – The Movie

With the BAFTAs last Sunday and the Oscars next week, film award season is well underway. And while it’s too late for new entries this year, Mr S hears of a dark horse for next year’s competitions. Step forward, Labour’s Barry Gardiner, who is the unlikely star of a documentary about his recent private members’ bill to ban ‘fire and rehire’ practices. Gardiner, Jeremy Corbyn’s colourful shadow trade secretary, ran a series of eye-catching stunts to raise publicity for the campaign, including gatecrashing the 1922 drinks at Tory party conference: a move that prompted frenzied speculation of an imminent defection. His efforts to change the law might have been unsuccessful but at least

The uncertain future of the Equality Act

Sir Keir Starmer’s interpretation of the Equality Act has caused something of a stir. The Labour leader cited the Brown-era legislation to support his assertion that ‘trans women are women’ and that this ‘happens to be the law in the United Kingdom’. This reading of the Act has drawn criticism from gender-critical feminists, including the trans writer Debbie Hayton, who states: If Keir Starmer thinks that I am a woman, I am delighted to tell him the truth. Transwomen (like me) are male, while women (like my wife) are female. Biology does not lie, male is not female, and therefore transwomen are not women. For all my many other sins,

Keir Starmer’s gender identity muddle

If you needed any sign that the Labour party is still deeply confused about gender identity and sex, look no further than the Labour leader Keir Starmer’s comments this week. Asked by the Times to define a woman, Starmer replied that: A woman is a female adult, and in addition to that trans women are women, and that is not just my view — that is actually the law. It has been the law through the combined effects of the 2004 [Gender Recognition] Act and the 2010 [Equality] Act. So that’s my view. It also happens to be the law in the United Kingdom. If Keir Starmer thinks that I am

How Starmer is using the crisis in Ukraine to his advantage

Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer had one thing in common at PMQs: they were both keen to talk about the escalating situation in Ukraine. While the Prime Minister wants to use the crisis to show there are more important issues than parties, the Labour leader views it as an opportunity to put some clear blue water between himself and his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.  Starmer is using the Ukraine situation this week to emphasise Labour’s return to the centre His call at Prime Minister’s Questions to ban Russia Today has already received some criticism from figures on the left and right of the party who believe it would be self-defeating. Whether or

Will Prince Andrew fuel a republican boom?

So that’s that then. After years of claims and counter-claims, Prince Andrew has settled with Virginia Giuffre for an eight-figure sum thought to be in the region of £12 million. This, for a woman he said he had never met. Hmm.  The humiliation for the disgraced royal isn’t over yet though: self-promoting Corbynista Rachel Maskell, the MP for York Central, has been quick today to demand his title as Duke of York be removed to avoid offence to the good people of God’s own county. And it seems that Labour backbenchers aren’t the only critics to whom Andrew is giving succour. For pressure group Republic, which campaigns for the abolition

I stand with Diane Abbott

Not for the first time in her political career, Diane Abbott is getting a lot of flak online. She’s being trolled, heckled and denounced as an enemy of the United Kingdom. Only this time Ms Abbott is being hauled over the coals not for saying something silly, but for saying something sensible. Something true. Something fundamentally correct. Namely, that Nato bears a great deal of responsibility for the current crisis in Ukraine. Browsing the Abbott-bashing headlines you could be forgiven for thinking she had upped sticks, flown to Moscow, and sworn lifelong allegiance to Vladimir Putin. ‘Diane Abbott backs Russia!’, says the Express. In its regular feature on mad things

Patrick O'Flynn

Labour’s obsession with race shows no signs of fading

After a relatively successful spell attempting to side itself with ordinary folk, Labour has lurched back into hardline identity politics with a particular focus on the issue of race. Over recent days some of the party’s leading figures have stoked up the idea of Tory Britain being a hotbed of discrimination. Shadow foreign secretary David Lammy is leading the way with a call for a posthumous royal pardon of those who took part in an anti-slavery uprising in Guyana in 1823. According to Lammy, the pardon would help Britain find a ‘path to repair’ in regard to its ‘acknowledgment of its role in the history of slavery’. Yet given that

A speech which showed parliament at its best

It’s been an angry, tense few days around parliament. The Sue Gray report saw Boris Johnson accused of lying, and starting another fight about Keir Starmer and Jimmy Savile that led to more allegations of dishonesty and bad faith. Anyone glancing at news from the Commons might get confirmation that MPs are a worthless sack of rats who spend all their time scratching and biting at each other. Which is why it’s important to draw attention to the other side of the Commons, which tends to get less attention: the human, collegiate side that was on display when MPs said goodbye to Jack Dromey who was the member for Birmingham Erdington

Lindsay Hoyle is turning into John Bercow

Sir Keir Starmer has a weakness, and the Tories have spotted it. His weakness is Sir Lindsay Hoyle. The Speaker likes to interrupt PMQs when noise in the chamber exceeds a threshold known only to him. During Sir Keir’s cross-examination of Boris today, he broke in three times to deliver pompous mini-sermons that might have been scripted by John Bercow. ‘Our constituents are very interested to hear this,’ said Hoyle, having told Sir Keir to sit down. The rowdies were ordered to ‘please leave quietly’. No one left. That should have told him that a game was afoot. He himself pointed out that the shouts and jibes originate from the

Is Labour ready to become the party of business?

While the Tories limp from one scandal to the next, an opportunity has opened up for Labour when it comes to courting business. Although it’s unlikely many voters elected Boris Johnson into office because they trusted his moral compass they did at least think he would deliver on his promise of sunlit uplands. But two years and a pandemic later, government spending as a percentage of national income is set to top 45 per cent, we’ve yet to ignite a bonfire of EU regulations, inflation has reached 5.4 per cent (and still rising) and the cost of living crisis is rapidly worsening. Voters are starting to question whether, with the