Posts Tagged ‘Keir Starmer’

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Labour Kicked In The Yarbles Yet Again

Monday, May 10th, 2021

The UK just had their 2021 local elections, and once again Labour got kicked in the yarbles:

The Conservatives have continued to sweep aside Labour in its traditional north-eastern English heartland.

The party lost control of Durham County Council, which it has run since 1925, losing 15 seats as the Tories took 14.

This follows the Conservatives winning the Hartlepool parliamentary by-election and receiving 73% of the vote in the Tees Valley mayoral election….

So far, the Conservatives have made a net gain of 12 councils, while Labour has lost control of eight.

You may think “Oh, Labour lost some local elections, big deal,” but the wounds are deeper than that. The areas they’re losing aren’t marginal toss-up districts, they’re places that made up the Labour heartland for decades:

Labour’s traditional constituents continue to leave the woke, EU-loving, Brexit-hating, Corbynite-riddled Labour Party in droves due to the naked contempt that party now regards them with:

So, the working-class revolt against the Labour Party continues. The ballot-box uprising of December 2019 – when millions of voters across the Red Wall switched from Labour to the Tories – is still in full flow. Hartlepool, Labour since it was founded in 1974, has now fallen to the Tories, with a staggering majority of 7,000. Labour councillors in Derby, Dudley, Sunderland and elsewhere have been unceremoniously turfed out of power and replaced with Tories. The results so far are ‘shattering’, says Labour’s Steve Reed.

‘Shattering’ is the word for it. What is being shattered is politics as we knew it, the alignments that defined political life in this country for generations. The Hartlepool by-election and the English local elections – at least what we know of them so far – confirm that the relentless realignment of British politics will not be halted anytime soon. The mass working-class defection to the Conservative Party; the colonisation of Labour by middle-class graduates; the transformation of Labour from a party of working people into a metropolitan machine more concerned with gender-neutral toilets and taking the knee than with what working-class people want and need – anyone who thought these historic shifts and quakes would be reversed by having sensible, forensic Sir Keir Starmer at the helm of Labour has just received the rudest awakening imaginable.

What Labour centrists must now admit is that their party’s travails run far deeper than the Corbyn effect. Another thing that has been shattered is the much gabbed-out idea that once Labour jettisoned Jeremy and the cranky trustafarians and Fisher-Price Marxists who made up his support base, then it would go back back to being a normal party with a shot at power. In truth, while Corbyn’s time at the top was undoubtedly disastrous – the anti-Semitism, the swapping of class politics for identity politics, the Britain-bashing – something far more profound is driving the working-class revolt against Labour.

To the fore is the issue of Brexit. These election results look like a continuation of working-class voters’ rejection of the Brexit betrayers – most notably Labour – and their lining up behind the party that at least promised to Get Brexit Done: the Tories. It still blows my mind that the political class thought it could try to stitch up the largest democratic vote in UK history and there wouldn’t be severe, long-lasting consequences. This extraordinary naivety was on full display in Hartlepool, where arch-Remainer Keir Starmer stood arch-Remainer Paul Williams in a seat in which 70 per cent of people voted for Brexit. Do they think working-class voters are stupid? The answer, as we know, is yes, of course they do.

A key lesson of the local elections – as with the 2019 General Election – is that working-class people take their vote seriously. They do not take kindly to the elite’s bigoted efforts to undermine their right to vote. Many working-class voters look at Labour and see a party of over-educated operators and activists who shamelessly devoted much of the past five years to frustrating the vote for Brexit. This is why they revolted against Labour in 2019, and why they revolted yesterday too – because democracy is important to working-class voters. They don’t have newspaper columns or a seat in the Lords or thousands of Twitter followers or some other means to make their voices heard. They only have the right to vote. You mess with that right at your peril, as Starmer and Williams surely now know.

Another problem is Labour’s embrace of identitarianism and its shamefacedness about Britain. From Emily Thornberry’s haughty sneer at a working-class household that was flying the English flag to Starmer’s taking of the knee to the regressive politics of Black Lives Matter, from Corbynistas’ claim that British history is one horrendous crime after another to Labour politicians’ rage against the Sewell report for daring to suggest the UK is not actually a racist hellhole – working-class voters clock all of this. Not surprisingly they do not feel enthused by the ideology of national shame now promoted by many in Labour, or by the snotty suggestion that loads of Brits are racist. A cartoon in Private Eye captured it well – it featured a Labour candidate doorstepping two working-class voters and asking: ‘Why won’t you racist fascists vote Labour?’

Following this most recent working-class revolt against Labour, there has been a shrill, unseemly spat between Corbynistas and Starmerites over who is to blame for Labour’s troubles. The disingenuousness from both sides is staggering. The truth is that these two middle-class factions have far more in common than they would like to admit. Both backed a second referendum; both looked upon Brexit voters as a misled, idiotic mob; both are repelled by the social and cultural values of working-class communities; and both are convinced that Britain and most of its inhabitants – Them, not Us – are potty xenophobes. The revolt against Labour is more than a reckoning with Corbynism or Starmerism – it is a democratic confrontation between working-class communities and a political elite who they believe, quite rightly, views them with contempt, disdain and pity.

(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Dr. Rakib Ehsan says that wokeness is killing Labour:

Last night showed yet again that large swathes of the country are sick of being treated with patronising condescension by Labour politicians and student activists. Labour was crushed in the Hartlepool by-election and suffered ward losses in multiple northern regions, with Conservatives gaining control of Dudley, Nuneaton and Bedworth councils.

These areas, with their high numbers of traditional blue collar workers, are leading the charge against a woke agenda that has almost destroyed their traditional party. Working class voters are sending a clear message: they do not need a ‘political re-education’, and they reject the fundamentally warped interpretation of British society held by some of the most vocal Labour representatives.

They see that too many Labour politicians are in thrall to a toxic racialised politics, the extent of this became clear when Sir Keir Starmer ‘took the knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter. The movement’s calls for the abolition of the police and a post-capitalist society reflect a crude identitarianism that carries no truck with the vast majority of Britons. Only one in ten of people in this country are in favour of reduced investment for local police forces.

Labour is also too comfortable with elements of the London elite that proudly vilify provincial voters who supported Brexit. It doesn’t help matters that Sir Keir Starmer was the chief architect of Labour’s second referendum policy – an exemplification of the metropolitan, anti-democratic tendencies which have taken hold of the party. It was, naturally, electorally disastrous.

It seems the primary distinguishing characteristic of the Labour Party days is unbridled, withering contempt for actual laborers. A party consisting of a woke urban elite pushing victimhood identity politics and condemning anyone that disagrees with them as “Little Englanders” will never enjoy the support of a majority of voters, no matter how many times that call Boris Johnson horrible, racist and xenophobic. Labour can continue to cling to the religion of wokeness, or they can be a competitive political party. They can’t do both. Until Labour realizes this, it’s just going to keep committing protracted, slow-motion suicide.

Speaking of which, I chuckled:

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LinkSwarm for April 10, 2020

Friday, April 10th, 2020

Happy Good Friday, everyone!

Are we finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel? The Wuhan coronavirus numbers have gone from doubling every two or three days to taking more than a week to double, which suggests successfully bending the curve. If hydroxychloroquine is indeed effective against the virus, we should think about opening the economy back up sooner rather than later, as our ICUs won’t be too overwhelmed to save lives.

Speaking of which…

  • Are fears of the Wuhan coronavirus overblown? This roundup of reader reports from various hospitals around the country suggests that it is. Lots of hospitals having layoff because so many elective procedures have been cancelled and projected coronavirus ICU cases never materialized. Maybe we’ve flattened the curve enough?
  • Democrats are going to fight Trump to the death over a stimulus aimed at small business. How are they supposed to get their beaks wet there?
  • “Dem Governor Who Banned Hydroxychloroquine Gets Caught Hoarding It.”
  • CNN tells the truth that Democrats blocked GOP funding for small business, then changed it, because telling negative truths about Democrats is always bad. (And speaking of bad, Powerline, I’m really not enamored of you launching a full-screen popup ad every time I click on a story (at least on the machine that doesn’t have Ad-Block for everything.)
  • “How US bureaucrats deepened the coronavirus crisis to deadly effect“:

    Public officials across the United States are flying blind against the novel coronavirus epidemic. Because of a government-engineered testing ­fiasco, they don’t know how fast the virus is spreading, how many people have been infected by it, how many will die as a result of it or how many have developed ­immunity to it.

    The failure to implement early and widespread testing — caused by a combination of shortsightedness, ineptitude and bureaucratic intransigence — left politicians scrambling to avoid a hospital crisis by imposing broad business closures and stay-at-home orders.

    The grand failure of federal health bureaucrats foreclosed the possibility of a more proactive and targeted approach, focused on identifying carriers, tracing their contacts and protecting the public in a more measured way through isolation and quarantines.

    The initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, was ­reported at the end of December. The first confirmed case in the United States was reported on Jan. 20, by which time it seems likely that many other Americans were already infected.

    At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ­monopolized COVID-19 tests. When the CDC began shipping test kits to state laboratories in early February, they turned out to be defective.

    The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration initially blocked efforts by universities and businesses to develop and conduct tests before relaxing the restrictions that made it impossible to assess the progress of the epidemic. Making a false virtue of necessity, the CDC set irrationally narrow criteria for testing, which meant that carriers without ­severe symptoms or obvious risk factors escaped detection.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Is Twitter using the health emergency to settle political scores?

    Nate Jones and I dig deep into Twitter’s decision to delete Rudy Giuliani’s tweet (quoting Charlie Kirk of Turning Point) to the effect that hydroxychloroquine had been shown to be 100% effective against the coronavirus and that Gov. Whitmer (D-MI) had threatened doctors prescribing it out of anti-Trump animus. Twitter claimed that it was deleting tweets that “go directly against guidance from authoritative sources” and separately implied that the tweet was an improper attack on Gov. Whitmer.

    I call BS. Hydroxychloroquine has looked very effective in several tests in France and China, but it hasn’t passed any controlled trials, and along with all the other promising drugs, it won’t pass those trials until the wave of death has begun to recede. In a world of bad choices, the drug looks like one of a few worthwhile gambles, as even Gov. Whitmer recognized by reversing course and asking to be allocated a lot of doses. Giuliani was closer to right than Whitmer. But Twitter decided that Giuliani’s view was so far from the mainstream that it had to be suppressed.

    To be clear, Twitter management decided to suppress a legitimate if overstated view about how to survive the coronavirus. Twitter readers would not be allowed to see that view. That’s a stance that requires some serious justification.

    Only Verified Official Coronavirus views are allowed, because Orange Man Bad.

  • Point/Counterpoint: National Review says that Sweden’s non-lockdown solution to coronavirus (isolate elders, but no shutdowns) has been better than our own, but Time disagrees. “Sweden has a relatively high case fatality rate: as of April 8, 7.68% of the Swedes who have tested positive for COVID-19 have died of the virus.”
  • Does the virus have an Achilles heel?
  • Could the Wuhan coronavirus have been in California already last fall? “[Victor Davis] Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China.”
  • Another 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.
  • Texas is doing comparatively well:

  • But: “Texas unemployment agency plagued by tech issue, backlogs as claims near 750K.”
  • Texas local governments need to start trimming their budgets right now.
  • A World Poker Tour organizer’s diary of the Wuhan coronavirus’ onset. I’m not really interested in poker tournaments, but this piece is really valuable for it’s detailed, almost minute-by-minute breakdown of those crazy days less than a month ago when the Wuhan Coronavirus went from Something We Might Have To Worry About to The Event Horizon of Absolute Change.
  • “Diamond Comics Announces They Will ‘Hold Payments To Vendors‘ Amid Coronavirus Pandemic.” Also, they won’t ship comics to stores, either. Given that Diamond has a defacto monopoly on comics distribution, this is going to drive a lot of indie comics makers completely out of business. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)
  • Another weird coronavirus wide effect: You can no longer ship packages to Saudi Arabia.
  • New York Democratic represntative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez draws a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. “Word broke yesterday that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is reportedly planning to endorse Caruso-Cabrera, probably because they don’t want to be the first with their backs up against the wall after AOC’s glorious people’s revolution.”
  • Colleges and universities are already starting to panic over the loss of revenue. “How long will it take for Democrats to propose a higher education bailout? When that happens, Republicans should hold out until schools start cutting pointless administrators and departments.” Like a malware-infected Windows system, what higher education needs is a shutdown, reboot, reformat and reinstall before it’s safe to start up again.
  • Laredo mandates masks.
  • Keir Starmer replaces Jeremy Corbyn as head of UK’s Labour Party:

    Corbyn’s tenure has cost Labour the trust and patience of millions, including political observers around the world. By rights, it should have been Corbyn’s hidebound socialism and barely concealed tolerance for anti-Semitism that did him in. But what ultimately cost Corbyn the support of his party was electoral defeat. And not just any defeat, but a disastrous one.

    British Labourites and voters more broadly knew who Corbyn was well before the summer of 2017. His first shadow cabinet was a mess. His nostalgic Marxism was laid bare in a manifesto that called for the nationalization of infrastructure and industry alike. His fondness for terrorists—from the IRA to Hezbollah and Hamas—was no secret. But the conservative government under Theresa May plodded into the general election with all the grace of a muskox, confirming voters’ fears that the government could not completely manage Brexit and transforming a 20-point margin in the polls into a 13-seat loss for the Tories. Though it was a defeat for Labour, Corbyn’s party managed a halfway decent showing. It was enough to avoid the impression that Labour had suffered a rebuke.

    In the interim, Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism problem rapidly became Labour’s anti-Semitism problem. The party was wrought by schism when it pledged to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism but amended it to allow its members more freedom to criticize Israel, all without consulting relevant Jewish organizations or even the party’s Jewish members. The unearthing of a variety of Corbyn’s anti-Semitic online affiliations compelled his own members to openly criticize their party’s leadership. Under Corbyn, his party’s affinities trended steadily in one odious direction, leading to the high-profile resignations of many longtime Labour MPs. “I am sickened that Labour is now perceived by many as a racist, anti-Semitic party,” said outgoing MP Mike Gapes.

    All this weighed heavily on British voters. One survey found that 85 percent of Britain’s Jews believed Corbyn was himself anti-Semitic, despite his pro forma denunciations of Jew-hatred. Britain’s chief rabbi denounced the Labour Party’s leader as “unfit for office,” a sentiment with which the Archbishop of Canterbury agreed. By the eve of the 2019 general election, only the most unwavering of Labour voters told pollsters that their primary concern about the prospect of a Labour-led government was “Jeremy Corbyn being prime minister.” But the inevitability of the disaster headed Labour’s way was not acknowledged until it was upon them, and by then it was too late. On December 12, Labour turned in the party’s worst electoral performance since 1935. It wasn’t the anti-Semitism that did Corbyn in. It was his failure to deliver at the polls.

    Technically, that’s Sir Keir Starmer, providing just the right amount of irony that a party theoretically representing the interests of the working class is now lead by an Oxford-educated lawyer-knight.

  • That Hungary emergency act the left was screaming “dictatorship!” about last week: worrisome, but not that worrisome:

    The tests are those most people would impose. Is this emergency law within the constitution or a violation of it? And there’s no doubt that it’s constitutional. It was passed by the super-majority that such a law requires. Are there safeguards in it? There are two. First, the constitutional court could reject it in whole or in part, either today or after the epidemic has receded. That is unlikely since all the required constitutional procedures were fulfilled in its passage, but constitutional courts are unpredictable. The second is that Parliament can vote to end the state of emergency at any time by the same two-thirds majority by which it passed the law. I would not entirely rule out that happening if the Orban government were to abuse these powers, but I judge both serious abuse and a parliamentary rebellion against it to be unlikely. Third, are the emergency powers granted to the government too broad? Some of them may be. The fines and prison sentences for breaking quarantine and spreading false rumors, though not unreasonable in themselves when panic and plague are in the air (the latter quite literally), look to me to be too high. But those sentences won’t be imposed arbitrarily; courts will determine them; and the terms of the legislation are tightly written to prevent its being used for political censorship or anything unrelated to the pandemic. So I would urge moderation on the courts and government, and leave it at that. Finally, shouldn’t the legislation have a sunset clause — say of one year on the British model — rather than staying in force indefinitely or until ministers judge the epidemic to be over? And there I think that it should.

    Plus it’s not like other European countries haven’t passed similar liberty-abridging laws in response to the crisis.

  • “‘Voter fraud’? California man finds dozens of ballots stacked outside home.” “The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.”
  • Austin’s holy homeless don’t need to practice the social distancing that mere citizens are required to observe:

  • UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is out of the ICU for coronavirus. Best wishes for a speedy recovery.
  • Rand Paul has also receivered from his bout with the coronavirus and volunteered to work at a local hospital.
  • Man steals guns from police firearms store…to sell them to cops. I don’t think you thought your cunning plan all the way through there, sport…
  • Feminist media personalities have no idea what it takes to run a business, details at 10:

  • Don’t trust Jussie Smollett in scrubs.
  • Dwight has a good anniversary roundup on the Newhall shooting.
  • Beast Mode.
  • Classic footage of the Gipper, showing what a thoughtful and learned man he was:

  • Cry. Me. A. Freaking. River. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Here’s a really good essay by Open Blogger over on Ace of Spades about Quintin Tarantino. I was unaware of the Terry Gilliam connection.
  • FINALLY! Former Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich is being inducted into the basketball hall of fame. A long-overdue honor for the man who guided the Houston Rockets to two NBA championships.
  • Awww:

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