The fact is the Labour backbenches, the Labour movement, and anything to the left of them all, thinks greater welfare spending is not just the solution to Britain’s woes, but a moral mission, and worse, completely sustainable and affordable
The Samson act is a dangerous one to follow. Bringing down a temple that is evidently failing Britain but burying yourself in the process is a moot stratagem at best.
Right now, who is going to bet that any of the current Cabinet will be in their current role by the end of this year. Whatever happens in the Labour civil war, the Opposition shouldn’t interfere, and simply adapt to what emerges at the end of it all.
Politics viewed from afar has become horribly loud. Blocking it all out, gives you an idea of how most people see politics. It pops in and out their consciousness because it is not their main priority, or topic of conversation. They don’t ignore it, but they aren’t awash with it.
For Conservative members Andy Burnham was out in front, ten points ahead of Keir Starmer, as to whom they expected to lead into an election, and that was before the rows of this week, but who’d they’d prefer to lead told a different story. Not one Starmer would enjoy.
Today is not the end, perhaps the beginning of the end, but the endgame was laid down years ago, and depressingly still has some way to run.
Saddle up, it’s going to be bumpy ride.
The Tories are still staring up a mountain with a long hard slog to go, and could still find another grinning and laughing at them from above when they get closer to the top, but the point is they aren’t going backwards. The path they choose next is the vital bit.
It never was going to be a glorious morning for the Conservatives, but the ‘sit rep’ right now is a beleaguered but unbowed acceptance of baked in expectations. Watching the Labour party take a beating less than two years after a landslide, as Dorothy said, folks, we are not in Kansas anymore.
Few people outside politics know who their councillor is and yet up and down the country there are people who stand to serve, to deliver, what are really important but dull day to day operations, and they do so for little reward. When choosing them we should at least think what it is they do.
After the cavalcade rolls on, life in English councils, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd will go on, with the minutiae of bins, roads, street lighting, looked after children, schools and care for the elderly. Who they get to run all that, very little connection to any of that.
Starmer’s comment about a stunt ‘just before elections’ supposes in one way that a ‘stunt’ is one thing, but it’s ‘simply not cricket’ to deploy it just ahead of going to the polls. As he famously once said to a Tory Prime Minister – ‘Come off it’
In two years of watching this political race I’ve seen an unpromising start and a long uphill climb coming ahead, but I’m still confident that not only are the Tories not ‘out of the race’ they are contending.
This whole saga goes to the heart of the decision making, quality control, fact checking, and judgement within this Labour administration. Mandelson for Starmer, the last man standing in the bloodletting since it all blew up, has gone from Prince of Darkness to Banquo’s Ghost.
If senior military men can suggest, without ridicule, that paying benefits to teenagers out of work might be better spent on paying them to train in the military, it is a mark of just where we are in the most volatile geopolitical circumstances most of us have known.