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How Will Starmer Unite the Unruly, Acrimonious Left?

by Guy de la Bédoyère
3 July 2024 11:18 AM

The other day, David McGrogan wrote an excellent piece for this site called ‘Why the Labour Party Will Win‘. He pointed out that we are subject to a cycle of hope and disappointment when it comes to government. After the farce of the Tory years it is inevitable that the voting public will turn to something else as a reaction, and that will in turn lead to its own disappointment.

All those who march proudly into the House of Commons in a few weeks, the new Government strutting along with self-righteous zeal, will soon hit the obstructive wall of reality.

On December 19th 1666, Samuel Pepys wrote in his celebrated diary after meeting an acquaintance at Westminster:

Sir R[ichard] Ford did make me understand how the House of Commons is a beast not to be understood. It being impossible to know beforehand the success almost of any small plain thing. There being so many to think and speak to any business and they of so uncertain minds and interests and passions.

I’m in the unusual position of being able to read his shorthand so I’ve just transcribed that passage from the original text, and that is what it says. It’s a brilliant observation which is as pertinent now as it was then.

The difference today of course is that politicians and government have far greater pretensions than they had in Samuel Pepys’s day. When the Plague hit in 1665 no-one in power had the slightest idea what to do except decamp to the countryside. When the Great Fire burned down most of London in 1666 it was down to Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York to lead the blowing up of houses to create fire breaks. But really all they could do was wait for the wind to change and let the conflagration burn itself out.

In our present age, politicians and government fall over themselves to pretend they are in control. They aren’t, but it doesn’t stop them coming up with all sorts of schemes as part of the masquerade. Various commentators have popped recently to point out how most of our present ills can be tied in some way to the measures adopted during Covid. It doesn’t matter what you think about Covid and whether it was real or not. What matters is what the Government did.

Net Zero is much the same. The illusion of state power over the natural world. Hubris beyond belief and doomed almost certainly to making things worse, only at vastly elevated expense and economic ruin.

The best column I read was Janet Daley’s piercing ‘The toxic legacy of lockdown is destroying our political system‘ because what she flagged up is the remarkable mystery of how lockdowns and the wreckage they caused have been virtually eliminated from the entire election campaign:

Locking people up in their homes and paying them not to work destroyed the possibility of creating new wealth and saw governments print mountains of money that debased the currency. Energy bills were subsidised by even more money from the Treasury.

But the governing party was not alone in its responsibility for creating this disaster. Labour was not only complicit in these plans, it was positively exuberant about them. Indeed, Sir Keir wanted earlier lockdown, more lockdown and longer lockdown.

It is truly extraordinary. The outgoing Government came to power considerably less than five years ago, but it seems like a century now, given the fallout that has followed.

But we face a probable new Labour Government by the end of this week. The shape of that victory is at the time of moment no more than the shadow of a dream. Within 48 hours the result will be a fact, set in stone for all time.

A shift to the Left is qualitatively different from a shift to the Right. I was cast back to the winter of 1977-8 and the firemen’s strike. I was at university (Durham). I was fascinated by my first introduction to the preposterous world of privileged students (we had grants back then, and our fees were paid by our individual local authorities) believing they had some sort of absurd affiliation and co-identity with the firemen’s cause. Sound familiar?

I made the mistake one morning at breakfast in my hall of residence of attempting to summarise the various ways of looking at the strike and whether it could be justified or was unreasonable. Another student, whom I had thought of as a friend, was enraged. His face became riven with anger and revulsion – do bear in mind I had not actually adopted a position myself – and he blurted out “you disgust me!” and threw his fist at me. He missed luckily, but he picked up his breakfast and stormed off. He never spoke to me again.

This is one of the features of the juvenile Left: a tendency to monocular vision, total intolerance of other views and also the belief in some sort of collective identity. The truth is the absolute opposite.

There is no such thing as the Left. What passes for the Left is a hopelessly inchoate ragbag of movements all dedicated in some way to idiosyncratic causes, only held together by not being in government. Each believes its particular trope and ideology is the path to utopia, but they are all fundamentally at each others’ throats. People’s Front of Judea and Judaean People’s Front and all that. Splitter!

I had a friend who was an unreconstructed Trotskyite. We got on well and I enjoyed our chats. I found him amusing but he took himself very seriously. He lived in a world which saw “Tory plots” at every turn, but he reserved his real ire for any faction of the Left not exactly on the same page as his brand of revolution. He’s dead now, but I treasure the memory of him expostulating:

You know what Guy, I hate Tony Blair so much that I hate him even more than I hate Margaret Thatcher. That’s how much I hate him.

No matter that Blair had pulled off the remarkable feat of getting Labour into power. This chum of mine rode through life on the crest of a wave powered by hate. He defined everything by how much he hated it. He defined historical figures by how much he hated them, and he could explain how much he hated any variant of Left ideology other than his own. Oh yes, he was an archaeologist, and he particularly hated the archaeologist and now GB News presenter Neil Oliver for being a “disgusting traitor”.

This is what Keir Starmer will probably face on Friday. The euphoria will dissipate in hours. The factions, all greedily counting down the hours until Friday morning, will emerge from the darkness and the unravelling will start.

Labour’s dream of exerting yet more control over our lives (though after the Conservatives it will be a tough call to outdo them) will, as it always does, decompose quickly in the face of the infighting and hate that will erupt. The fake unity will evaporate when confronted by events and the political hatred, of the type only Leftist movements can really pull off when battling it out for pre-eminence among themselves, will take over.

Every dog must have its day. In truth, the new Government will do some good and probably a great deal of bad. But whatever it does it will be a great deal less than it claimed it would do, and it will lead to disappointment and disillusion. If Labour wins, the tone will be that brand of spiralling internecine self-destruction it specialises in.

We are on the cusp of change except that, as always, nothing will change at all except the colours of the wind.

Tags: Conservative PartyGeneral Election 2024Keir StarmerLabourLeft-wingLockdown

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29 Comments
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FerdIII
FerdIII
2 years ago

To find the $cience, follow the money.
Plant food causes climate?
Well kill Gaia. She emits 95% of the 0.04% rounding error essential for oxygen production. Oh wait, they are doing that with their lithium mines, their rare metal mines, their bird choppers, their biomass fuels and chopping down forests….

125
0
David Tallboys
David Tallboys
2 years ago

The devil carbon dioxide has been used to scare the children.
But, once you see it ain’t what you’ve been told to believe you can relax – and do nothing but smile benignly at the deluded.
–
Climate disease is an odd affliction. Most sufferers of an illness are pleased to be told their life is no longer in danger, that the fever is subsiding, and they can stop taking the expensive medicine because, well it was only a placebo anyway.
But with climate disease the afflicted don’t believe the good news and want to continue their suffering – hence indicating it is more of a mental illness than a physical one – and they can’t stop wanting more people to suffer from it.
—-

I say; Reject Dogma; Question Authority

In fact, Just Stop Net Zero https://juststopnetzero.com/

141
-3
David Tallboys
David Tallboys
2 years ago

Is there a Woodward and Bernstein opportunity, or perhaps a Pulitzer prize in the offing, for the first team of journalists to dispel the WEF/UNIPCC belief system?

71
0
Smudger
Smudger
2 years ago
Reply to  David Tallboys

Unlikely, the whole media establishment is corrupt to the core.

25
0
Marcus Aurelius knew
Marcus Aurelius knew
2 years ago

Welcome to the Dark Side, Neil 😉

47
0
psychedelia smith
psychedelia smith
2 years ago

The idea that we are some kind of CO2 induced climate crisis is such demonstrably bollocks now that it can only mean Reuters have been bought by the Gates/Getty/Soros/WEF cartel to add to their roster of many other previously ‘independent’ publications. They’re having to work hard though, word is fast getting out that this is the biggest mass deception and financial scam in human history.

Send this to anyone who still uses the words ‘climate emergency’ and ‘science’ in the same sentence.

WHO WOULD YOU TRUST? smaller.jpg
58
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huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
2 years ago

“Reuters is committed to providing the most accurate and insightful coverage of the climate crisis, as it threatens the health, safety and economic well-being of people world-wide. Our hope is that our careful, factual reporting will help nations, businesses and individuals respond to the challenge rapidly and intelligently.”

This whole statement is self-contradictory. It starts with the premise that the “climate crisis” is a given. The possibility that this “fact’ deserves to be questioned is ignored, therfore “careful, factual reporting” is inherently impossible. The author is clearly not well versed in either logic or the use of English.

Without labouring the point my one word critique would be – bollox.

Last edited 2 years ago by huxleypiggles
50
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huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
2 years ago

There is one huge flaw in Mr Winton’s argument and that is that he appears to accept that the Wannabe Powers That Be believe in global warming, the next ice age or climate change or whatever is dish of the day, except…they don’t.

Climate change is the mechanism upon which all the desired control measures can be hung. Carbon dioxide, widened out now to include anything containing carbon, and essential for all life, is easily measured and because we are expected to believe that it is pushing climate change we have to be seen to control it.

Aah, that will be your carbon credits then. Every single action will soon have a carbon value. It is not inconceivable that even a visit to the bathroom will soon have a carbon value.

Climate change = measurable carbon = complete population control.

The myth of climate change is being used to introduce the most dystopian society ever and one which will ultimately destroy humanity.

66
-2
Lockdown Sceptic
Lockdown Sceptic
2 years ago

Climate change hoax crushes freedom

*****

Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane 

Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field 
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE

24
-1
MichaelM
MichaelM
2 years ago

“Everybody agreed that the climate had warmed over the last 10,000 years as the ice age retreated, but most weren’t really sure why.”

This video clip, showing a panel of climate scientists, suggests that during the last 10,000 years the Earth has been warmer than now 90% of the time – and the same applies over the 4.6 billion years of the Earth’s existence.

https://youtu.be/mqejXs7XgsU

23
0
sskinner
sskinner
2 years ago
Reply to  MichaelM

You beat me to it. Great video. I’m guessing you are aware of Tony Heller and teh website wattsupwiththat?

12
0
MnemonicMike
MnemonicMike
2 years ago

I’ve never ever considered Reuters to be a non-partisan news source, so that bit sort of gobsmacked me.

17
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sskinner
sskinner
2 years ago

All good except for this:
“Every scientist knows the world’s climate has been gradually and occasionally irregularly warming since the last Ice Age over about 10,000 years.”
The Holocene Climate Optimum was the warmest period in the last 10,000 years. During this time the Sahara was green and wet due to the vast amount of moisture brought to this region because of the extra heat. Also, Neolithic settlements were a lot further north as can be seen all across northern Scotland and it’s Islands. They were all abandoned when temperatures dropped. There has since been the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm period and each was a step down on the previous. We are in the Modern Warm Period where temperatures have come up following the end of the Little Ice Age. The current warm period is coolest of all of them although and the warmest period in the last 200 years were the 1930s.
Looking at the pattern of global temperature covering the last 4 glacial cycles there is nothing to indicate that the pattern has stopped. The last inter-glacial ended while CO2 remained elevated indicating CO2 was unable to prevent temperatures from falling.
CO2 is measured in parts per million. To see exactly how much it has increased create a graph where the y axis is scaled to 1,000,000 and then see how ‘scary’ the increase in CO2 is.

28
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varmint
varmint
2 years ago

I think the population of the world reached 8 billion a couple of weeks ago. They all need energy. Where is to come from? It obviously cannot come from coal oil and gas, at least not for very long, as this is a finite resource. This is what “climate change” is really all about. ——–Control of the world’s wealth and resources. It has been decided at UN level that the wealthy west has used up more than it’s fair share of the coal oil and gas in the ground to become prosperous and must stop doing that. To get away with that you need a very good or at least a plausible excuse for your citizens and that excuse is “climate change”. The west can afford to dabble in niche technologies like wind and sun and fob it’s people of with expensive unreliable energy, because it is all for the greater good of “saving the planet”. So over the last 50 years up has grown the Climate Industrial Complex. All apparently based on “science”. But as someone once pointed out ” One cannot rigorously rule out global warming due to an increase in greenhouse gasses. It nonetheless seems peculiar to base policy on something for which there is no evidence”. —Atmospheric Physicist Richard Lindzen.———- So if there is no evidence for something how is a problem? How is it a crisis? That is where the politics comes in. The politics of “Sustainable Development”. All environmental scares whether global cooling, global warming, storms, floods, droughts, and any extreme weather you can think of require the same response. Bigger government, more central planning, more and more regulations, more taxes, and less freedom. CO2 that is allegedly responsible for all the rising seas, melting ice and a climate apocalypse is indeed classed as a greenhouse gas. But it is also something else. It is the one gas that can be tied to Industrial capitalism. All human activity involves the release of some CO2 so what better way to control all human activity than by regulating it? CO2 is the socialist bureaucrats dream gas. Without global warming as the excuse, the whole Sustainable Development politics of controlling all human activity collapses. Which is why we see a bought and paid for mainstream media make such an issue of presenting the climate emergency as “fact” and ridiculing anyone daring to question any aspect of it. They are condemned as “deniers”, which surely has to be one of the most infantile terms imaginable if what is being discussed is supposed to be “science”. In science you question everything, and the fact that no dissent from orthodoxy can be allowed only reveals one thing. ——It is and never was about science in the first place. It is indeed a manufactured crisis for political purposes. It is “Official Science” not “science”, where truth is to be decided by a show of hands from government funded data adjusters.

Last edited 2 years ago by varmint
27
0
Corky Ringspot
Corky Ringspot
2 years ago

All very believable ammunition, but for a journalist at Reuters not very well written.

2
-8
Rowland P
Rowland P
2 years ago

There is an outfit called “Covering Climate Now” which provides “guidance” to the media and all types of business on how to push the climate change narrative. So we now get it shoved down our throat not only in News items but also in advertisements. This is blatant propagandising with that great word they all love – disinformation!

12
0
RTSC
RTSC
2 years ago

I too worked at Reuters many years ago when it was still based in Fleet Street.

Its decline from a source of trusted, unbiased news, to a partisan arm of the Climate Change Propagandists is sad to witness.

14
0
VAX FREE IanC
VAX FREE IanC
2 years ago

Again I feel the urge to post this image, once used in junior / infant school science classes.. ‘Visuals’ can also be useful to educate the intellectually challenged and miopic minded, helping to demonstrate the effects of sunlight, water,and Co2 with plants here on planet earth.. Is this truly beyond the understanding of modern journalists and MSM? (rhetorical)
Problem is, many of the afforementioned appear to be living on a completely different planet. Away with the faeries so to speak.

elementary carbon science.jpg
8
0
sskinner
sskinner
2 years ago
Reply to  VAX FREE IanC

Nice. A picture paints a thousand carbon credits.

0
0
Covid-1984
Covid-1984
2 years ago

Why even put the phrase “Rising Temperatures” in the heading?. Giving succour to the harbingers of doom. Who caused the ice age 10000 years ago….Fred Flintstone?

10
0
Smudger
Smudger
2 years ago

“Journalists need to stand up and be counted. The trouble is that requires bravery and energy, and an urge to question conventional wisdom”.
Did the author practice what he preaches whilst in secure employment with Reuters?
The best protection against MSM propaganda is for more people to never buy their products and support any movements that call to break up these modern day robber barons.

5
0
Kornea112
Kornea112
2 years ago

The simple fact that the climate catastrophes are organized and want to shut down any opposing debate should be enough to convince any questioning mind that something is not right with their message.

8
0
GMO
GMO
2 years ago

Some are getting rich and powerful in the the ‘humanity caused climate change’ industry.

They won’t give up their wealth and power without a fight.

Be prepared for it.

5
0
GMO
GMO
2 years ago

To convince people that humanity is a significant factor in the earth’s changing climate is for the ‘humanity caused climate change’ advocates to follow the scientific method.

Make a hypothesis and then proof it.

They should make a detailed accurate prediction of the erath’s climate for each small section of the earth in the near future (2025), not some very distant date 50 years in the future.

If they actually know how the earth’s atmosphere work, and know how and why the earth’s climate is changing, then it should not be difficult.

Then we can see if their hypothesis is correct or not.

4
0

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