There’s a future world in which I fancy myself an old-style crime boss. I infiltrate the organisation, climb to stand at the leader’s right-hand side and when the moment comes ruthlessly snatch power.
I didn’t used to have such ambitions but then what is Sir Keir Starmer if not an inspiration to us all? Forget your party allegiance. If you want to see victory, whole and unblemished, then model yourself on Keir Starmer versus the Labour Left. It’s hard not be impressed, although it would be more gripping as a drama if the bodies along the way hadn’t been so carefully hidden from public view.
Impressed as I am with Starmer, I therefore felt quite hopeful for the country on July 5th. The Government could be brave, it could afford to risk its popularity in the service of good governance, it could fulfil its technocratic promise.
Two months in, I’m not so sure. In concrete term there isn’t much to go on. A reasonable place to start might be the flagship policy of imposing VAT on private schools fees. Is this going to lead to an increase in the number of people receiving a good education over the course of this parliament? Or will it merely cause financial pain to families at the bottom of the top decile of income earners? What is the aim? It can’t all be envy, electoral signalling and class warfare, can it?
Or maybe it can. This policy is aimed at extracting money from parents who already pay twice for their children’s education, once through their taxes and again in fees to private schools. Shouldn’t the willingness of some families to pay twice for education be enough for a party that wants to lift up the less well-off rather than punish the successful. Today’s Labour Party, however, reveals itself in its actions.
My worry is this tax raid won’t only punish the well-off. When the policy is enacted there will follow a migration of pupils from the private to the state sector. Unless your parents are both train drivers, a 20% increase in fees will be unaffordable. Where will these pupils go? At the good comprehensive school where I work, the only reason we’re not entirely serving the local middle classes is because our admissions policy sets aside a certain number of places for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Before this policy was put in place, the school was following the typical trajectory of successful schools with an inverse relationship between improving results and the number of low-income pupils getting in. Most successful comprehensive schools do not set aside any places for disadvantaged pupils. That will mean the refugees from the private sector will inevitably take places from less privileged children at the best comprehensives. The only way to remedy this would be to create additional places at outstanding state schools, but the Government has no intention of doing that.
Two months in, then, are the tea leaves of early decisions enough to place Starmer in the firmament of the most successful Labour leaders? Only four have won overall majorities since 1906: Attlee, Wilson, Blair and Starmer. But will he make good on this promise? Did Starmer win a huge majority so he can impose VAT on private school fees, take away the winter fuel allowance and pretend that the national electricity grid will soon be carbon neutral? Did Starmer say very little in the election campaign because he actually has very little to say?
After his leadership campaign in 2019, I had Starmer down as a dissembler par excellence and now he has won power I’ve seen nothing to change my mind. He seems to offer more brave words than he does brave actions. He has ruthlessly dealt with his enemies in his party, but to what end? He comes across as a ruthless dissembler with nothing substantial at his political core. At the back of my mind lingers one final question: is Keir Starmer just Boris Johnson but with more hair gel and less testosterone?
The author is a teacher at a London comprehensive.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to “the Tories’ tax raid” rather than Labour’s in the headline.
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Good news. 0% should believe that man made plant food does anything or causes anything. It doesn’t. But at least the sheeple are moving ever so cautiously in the right direction. Given the literally trillions of £ / $ in endless propaganda and funding
over 40nay 140 years, this is indeed surprising. See Rona Fascism for a template and more information.The propaganda didn’t work for BREXIT either. Sometimes my faith in human nature is restored (a bit).
In the Brexit referendum, both sides used propaganda, but the Leave side’s propaganda was much more effective.
The fundamental reason Leave won was that there were three broad mutually exclusive outcomes for the country – Remain, Hard Brexit and Soft Brexit – but only 2 options on the ballot paper. And the Leave side took full advantage of this major faux pas by Cameron … and the rest is history…
I’m sorry but that is mostly nonsense.
I doubt if many people today could give you a coherent definition of hard versus soft Brexit.
The majority of people realised, to at least some degree, that the EC was dominated by venal, corrupt, bureaucratic incompetents who they could never, even theoretically, replace. And that the UK was being milked financially whilst the EC wouldn’t even give Cameron the fig leaf of a Neville Chamberlain style ‘piece of paper’ when he asked for some very modest reforms.
It was even then felt very widely that the pace of immigration was much to great and that “rubbing their faces in diversity” was in fact affecting ordinary working class people much more than even the “leafy suburb” Tories.
Cameron, to give him his due, put a lot of effort (and a Hell of a Lot of our money) into his ‘Project Fear’. But he had seriously underestimated the level of resentment about the EU and the fact that the European Elections were an even more blatant charade than domestic elections.
Whether people today could give a coherent definition of hard versus soft is somewhat irrelevant given we are now 7 years later. But, at the time, there was much discussion about a Canada-style free trade deal and World Trade Organisation rules (hard Brexit) and the Norway option (soft Brexit).
In the Referendum the result was 52:48 (Leave: Remain). Let’s assume the Leave vote split roughly 50:50 between Hard and Soft. Given we now have a Hard Brexit, for your argument to prevail logically, you are effectively saying that virtually all those voting Leave and wanting a Soft Brexit would rather have a Hard Brexit than Remain. Which is clearly nonsense, I’m sure you will agree.
There was never a hard or soft Brexit. You either leave an organisation or you don’t.
We voted to leave – reaching a “new deal” with the EU was not on the ballot paper.
We haven’t left: they simply created the terms of the “outer tier” which will, in due course, be applied to the likes of Turkey, Ukraine and (probably) the north African states bordering the Med.
Norway is in the Single Market but not in the European Community, so it clearly is possible.
The bastards don’t care what normal people think.
True, but normal people care what normal people think, and there is only so far that we can all be pushed. Some can be pushed much, much further than others, of course, but in the end, normal people are quite capable of digging in their heels and saying no.
9 out of 10 to the Uni that came up with a organisation name with an acronym that sounds appropriate.
I believed in the official climate change narrative up until 2020, as I didn’t know much about it and believed that virtually all the scientists in the world (as we are being led to believe) would hardly be wrong, up until I saw how “debate cancellation, modelling, invented attributions and data manipulation” were being used on a worldwide scale to push lies about Covid and Covid vaccines.
I wonder if many other recent climate change sceptics have had their eyes opened about climate change in a similar way.
Same here, exactly describes my scepticism history. Now my default position is to not believe any official pronouncements in either the public health or environmental areas without solid evidence.
Really pleased that you’ve seen the light.
The whole things been a scam from start to finish. When ‘Global Warming’ turned into climate change, and then to climate emergency, I just knew they were adjusting the narrative to suit there purposes.
The whole wretched nonsense is just another multi-faceted control mechanism, developed by the likes of Maurice Strong and the Club of Rome way back. In plain English.. the eugenics driven billionaire club. Check out their book in PDF format.. ‘The First Global Revolution’.. they tell you in that exactly what their aims were/are, and how they’re going to achieve them.
Research Maurice Strong and the 1992 Earth Summit.. IPCC.. the truth is out there, but being removed, smothered and mollified as I type this..
I believed that CO₂ might be a factor until I attended a teacher training course when anybody (students, staff) who was sceptical about this (and some other political agendas at the time, notably Slave Trade Reparations) found themselves separated from their
gonadsfunding. I sought in vain for “The Science” (especially “The Climate Model”) so that I could assess it for myself. Then I too got cancelled, but escaped, biologically intact at least. (This was about a year before Climategate.) Blow me down, the same thing happened two decades later to anybody who questioned the Covid Narrative, and again regarding the Trans Narrative. It’s not that Critical Thinking is dead in the UK, its more that Critical Thinkers are culturally excised in a sort of anti-science, anti-technology, anti-maths Cultural Revolution, which is forcing Real Scientists© to become DeliverEat drivers delivering insect pizzas to The Great Gullible coming out of schools.With me it was the reverse – after a few years wondering and reading I came to the conclusion that we are in a Propaganda State regarding sexuality and gender, race, and not least climate change. I wrote an e-book on it in 2019.
When COVID arrived it was immediately clear to me that the whole thing had shifted up several gears, and that the threat to the culture was immediate, not future.
Climate Sceptics Rise
ignore climate lies
***************************
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
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“Climate catastrophe, spouted on a TV near you since 1970”
(And we are still here!)
“Climate scepticism” — what a silly phrase. No-one is sceptical of the fact that there is such a thing as climate. What we’re sceptical of is man-made global warming. Stop conceding to their slanders by adopting their loaded language.
The zeal of the liars with the microphones can actually damage their cause in some cases. I know of one person who woke up to the C19 fraud while actually watching the TV alarmism. They were trying too hard. But don’t tell them that.
I’m in my early ’60s. I live in southern England and have done all my life (although I’ve moved in stages from east to west).
The climate now is no different now to when I was a girl. We get the occasional very hot summer and occasional very cold/snowy winter. We sometimes get prolonged dry spells and sometimes prolonged periods of rain. Flooding is more common but that is due to environmental action/inaction (building on flood plains; failing to keep waterways clear; failure to build flood relief schemes) than anything else.
I believe the evidence of my own eyes; there has been no discernible climate change over the past 60 years. I’m immune to the propaganda pumped out at us by the Government and the likes of the BBC. I don’t believe a word they say …. about anything.
Encouraging article Chris – thank you.
I regularly rebuff alarmists on twtr, mainly JSO, XR, the UN’s new bit of fluff, and many nutty professors, and am seeing both fewer comebacks from them and a significant increase in R/Ts. I hope the trend increases.
This is about science not about what people believe.