It's a stitch up

The Tories need to go, but Keir Starmer's "more of the same" agenda is profoundly uninspiring.

After 14 ruinous years Britain desperately needs a change of direction, but the looming General Election is already stitched up in favour of "more of the same".

Keir Starmer is an establishment insider who has spent the last four years acting as the Tory minister for controlled opposition by repeatedly abstaining on all kinds of sickening Tory legislation, and sabotaging efforts to hold the government to account.

He’s driven Labour so far into Tory hard-right territory that their general election pitch is that they’re going to keep pretty much everything the same.

Starmer’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves is fixated on the same bankrupt penny-pinching ideology as the Tories, and is fiercely resistant to reversing austerity cuts or giving the British economy the investment boost it desperately needs after 14 disastrous years of infrastructure under-investment and public service under-funding.

Starmer’s shadow health minister Wes Streeting keeps bragging about how he’s going to divert even more of the overstretched NHS budget into the pockets of private health profiteers (many of whom have made large political donations to Starmer, Streeting, and other figures on the Starmerite Labour right).

Starmer has gleefully ripped up his leadership election pledge to take vital infrastructure and services out of the hands of greedy privatisation profiteers, and run them as not-for-profit public services.

Even after the privatised water companies have ripped £70 billion in profits while pumping our rivers and coastal waters full of raw sewage, Starmer is on their side.

Even after the privatised energy companies exacerbated the inflation crisis by extracting vast unearned profits through obscene energy bills, Starmer is on their side.

Starmer’s so committed to his "more of the same" agenda, he’s not even going to do anything to rein in the greed of the profiteering academy spivs that have infested thousands of schools all over England since the Tories started mass privatising schools in 2010.

Even Starmer’s plan to renationalise the rail network is a deceptive sham that allows private profiteers to keep siphoning £billions out of the system by retaining ownership of the trains.

Starmer has transformed himself from frontman for the disastrous demands for a "sore loser" referendum that annihilated Labour’s chances of winning the 2019 general election, to an avid Brexiteer who refuses to countenance changes to Boris Johnson’s lazy, shambolic, and economically ruinous Brexit bodge.

Starmer has demonstrated that he’s way to the right of Tony Blair by refusing to even scrap the obscene Tory policy of condemning millions of British kids to poverty through the two-child cap on social security. Starmer wants to bake child poverty into the system because, just like the Tories, he believes that children born into low-income families don’t deserve things like good nutrition, warm homes, resources, or extra educational opportunities.

Starmer’s commitment to inequality is further bolstered by his policy of refusing to increase taxes on profiteering corporations and the mega-rich, and his insistence that kids from poor and ordinary backgrounds lumber themselves with literally unpayable student debts for the "crime" of seeking a university education (which he received for free).

Starmer is such an establishment stooge that he refuses to even stand up against Britain’s complicity in Israeli genocide. Not only did he sabotage the SNP motion calling out Israeli collective punishment of civilians, he also stated in an interview with LBC that he believed that Israel has the right to defy international law by cutting off water, energy, and food supplies to civilians.

The least Starmer could have done is object to the Tory government’s continued supply of weapons for Israel to commit their war crimes with, but his refusal to even do this illustrates that he’s likely to be just as much as a foreign policy extremist as any Tory Prime Minister.

Starmer is vehemently opposed to debate and dissenting opinion in the Labour ranks, to such an extent that he’s repeatedly resorted to Stalinist diktats, internal election rigging, and ideological purges to marginalise and expel anyone who is unwilling to be a passive nodding dog. So it’s hopelessly naive to imagine that Labour MPs will somehow manage to steer Starmer away from the "more of the same" pro-privatisation, austerity and under-investment, red-Tory course that he’s enacting.

This absolute stitch up is obviously great news for capitalist exploiters, greedy privatisation profiteers, city speculators, media hacks on six figure salaries, and the mega-rich who have literally multiplied their wealth over the last 14 years while the rest of us suffered the dire consequences of austerity, under-investment, and public service cutbacks.

They’re obviously delighted that the British public are being dealt a grotesquely unappealing non-choice between two versions of the same agenda of austerity, inequality, under-investment, privatisation profiteering, and genocide complicity.

Whether the red team wins, or the blue team achieve a seemingly impossible turnaround to steal it, the ultra rich are completely comfortable in the knowledge that the next government is intent on serving their interests above the interests of the rest of us, no matter if that results in continued economic decline for the country as a whole.

It’s an absolute stitch up, and that’s exactly the way they want it.

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