Keir Starmer is the new David Cameron

After binning all of his progressive leadership election pledges, Keir Starmer's political agenda is turning out to be almost indistinguishable from David Cameron's

Keir Starmer is an egregious liar. He barefaced lied to the Labour Party membership that he was a democratic socialist, with a democratic socialist agenda. As soon as he won the leadership election he began ripping up his 10 pledges, and revealing his true agenda as the exact same kind of technocratic, economically illiterate, liberal capitalist rubbish that got this country into such a mess in the first place.

Austerity Ruination

David Cameron came to power in 2010 saying that the economic incompetence of the last government meant that the country couldn’t afford to invest in infrastructure, couldn’t afford quality public services, couldn’t afford real-terms pay raises for workers, couldn’t afford a functional social safety net …

Keir Starmer’s pitch is identical. 'Liz Truss broke the economy so now we can’t afford anything nice'.

David Cameron proved how economically illiterate it is to cut investment and crush incomes in the wake of economic turmoil, yet somehow Starmer thinks it’s sensible to repeat the failed Tory austerity experiment all over again.

Below inflation pay offers

One of the key elements of Tory austerity ruination was erosion of workers’ wages through repeated below-inflation pay settlements, which amount to real-terms pay cuts. This led to the longest sustained collapse in UK workers’ wages in centuries, over a decade of economic stagnation, and an alarming collapse in Britain’s relative productivity.

Keir Starmer is openly hostile to trade union demands for inflation-matched pay settlements, and has banned his shadow cabinet from supporting strike action.

Starmer’s is outright hostile towards the very people the Labour Party was founded to represent, and seemingly his justification for this hostility is that inflation-matched wage settlements for workers cause inflation, which is clearly absolute bobbins when UK workers wages still haven’t recovered to pre-2008 levels in real terms, but the Bank of England has created almost a £trillion in new cash since then, and corporate profits have soared to utterly obscene levels.

Courting £billionaire donors

One of the most depraved things about Cameron’s Tory party was the way they sucked up to £billionaire donors, wining and dining them at lavish events, allowing them to buy access to government ministers, and even allowing them to write government policy for them (which is where Cameron’s obscene and unlawful unfair dismissal tribunal fees came from).

After steering the Labour Party to the brink of bankruptcy (driving away hundreds of thousands of paying members, picking fights with trade unions, paying out compensation to internal party wreckers when they were advised that Labour would win if the case went to court …) Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have adopted Cameron’s fundraising tactics, allowing wealthy donors to buy access to the party leadership for just £5,000 (the Rose Circle), and they’ve even been schmoozing the same mega-rich donors who bankrolled Cameron’s political operation!

Capitalist media have repeatedly tried to portray Labour’s shift from a people-funded party under the previous leadership to a plaything of the rich as if it’s some kind of triumph for Starmer, but for ordinary people it’s clearly a disaster.

Trickle-down economic rubbish

The hard-right theory that the whole of society benefits when the mega-rich are allowed to multiply their wealth has been disproven so many times it’s absurd, yet Cameron relied on this absurd myth to justify endless tax cuts and handouts for corporations and the mega-rich (while slashing the wages, social security support, and public services of everyone else).

Since 2010 billionaires multiplied their wealth, while the rest of us got poorer.

Instead of pledging to claw back some of these obscene Tory handouts, Starmer has demonstrated his fealty to the mega-rich by ripping up his pledge to increase the top rate of income tax, and by promising not to raise corporation tax, or to equalise low taxes on dividends with high taxes on work.

Instead he’s promoting a vapid "growth agenda" with promises that everyone will get richer if we keep things pretty much the same, but just manage them a bit better.

He’s telling us the wealth will eventually trickle down if we just keep on allowing the ultra-wealthy to keep funnelling it upwards.

Impoverishing "superfluous kids"

It was at the back end of David Cameron’s stint as Prime Minister that the policy of impoverishing children with more than two siblings came up.

Punishing kids for the choices of their parents is morally abominable and economically illiterate too, given that the opportunity-deprived kids of today will become the workers of the future.

Keir Starmer’s decided to keep this sickening Tory policy in order to pander to the kind of people who still haven’t had enough of Cameron’s brutal and ruinous austerity agenda.

Academy school profiteering

David Cameron kicked off the process of removing thousands of schools from local authority control, to hand them over to an unaccountable bunch of academy spivs who have been using school education budgets as their own personal cash machines for years, flogging off playing fields, paying themselves bloated executive salaries, and siphoning off even more cash through untendered “supply contracts”.

Anyone who wanted to fix the education system would make it an absolute priority to rein in the academy profiteers, or kick them out of the system altogether.

Starmer’s made it clear that he’s absolutely fine with the mass privatisation of England’s schools, and that he’s got no intention of interfering with the academy spivs and their profiteering at our childrens’ expense.

More NHS privatisation

David Cameron famously promised “no more top down reorganisations of the NHS” before launching the biggest top-down NHS reorganisation in history, aimed at smashing it into pieces and handing control of the most profitable bits to private health profiteers.

Starmer hasn’t just ripped up his pledge to get the private health profiteers out of the NHS, he’s appointed Wes Streeting as his shadow health minister, and had him going around bragging that he’s going to bring in even more NHS privatisation. Welcome news to the private heath profiteers who donate to Streeting and the Labour-right ghouls Starmer has surrounded himself with, but disastrous news for the rest of us.

Starmer isn’t just intent on allowing NHS privatisation to continue, he’s also made it clear he has no intention of booting Britain’s debilitating infestation of profiteers out of other vital national infrastructure and services too, like water, energy, and the Royal Mail.

Rip-off university fees

Tony Blair was the one who initially introduced tuition fees in order to lumber students from poor and ordinary backgrounds with debt, but Cameron was the one who tripled them to a whopping £9,000 per year, and introduced rip-off repayment terms of inflation plus 3%.

The result is that over 80% of graduates will never pay off their university debts, despite paying a whopping 9% of what should be their disposable income to service the debts for their entire working lifetimes!

Keir Starmer has ripped up his pledge to abolish these obscene fees, arguing that we “can’t afford” not to lumber kids who aspire to better things with entire working lifetimes of unpayable debt.

Conclusion

It’s important to remember that Cameron’s politics weren’t even popular at the time.

The Tories only got their hands on power in 2010 because the Lib-Dems agreed to rip up all of their manifesto commitments and help impose austerity ruination on the country in return for five years of six figure salaries and ministerial cars.

Then the Tories only kept power in 2015 because Ed Balls talked Ed Miliband into pathetically imitating unpopular Tory austerity ruination rather than vehemently opposing it.

But Keir Starmer clearly believes that imitating David Cameron’s political agenda is his route to electoral success (despite this same strategy failing so spectacularly for Ed Miliband).

Do the British public really want more of the same austerity ruination, privatisation, profiteering, and poverty-spreading politics that’s blighted the last 13 years?

Starmer and the right-wing ghouls he’s surrounded himself with clearly think they do.