What price a promise?

Keir Starmer has once again relaunched his leadership, this time by asking dissatisfied voters to judge him by his shiny new political listicle of "six milestones"

Keir Starmer has once again relaunched his leadership, this time with a glossy new "six milestones" and "a plan for change" to woo dissatisfied voters.

Obviously we're just supposed to forget all about the existence of the "ten pledges" Keir Starmer made during the Labour leadership election, which were all torn up and binned (to rapturous applause from the liberal-capitalist media commentariat who couldn't disguise their glee at the way he lied through his teeth to con the Labour Party membership into voting him in).

These "ten pledges" have now been erased from Starmer’s website, with just a 404 error notice appearing to those who might want to find them.

And then there were Starmer's "5 missions" from the general election campaign.

Are we supposed to just forget that they existed too, and fail to notice that one of his "missions" (100% Zero Carbon by 2030) is contradicted by one of his shiny new "milestones" (95% Zero Carbon by 2030)?

Apparently Starmer’s new "six milestones" and "plan for change" are built upon his "three foundations", but it’s clear that people aren’t buying it, with almost nobody in Britain able to recall the details of all of his 10 pledges, 6 milestones, 5 missions, and 3 foundations, and a majority now believing that Starmer’s Labour merely constitutes "more of the same".

And then there were Starmer’s "six tests" for Brexit from his time as Corbyn’s Brexit secretary, none of which were remotely applied when Starmer whipped Labour MPs into waving through Boris Johnson’s lazily plagiarised and economically ruinous hard Brexit shambles.

Given Starmer’s track record of abandoning his neat little lists, all that his latest relaunch serves to achieve is to get people wondering how many more times he’s going to resort to picking a number between one and ten and combining it with a new synonym for "promise" or "objective", and then expecting everyone to simply forget all about the prior set of promises, pledges, commitments, missions, priorities, or whatever.

A charitable interpretation is that Stamer and his inner circle are merely obsessed with drawing up pointless political listicles, but the more jaded among us might well see it as akin to some horrifying dystopia, in which the "five year plan" repeatedly morphs into a new number with a different synonym for "plan", while references to the old number and plan get the Room 101 memoryhole treatment.

It’s interesting to see how many establishment media hacks are willing to go along with it all by copy-pasting the Labour press release into cookie cutter articles about his Starmer’s "milestones", and failing to provide the obvious context of Starmer’s demonstrable litany of broken "promises", unapplied "tests", scrapped "policies", and abandoned "pledges".

This context should raise a number of obvious questions such as how long will it be before Starmer’s latest "milestones" are scrubbed from the Internet like his "ten pledges" in a desperate attempt to pretend they never existed? How much damage Starmer’s continually shifting commitments are doing to the public’s already eroded faith in politics? And whether increased public distrust and despair are actually deliberate and desired outcomes.

The media hacks who have neglected to provide the obvious context and evaded asking such apparent questions in their coverage of Starmer’s latest relaunch are guilty of adding to the dystopian vibe.

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