No, this isn't Starmer's "Falklands moment"

The desperation amongst Labour MPs is so palpable that they're now fantasising about Keir Starmer restoring his popularity through a Thatcher-style "Falklands moment"

Multiple Labour Party insiders have been telling their chums in the media that Keir Starmer’s stance on Ukraine could be his "Falklands moment".

One of them told Newsnight editor Nicholas Watt that "this could be the making of Keir. Good Prime Ministers are made by great responses to huge events. Think of Thatcher and the Falklands. She was unpopular going into that and then everything changed", while another said "I am seeing strong parallels with the Falklands".

The desperation in these statements is palpable.

The evidence that Keir Starmer is a deeply unpopular dud of a Prime Minister is pretty much impossible to ignore at this point, so they’re desperately scrabbling around for some historical precedent for a rapid recovery in fortunes.

It’s somewhat telling that the best they can come up with is Thatcher, the woman who steered the United Kingdom into decline by wasting away the one-off North Sea oil and gas bonanza on handouts for the rich; her obsessions with privatisation mania, financial sector deregulation, deindustrialisation, and under-investment; and her disastrous housing policies that eventually resulted in the development of a vast economically debilitating class of unproductive property-hoarders.

It should be obvious that the Falklands situation is vastly different to Starmer’s strategy of further impoverishing the most needy people in Britain and overseas, in order to fund a ridiculous splurge of military spending.

Thatcher sent the taskforce to restore British rule in the Falklands, which was a mission with an unmistakable objective. Starmer has already been criticised by the IFS for lying about his military spending splurge, and the actual objective is far from clear.

Are the kind of people who are delighted at the idea of inflicting even more poverty and destitution on poor and ordinary Brits to fund a military spending splurge really the type to ever vote Labour at all?

And who is really celebrating the fact that Trump’s defence secretary Pete Hegseth has condescendingly congratulated Britain for increasing our military spending, while Trump simultaneously proposes slashing US military spending?

Is this really the kind of "victory" that’s going to reverse Starmer’s popularity nosedive and return him to power on a wave of nationalist sentiment?

Perhaps these MPs are getting ahead of themselves and imagining Starmer raising a British taskforce to fight in Ukraine? But how realistic is it to imagine the British public rising up in a frenzy of jingoism as plucky little Britain secures a Falklands-style total victory over Vlad Putin’s Russian army?

If there aren’t enough sane people in parliament to prevent Starmer from trying to save his own skin by sacrificing British personnel in a foreign war, the absolute best case scenario would be that Britain bogs itself down in an economy-sapping war of attrition. Worse, and probably more likely scenarios from such a folly would be turning Britain itself into a target for Russian attacks, or the triggering of WWIII.

Putin’s Russia is so obviously not the same as the faltering Argentine military junta in the early 80s, and eastern Ukraine is not the same as some of the most isolated and sparsely populated islands in the world.

Starmer has already defended the idea of further impoverishing the poorest people in Britain to fund his militaristic willy-waving, and this is the real issue at hand.

Ordinary British people have already suffered the longest sustained collapse in living standards on record since 2008, Starmer’s already killed confidence in his new government with his insane "things will get worse" doom-mongering, and by letting Rachel Reeves continue Tory austerity ruination, mug pensioners, and fulminate about slashing Britain’s already-degraded social security system, and now he’s planning to further erode living standards to prioritise militaristic posturing.

It’s actually immaterial to Starmer’s chances whether his government bogs Britain down in an unwinnable war, or just limits itself to splurging tens of billions to boost the balance sheets of private arms manufacturers.

If ordinary people’s living standards continue to deteriorate, Starmer is obviously going to pay the price at the next election.

These MPs daydreaming about Starmer’s "Falklands moment" are profoundly unserious people.

If they had any sense at all they’d be leaning on Starmer as hard as they could to use Labour’s mega-majority to deliver policies that actually improve people’s living standards.

But that would necessitate the formulation of radical policies to address the issues that are dragging Britain down (privatisation profiteering, property-hoarding, unaffordable housing, low wages, underfunded public services, crumbling infrastructure, the demographic ageing crisis, self-imposed Brexit sanctions …) and a lot of hard work. And even then it still wouldn’t guarantee success given Britain’s absurd electoral system and the utter right-wing domination of conventional media and social media platforms.

Idly fantasising about Starmer restoring his popularity through some magical "Falklands moment" is much easier than actually doing anything useful, but it’s also completely deluded, and impossibly unlikely.