Reasons to be sceptical of Starmer's latest promises

Keir Starmer is promising that Labour would decentralise power away from Westminster, but his track record of power hoarding invites scepticism.

Keir Starmer is promising that Labour would "shift power from Westminster to local communities across the country" but his track record as Labour leader so far suggests the absolute opposite is more likely.

Local candidates

During Starmer’s deceitful Labour leadership election campaign he said that "selections for Labour candidates need to be more democratic", centralised imposition of candidates should be ended, and "local party members should select their candidates for every election".

What Starmer and his right-wing goons have delivered is repeated interference in candidate selection processes to exclude left-wing and popular local candidates to parachute in Starmer loyalists.

In 2021 they stitched up a farcical short-list of just one candidate in Hartlepool, to foist a remain-ultra on one of the strongest pro-Brexit constituencies in the country, resulting in a history-making by-election loss to the party of government.

In 2023 they triggered a mass resignation of Labour councillors in Copeland after excluding the most popular candidate from the selection process.

Now it’s rumoured that Starmer’s goons are planning to scrap democratic selection processes for prospective MPs all over the country, so the NEC can centrally impose Starmer loyalists.

Labour leadership nominations

One of Keir Starmer’s first acts as Labour leader was to stitch up the Labour leadership nomination process in order to make it vastly more difficult for socialists, women, or people of colour to succeed him as Labour leader.

He did this by centralising the selection process into the hands of Labour politicians in Westminster, to dramatically reduce the influence of Labour Party members over the process.

Vote-rigging and deselections

Under Starmer’s leadership Labour have been using the scandalously dodgy Anonyvoter system to run internal elections, resulting in left-wing and popular local candidates having their in-person wins repeatedly overturned by extremely unusual online voting patterns that favour Starmerites, Labour right-wingers, and family members of Starmer’s inner circle.

Labour have repeatedly abused disciplinary processes to block, suspend, or expel popular local politicians to prevent them from standing in elections, like they did to oust North Tyneside mayor Jamie Driscoll from the contest to stand as Labour’s candidate for the expanded position of Mayor of the North East.

And even when left-wing candidates defy the odds and overcome all this vote-rigging and the dodgy Anonyvoter system, Starmer’s goons cynically abuse disciplinary processes to remove the eventual winner, like they did to purge the Jewish socialist Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, immediately after she was elected to Labour’s NEC.

Internal power centralisation

Starmer’s Labour has used centrally imposed candidates, nomination stitch ups, vote-rigging, and factional purges to centralise political power within the Labour Party, yet somehow we’re supposed to believe that they’re going to decentralise political power if Starmer becomes Prime Minister?

Continued austerity

Since 2010 the Tory government has slashed local government support by 60%, which is why local communities feel like they’re falling apart, and dozens of local councils are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

If Starmer wanted to empower local communities, the simplest way would be to reverse these ruinous Tory austerity cuts and give local governments the economic power to reverse austerity ruination, and improve local services.

Starmer outright refuses to commit to reversing these ruinous Tory austerity cuts with a yes or no answer.

Hostility to devolution

Keir Starmer has repeatedly displayed his hostility to the devolved powers of the Scottish parliament and locally elected mayors.

Labour has repeatedly backed the Tories as they’ve eroded Scottish democracy with vetoes on Scottish Parliamentary legislation and through their Brexit power grabs.

It’s one of Labour’s worst kept secrets that Starmer and his right-wing goons are profoundly hostile to elected Labour mayors in the north of England like Andy Burnham and Jamie Driscoll, not least because they’ve been pursuing the kind of left-wing transport nationalisation, child poverty alleviation, and social housing construction policies that Starmer’s right-wing goons abhor.

Starmer’s Autocratic tendencies

The Labour Party has never had such a dictatorial and autocratic leader in its history.

Starmer is famously intolerant of any kind of dissent in the ranks of what he repeatedly refers to as "my Labour Party".

From Stalinist diktats banning local Labour members from even discussing certain topics, through the mass expulsion of local Labour councillors for voting in favour of Gaza ceasefire motions, to intense pressure applied on Labour MPs to recant their personal views on all kinds of issues from capitalism to NATO.

Even Tony Blair allowed far more dissent in the Labour ranks. Remember how scores of Labour MPs defied Blair to vote against the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, yet they were allowed to remain as Labour MPs. It’s impossible to imagine Starmer doing anything other than a mass purge of dissenting voices were he to face a similar rebellion.

A wannabe tyrant like this simply doesn’t give away political powers to anyone other than those who will follow all of his autocratic diktats and decrees to the letter.

A litany of other broken promises

Aside from all of the direct evidence demonstrating Starmer’s power-centralisation and control freakery, there’s also the fact that he’s proven himself one of the most egregious liars in British politics by gleefully ripping up all of his 10 leadership election "pledges" before bragging to Andrew Marr that he’d lie to people again to win more political power for himself.

Even if he hadn’t repeatedly proven his hostility to power-decentralisation through his actions, we’ve still got the receipts to prove that the man simply cannot be trusted on anything he says.

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