Who is Starmer even trying to appeal to?

Disillusion and antipathy towards Keir Starmer's government continues to grow, and it's hardly surprising given his determination to piss almost everyone off

In July Keir Starmer won the most absurdly disproportional landslide election in UK political history. Thanks to Britain’s archaic and absurdly unrepresentative voting system, Labour managed to bag 63% of parliamentary seats on just 33.7% of the vote.

Starmer became Prime Minister by default despite winning half a million votes fewer than Corbyn did in the 2019 thumping, and a whopping 3.1 million fewer than Labour achieved in 2017.

He became Prime Minister despite having no real popular support, thanks entirely to the peculiarity of the electoral system. However despite his lack of popular appeal, he still had one massive thing in his favour; a massive parliamentary majority.

Even if Labour weren’t particularly popular upon obtaining power, they had the option of building popular support by using their mega-majority to deliver popular policies that materially improve people’s lives.

Somehow Starmer and the Labour-right goons he’s surrounded himself with decided to pledge that "things will get worse" instead, whilst going into attack mode against the voters they’re going to need to retain or win over if they want to prevent the Tory lunatics sliding back into power at the next election.

This inexplicable strategy has backfired dramatically, with the Labour government’s approval rating slumping to an astonishing Minus 41 in the latest YouGov poll, which shows 59% of people disapproving of the government, while a tiny rump of just 18% remain positive.

Starmer’s rapid popularity slide (from what was already a poor starting position) is easy to explain if we look at his attitude and actions towards crucial political demographics.

Pensioners

Rachel Reeves’ decision to confiscate the Winter Fuel Allowance from millions of pensioners living on as little as £11,000 per year is a remarkable act of political stupidity, especially given that Starmer’s pledged to give away the same amount that this pensioner-impoverishment policy saves to fund Zelenskyy’s war in Ukraine!

Freezing pensioners in their homes to bankroll Zelenskyy isn’t just obscene, it’s economically illiterate too, because £3 billion more in pensioners’ pockets ends up recirculating around the British economy, while £3billion more for Zelenskyy ends up getting burned away on overseas battlefields.

Public sector workers

Labour’s just made a desultory pay offer to teachers and NHS workers who are desperately in need of a pay bump after suffering 14 long years of Tory wage repression.

The NHS and the education system are suffering huge recruitment and retention problems, and Labour’s refusal to reverse the Tory erosion of wages in these vital sectors isn’t just going to exacerbate the staffing problems, it’s going to anger core traditional Labour-voting demographics too.

Private sector workers

Starmer binned his transport secretary Louise Haigh over her criticism of DP World for firing 800 British P&O workers to replace them with cheap overseas labour, using a ridiculous tabloid scandal to justify it.

The message is clear that Starmer’s on the side of unscrupulous bosses, not ordinary workers.

Children and young people

Okay, we know that children can’t vote, but people who care about children certainly can, and young people eventually reach voting age don’t they?

One of Starmer’s very first actions as Prime Minister was to sack a load of Labour MPs for daring to vote in favour of scrapping the Tories’ cruel 2-child family impoverishment scheme.

Starmer sent a clear and unequivocal message that if you’re the kind of person who thinks it’s wrong for the government to economically sanction children for the "crime" of having more than one sibling, Labour is not the party for you.

Add in Starmer’s screeching U-turn on his pledge to abolish rip-off university tuition fees, and Starmer’s antipathy towards the younger generations is clear to see.

Traditional Labour voters

Starmer knows full-well that the majority of Labour Party supporters are strongly in favour of public ownership of core infrastructure and services (NHS, water, energy, transport, mail …), which is why he brazenly lied about being in favour of renationalisation during the 2020 Labour leadership election.

He knew he didn’t stand a chance of becoming leader if he told the truth about wanting to leave the parasitical profiteers in charge because Liz Kendall got 5% of the vote with her Labour-right agenda in 2015, so he lied through his teeth to con the Labour membership into backing him, then filled his cabinet with Labour-right fanatics like Liz Kendall and Rachel Reeves.

Renationalisation of England’s water companies would be a massive vote-winner. The privatisation profiteers have repeatedly hiked water bills, run the infrastructure down, and loaded the companies up with tens of £billions of debt in order to extract extraordinary shareholder profits and bloated executive salaries.

They’ve figured it’s more profitable to pump our rivers and coastal waters full of raw sewage than to treat it, and the public are angry.

Somehow Starmer has decided that he’s on the side of the profiteering and polluting private water parasites, so traditional Labour voters and the general public who detest them can get screwed.

Environmentalists

If you were to believe what capitalist media feeds us, people who care about the environment are a tiny bunch of hippy weirdos, but a recent poll found that environmentalism is the most popular ideology among Labour voters and the general public alike.

Given the extraordinary popularity of environmentalism, it makes absolutely no sense that Starmer has repeatedly watered down Labour’s environmental commitments, and even wants to keep the private water profiteers who have been boosting their profits by pumping raw sewage into the natural environment instead of treating it.

Humanists

People are outraged by the ongoing genocide in Gaza. For over a year we’ve all seen the horrifying images of Israeli war crimes; looting; targeting of journalists academics, aid workers, and medics; destruction of schools, hospitals, churches, mosques, and historical sites; mass killing and expulsion of civilians; aid blockades; dead children; starving displaced civilians; and so much more.

I can’t share gory images on here, but you just need to look at the embedded video above and realise that this apocalyptic scene was once one of the most densely populated places on earth, to get an idea of the sheer horrifying scale of human suffering of all of the people who have had their homes and lives reduced to rubble.

It’s beyond sickening to see Starmer, the self-proclaimed "human right-lawyer", not just providing diplomatic cover for and palling around with the perpetrators, but actually supplying them weapons and providing covert military support via Britain’s airbase in Cyprus.

It’s impossible for anyone with a shred of human decency to feel enthusiastic about a government that revels in its support for such unspeakable atrocities.

LGBTQ people

If Keir Starmer had just visited one homophobic church at Easter, you could have imagined it was some kind of vetting oversight, but after the scandal died down he decided to make another Easter visit to a different homophobic church in 2023.

Doing it once could’ve been a mistake, but doing it twice was quite clearly deliberate. Add in his embrace of the transphobic agenda, and his hostility to queer folk is more than apparent.

Austerity-sceptics

Even if people were inclined to believe in the absurd economically illiterate fairy tale that it’s possible for a nation to cut its way to prosperity in 2010, fourteen years of stagnation and declining living standards provide ample proof that it doesn’t work.

Yet Starmer’s insistent on imposing even more across the board austerity cuts, cynically rebranded as "efficiency savings".

Labour’s thumping mega-majority was an opportunity to finally turn the page on George Osborne’s failed economic delusions, yet instead of a serious programme of investment economics, we’re being offered up another sickening dose of "more of the same" cutbacks and managed decline.

So who is Starmer actually trying to appeal to?

Starmer is hostile to workers; pensioners; children and young people; traditional Labour voters; people who care about the environment; queer folk and their allies; austerity-sceptics; and people who support human rights and international law.

Even Britain’s depraved liberal-capitalist hacks are turning on him, saying he should be doing better, and pretending that they want to see the kind of policies to materially improve people’s lives that they so vehemently opposed when Corbyn was offering them.

So after all of that, who is actually left?

Private health profiteers; genocide-enthusiasts; transphobes; people who want pensioners to freeze and children with more than one sibling to go hungry; private energy company executives and shareholders; unscrupulous employers; people who hate "tree-huggers"; private water company bosses; people who still somehow believe in austerity economics …

Not only are these groups relatively tiny in comparison to massive demographics like workers, pensioners, and traditional Labour voters, they’re also highly likely to jump ship to the Tories at the first opportunity, aren’t they?

Why would they support Starmer’s red version of the Tory party, when they could simply vote for the real thing next time around?

Things can only get worse

It’s absolutely no surprise that Starmer’s already weak approval ratings have fallen off a cliff, but Labour still has a thumping majority, and it’s actually not too late for challengers from within to remove him and replace him with someone who actually gives a shit about serving the interests of ordinary people.

Given Starmer’s dictatorial tendencies and the utterly spineless behaviour of Labour’s 400+ MPs to date as he trashes the Labour Party brand, it seems vanishingly unlikely that any significant change in direction is on the cards.

And if Starmer continues serving the interests of tiny vested minorities and displaying open hostility to massive and crucial demographics, things are only going to get worse. Not just for the country, but for the Labour Party’s collapsing approval ratings too.

[Credit to Stats For Lefties for the graph in the header image]

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