This video comes from an interview between Beth Rigby of Sky News and Keir Starmer yesterday, posted by them to YouTube:
Beth Rigby does three things.
She asks Starmer if he can be trusted.
She then demonstrates that by abandoning all the pledges he made to become Labour leader he cannot be.
She then treats with disdain Starmer's claim that almost nothing has changed.
And she was absolutely right to do so. Starmer has u-turned on all his promises to deliver a package that is shockingly, and one has to presume, deliberately mundane, as if the death of democratic politics by suffocating it with indifference might be his aim.
Nor was Beth Rigby alone in doing this. Robert Peston was appropriately challenging for ITV. I did not see Chris Mason fur the BBC, because who cares what he asks?
Beth Rigby's very obvious conclusion, that Starmer is not trustworthy, is right.
Our democracy is in a terrible place.
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I am surprised this question is even asked. Look how he secured the leadership role. He absolutely lied through his teeth. There’s no other way to put it.
Where was Beth Rigby when he did that? She supported him because the Murdoch press didn’t want any radical polices coming from the opposition. And so it came to pass.
The standout for me was Starmer’s repeated assertion regarding pledges, namely “We can’t afford it,” which we know to be nonsense because the Ways & Means Account remains available as an effectively unlimited source of funding just as it has for centuries. It would be refreshing, to say the least, to see anybody at all in politics challenged about this. Although Beth does well above in some regards, our political media are letting us down dreadfully by not asking the right questions.
I have no doubt that the ditty “Liar Liar, Starmers undies are on fire” is true
Is this the most important element wrt LINO ? (after the Johnson era poeple might have internally normalised politicians=liars).
The adherence of LINO/Reeves to “cast iron fiscal rules” (most of the population go cross-eyed at this point) could be construed to be more important.
This blog has attacked LINO & the Starmer/Reeves axis on this subject regularly.
Thus while yes – Starmer et al …in LINO undoubtedly lie and cannot be trusted, arguably the bigger problem is that their adherence to fiscal rules and the fantasy of “growing the economy- before gov spending” means they offer no change. NONE. To the Uk population.
But the journos do not follow this line of questioning (no change/no possibility of change) – one can speculate why not (they are as ignorant of economics as Starmer?).
Thus: Starmer & LINO: We Lie & Offer No Change to UK Serfs.
Time to start printing the leaflets.
Keir Starmer here. The country can no longer afford to fight a war or a pandemic we must go back to barter!
We went back to butter some years ago. And feel a lot better for it.
Fat is not the enemy – we actually need it
Sugar is the enemy
And indolence
‘Marvelous’
Starmer’s central excuse for dumping most of the ten pledges he used to gain the leadership is that we can’t afford them. This begs two questions why did he adopt them in the first place without doing a cost analysis and secondly precisely why are they not affordable now. What’s the point of a politician who evades answering such questions which leads on to the much bigger question of how he understands the country’s monetary system to work. Certainly trying to get Starmer supporters to recognise this question is central to supporting any political party is met with indifference and failure to provide any coherent information how the UK’s monetary system works. Is the equivalent of trying to pretend the country can fight a war or a pandemic on the basis of a barter system. This is truly Stone Age thinking or voters who can’t walk and chew gum at the same time to use an American adage! Certainly Richard is right the behaviour of Starmer doesn’t augur well for the future of this country.
https://x.com/PeoplesMomentum/status/1791020246943326529
Much to agree with
Correction “It’s” not “Is”
Tory election propagandists have a barn door sized target on the ‘Can Starmer be trusted’ issue, and they will hammer this as an issue.
What effect that will have on voting intentions I do not know.
I suspect lack of trust will result in lower turnout, with both Tories and Labour voters unwilling to vote and staying home, a little like 2005, but with a turnout dropping below 60%. If it drops below 55% I think there will be huge angst.
I agree with that tony. The English branch of my family, all previously Tory voters, one a former deputy mayor, have told me they cannot vote for the present version of the party they once supported. Since none of them will ever vote for the Labour Party, what now?
Indeed the Tories can really make hay with Starmer by asking voters what kind of politician makes policy pledges to gain position without bothering to cost them!
https://www.clpd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Keir-Starmers-10-Pledges.pdf
He lied to me personally. That’s all I need to know.
Clearly got a personality defect that he needs to lie so much!
In that he is so similar to Johnson, an inveterate compulsive liar and a propensity to deny that he ever said something – though he lacks Johnson’s bonhomie, sense of humour, Latin and his grandiose unachievable ambition.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories at all, but it’s sometimes really hard to get away from the feeling that the Starmer project is to strip both left and labour movement influence from the British Labour Party, to create a dysfunctional duopoly like the American, with both main parties funded by and acting in the marginally different interests of wealthy individuals and corporations.
I am sure you are right
Here’s what the UK has to look forward to bribes being handed out in the House of Commons debating chamber:-
https://apnews.com/article/4544ea9878388ccf500ccc1492b26d8d
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAC2xeT2yOg
HI Richard,
via that interview, we can be sure what Starmer will not do, as he confirmed pledges are dropped if he can’t deliver them.
so he won’t deliver:
1. Labour’s core principles
2. Universal services
3. Green new deal
4. International peace and justice
5. Common ownership of Rail, Mail, Water and energy
6. Refugee rights
7. Workers rights
8. keeping wealth and power away from parliament
9. Equality
10. opposition to the tories.
I think that he makes it very clear that he will not be making the country a better place, and so it would not be wise to vote for him or his party.
Regards
Sean, I so agree, except “so it would not be wise to vote for him or his party”.
If not voting labour allows a Conservative candidate to be elected that is morally worse than voting Labour.
I detest Labour, but I would vote Labour to prevent a Conservative being elected. Anyone who would accept the Tory whip is morally bankrupt. Admittedly anyone who would accept the Labour whip is insolvent and heading for bankruptcy.
But, first, the Conservatives need to be destroyed, then Labour to collapse (as they will).
Such is the moral ambiguity of having a first past the post “democracy”.
Our Democracy has been in a terrible place since the mid 1970s when Cecil King who owned the supposedly Labour supporting Daily Mirror was trying to form a right-wing dictatorship to be headed by Lord Mountbatten and the ex-head of the British Army was forming a not very secret Army to overthrow the Labour Government.
The cause of this intended mayhem was a Labour government that responded to the massive OPEC Oil Price hike in revenge for western support of Israel in the Yom Kippur war with a series of Prices and Incomes policies that meant the effects of the resulting inflation and was fairly spread across the population.
Policies rather like many of the ideas suggested on this blog.
The rich were incensed and started plotting.
I don’t think this is any longer about what policies a Labour administration should legislate for if it gains office it’s about the basic morality of its leader Starmer!
Starmer is no more or less representative of the trend set by the early days of the first Blair administration – get in, sell out. I always think of Alan Milburn, lining his pockets from early on in his trajectory from socialism (supposedly) to neoliberal opportunist.
Peter Oborne, amongst others, has always stated that Starmer is the MI5/6 choice, and he is a genuine project of the neoliberal establishment to destroy the Left.
Richard has told us times without number that there is sufficient money available for our recovery. I see him every day on YouTube setting out his calculations and methods. There is no excuse for continuously claiming we cant afford it. He must be challenged at every opportunity.
One possible future for Labour is to become like the US Democrats, one of just two big Parties, as dependent on big business donors as the Republicans. But another future might be a severe shrinkage in voting support until it resembles the almost invisible ” Socialist” Parties of France, Italy, or Greece. Barely functioning as viable Parties but still supplying technocratic administrators to take over government tasks when other “business-friendly” politicians have passed their sell-by date. Neither scenario is attractive.
Fortunately, there is a lot more to political action than just voting for parliamentary Parties and then sitting back hoping they might think of us from time to time.
He dropped many of his pledges before the Economic challenges he mentioned happened, He is simply a liar.
We need your voice in the mainstream media Richard. This disingenious argument that we ‘can’t afford’ the pledges he’s dumped, one you’ve throughly debunked has to be put to bed once and for all. Otherwise we’ll be forever stuck in this flawed ideological rut forever undermining progressive politics from gaining any traction un the UK.
And in all other constituencies including Hackney North – Diane Abbott’s. In the Labour movement – both Trade Union and Party, those who attempt to fill disputed job positions are known as scabs. But that’s an inadequate epithet where all relevant disciplinary rules, common law natural justice principles have been rubbished as blatantly as the Abbott and Starmer cases are concerned.