Watching the PM and Kemi Badenoch go at each other over immigration today an independent observer might be inclined to conclude despairingly ‘they’re as bad as each other.’ And so of course they are, what with the faux Conservatives having looked at Blair ‘The Master’ and decided that was the model to follow from 2010 onwards.
Yet for all his radical talk of fixing problems at their foundation Starmer is reluctant to tackle them at that level. Instead his approach is semi-reactive, for example reaching agreements with European partners to catch and prosecute people-smugglers - Yvette Cooper made a ministerial statement about this straight after PMQs. Kemi noted that this issue was not even one of Sir Keir’s priorities in his new ‘Plan For Change.’ Yet other countries are dealing with the problem more directly - Sweden, for one.
By the way, again it seems that Starmer’s SpAds have a tin ear for propaganda: in his 28 November migration speech he said ‘mark my words – this government will turn the page,’ using a Kamala slogan just after she rode it into the biggest electoral failure in recent US political history.
Immigration is merely one Jumbo in the room. The biggest one, the Mama Tembo, is energy.
Labour’s Noah Law soothed his boss’s nerves after the spat with the Opposition leader by pitching an easy question on how Starmer could ‘help Britain become a clean energy superpower.’
Here is a quiz for Ed Miliband: place the following adjectives for Britain’s energy policy in order of importance - ‘cheap, plentiful, reliable, clean.’ Anyone in his right mind - like India, China, the USA, Russia - has to put ‘clean’ at Number Four. Fortunately with nuclear reactors and an abandonment of Net Zero all may be achievable, as Reform’s Nigel Farage told Question Time last week.
It will be needed so we can earn a living in the world. GDP is a hopeless yardstick of national prosperity, since all it does is measure economic activity. Spend money like a sailor on shore leave and it will go up; but if you do it by increasing the population of dependant low-skilled and unemployed people the GDP per capita will decline.
What counts is energy use per capita. There has to be enough to house, feed and clothe everyone with more left over to produce goods and services for them but also for export, to keep our international trade in some sort of balance. How, with the most expensive electricity in the world, are our industries supposed to compete? What happens if they can’t? We import half our food as it is; how shall we pay for it? Is that not a sustainability question too, you Greens?
Which brings us back to another neglected pachyderm: farming. When Jerome Mayhew (Con) spoke of farms being lost and irreplaceable the PM responded as usual, with an undetailed claim about the IHT threshold for the ‘ordinary family case’ being £3 million. He also boasted that Labour will be investing £5 billion in farming over two years - the expected revenue from the new IHT rules is only 20% of that, so why do it? Why bring the tractors out in York over it?
Look more closely into that five billion pounds and see that little of it is to do with making our farmers produce more food for us. A lot is to do with Greenery, but not the kind we can eat. No wonder Mayhew called Sir Keir ‘duplicitous.’ Meanwhile, as well as the soaring costs of fertiliser and fuel for their machinery, Ed Davey noted that farmers have been undercut by the last administration’s Oz/NZ trade deals.
Starmer was also confronted with the usual queue of begging bowls for good causes and ticklish issues of diplomacy - post-Assad Syria, picking sides in Gaza, arming against Russia, freeing a Brit long imprisoned in Dubai. Somehow we have to stay out of more of the wars that have nearly eviscerated us since 1914 and keep the home fires burning.
We are in crisis. If Labour goes on playing at Johnny Head-In-Air, indulging itself in back-to-Eden crazes, fantasising about punching above our weight on the global stage and thinking other countries will always meet our needs because all we require is international law and fiat money, we are headed for a fall.
A month after the petition to call a fresh General Election, the Government has issued an official response. It appears to have been written by an infinite number of monkeys.
“This Government was elected on a mandate of change at the July 2024 general election… The Government was elected by the British people on a mandate of change at the July 2024 general election… On entering office, a £22 billion black hole was identified in the nation’s finances… The Government will continue to deliver the manifesto of change that it was elected on.”
We have a whole sentence repeated, a black hole entering office and a last line that should read ‘on which it was elected’ rather than ending in a preposition.
Who wrote this drivel? More to the point, who approved it? Perhaps it escaped the notice of the current Cabinet Secretary Simon Case because he is sadly unwell and it was not yet technically under the purview of his successor Sir Christopher Wormald, due to take over soon. Or maybe it is a touchstone exemplifying the mediocre quality of staff that Dominic Cummings sees throughout government and bureaucracy.
My wife suggests it was given to ChatGPT to write. Or possibly some half-educated researcher - a Chap-GPT? - was tasked with it; if so, the Cabinet Office needs to recruit a subeditor from Fleet Street, for the carelessness of the prose seems to betray a panicky haste - not so much spin as a ‘flat spin.’
We turn now from the grammar to the content, a by-the-yard wallpaper of political assertions, offcuts of which are served weekly in PMQs. The petition claims that Labour has gone back on its promises; paste this question into your AI chatbot and judge for yourself: ‘What pledges in the Labour 2024 manifesto have been abandoned in practice since the General Election?’
Presumably when the Government refers to a ‘manifesto of change’ it does not mean a number of retrospective changes to the manifesto itself. Also the claim to have a ‘mandate’ is leading with the chin, since only one-fifth of the electorate legitimised Starmer’s victory and many of them must now be experiencing ‘buyer’s remorse.’
It would be far better for our masters to take down this nonsense and reconcile themselves with having allowed the debate scheduled for 6 January; which will of course ‘change’ nothing.
Naturally Starmer will dismiss the 6 January Westminster Hall debate as merely ‘noises off’, taking the legalistic view that he won by the rules and waving his lottery ticket of validation.
His thinking is limited. Rules, like the Sabbath, are made for man, not the other way round. They are downstream of power, which in turn flows from the collective identity of the populace. Our customs precede our statutes.
For decades that commonality, a willingness to live and let live learned the hard way through centuries of blood and strife, has been under attack from multiple ideologies. Our governments have tried to shore up our unity with an ersatz culture of abstract rights and principles as though there is a Platonic world more real than this one. Lawyers may live in it, but we don’t.
Democratic control is minimal: our representatives ignore us and please themselves once elected. We may throw out a rascally government yet our ability to choose its successor is warped by the oddities of the constituency system. Starmer rejected Ed Davey’s call for proportional representation, but then why expect the cat to bell itself?
A Prime Minister with a large Parliamentary majority has five years to wield a monarch’s arbitrary power. Sir Keir is on plan to inflict huge damage to the country and only a disaster - likely one of his making - can save us. For who can otherwise stop our ‘red-green’ General?
Despite our young - less than a century old - democracy the State apparatus he has inherited can enforce its fantasies with spies, police and propaganda. It has limitless numbers of servants - flunky monkeys - to do it, thanks to their taking and spending half our earnings. Chattering and screaming, they will destroy the machine.
The Cabinet Office statement in full (in case it does get taken down): “Government responded
This response was given on 6 December 2024
This Government was elected on a mandate of change at the July 2024 general election. Our full focus is on fixing the foundations, rebuilding Britain, and restoring public confidence in government.
The Prime Minister can call a general election at a time of their choosing by requesting a dissolution of Parliament from the Sovereign within the five-year life of a Parliament. The Government was elected by the British people on a mandate of change at the July 2024 general election.
This Government is fixing the foundations and delivering change with investment and reform to deliver growth, with more jobs, more money in people’s pockets, to rebuild Britain and get the NHS back on its feet. This will be built on the strong foundations of a stable economy, national security and secure borders as we put politics back in the service of working people.
On entering office, a £22 billion black hole was identified in the nation’s finances. We inherited unprecedented challenges, with crumbling public services and crippled public finances, but will deliver a decade of national renewal through our five missions: economic growth, fixing the NHS, safer streets, making Britain a clean energy super-power and opportunity for all. This is what was promised and is what we are delivering.
The Government’s first Budget freed up tens of billions of pounds to invest in Britain’s future while locking in stability, preventing devastating austerity in our public services and protecting working people’s payslips.
Mission-led government rejects the sticking-plaster solutions of the past and unites public and private sectors, national, devolved and local government, business and unions, and the whole of civil society in a shared purpose. The Government will continue to deliver the manifesto of change that it was elected on.
One of the PM’s stock phrases is ‘fixing the foundations.’ Is he the one to do it?
‘Starmer is already in a flat spin from which he will not recover,’ Dominic Cummings said last week (47:46). ‘He has no idea how to do the job… He will just thrash around failing.’
That might not have been obvious from today’s PMQs. The PM appeared to be more animated in his responses; perhaps he had had a little coaching from the increasingly Gollum-resembling Blair who also warned him straight after July’s election that he would have to do something about immigration (what an irony, Tony!)
He was helped by Kemi Badenoch’s repeating her unfortunate habit of asking a two-part question, this time combining the latter issue with another go at his appointment of convicted fraudster Louise Haigh as (now ex-) Transport Secretary. It allowed Sir Keir to focus on his recent remigration achievements: 9,400 repatriated (mostly voluntary, but including 600 Brazilians suddenly rounded up and flown out - the ruthlessness so displayed might backfire.)
For a while, perhaps, given the Tory Opposition that did so disastrously when in power. Cummings says they too ‘will not recover… The machine is broken.’
But immigration is one of those foundations that need fixing, and not just for fiscal reasons. The implications for our politics and social relations are far-reaching.
But when Ed Davey now asked for a full debate Starmer replied ‘Proportional representation is not our policy and we will not be making time for it. I will just gently say to the right hon. Gentleman that he did not do too badly under the system as it is.’
As indeed did Labour, and Sarah Olney’s Conservative debating opponent Lewis Cocking, who held his Broxbourne seat in the GE with only 36.8% of the vote.
So much for power to the people.
A third foundation is our economy, the draught horse that has to pull so much. A great deal of this PMQs session was taken up with worthy causes that require funding:
The North Devon hospital with only 6 ICU beds serving 165,000 people; ‘our prisons bursting’ (said Sir Keir); 1,500 South Wales homes needing festive food hampers (sung for by MP Carolyn Harris); NHS waiting lists; access to GPs; financial support for GP practices; guarding against unacceptable behaviour in the workplace; tackling violence against women and girls; bringing historic buildings back into use; compensation for victims of the contaminated blood scandal; financial redress for WASPI women who saw their retirement date pushed back with inadequate warning; index-linking frozen pensions for British émigrés; heating for pensioners; infrastructure for Middlewich; money for special educational needs and disabilities; staving off Post Office closures; the renationalisation and revival of railways.
How is all this and more to be paid for?
As Kemi said, ‘Last week, the Prime Minister failed to repeat the Chancellor’s pledge of no more borrowing and no more taxes… He cannot even repeat the pledges he made just a few weeks ago. None of [this Cabinet] has ever run a business. Why will the Prime Minister not listen to businesses who are saying his Budget is catastrophic?’
This invited Starmer’s usual counterattack on the Conservative’s economic record and shilly-shallying on policy; can they ever live it down?
Nevertheless, it is one thing to win points in the Debating Chamber; another to build a thriving economy on closing industries and New Age energy. Technically Labour has until 2029 to sort out how the country will make ends meet; in reality we may not have so long.
The recent elections in the USA resulted in Trump sweeping the board, this despite the impression given in all the media that Harris was going ahead in a tight race to the White House. As with so much these days the direction the media wish to take us is not necessarily that which is a true reflection on what is actually happening.
That in itself is a worrying trend. There was a time when the media was fairly impartial in its opinions, now not nearly so much: like everything else it is divided into entrenched camps.
This is not only giving endlessly false readings on events but in many cases it feels, rightly, that opinion is being driven by vested interests.
A good example of that was the unanimous push of government advice during Covid, regardless of any misgivings from many of a different opinion who were completely sidelined.
To a degree one can understand why the dead tree press would obey. The sales of newspapers are but a fraction of a few years ago and many titles are struggling to stay alive, never mind relevant.
The pouring of huge amounts of government money into advertising would make anyone think twice about bucking the trend and losing all that ‘gifted’ revenue.
Elsewhere the feeling with hindsight is that there was a lot of leaning on individuals and corporations to toe the official line and the ‘nudge’ unit did its part in orchestrating all this.
A comment by Pat Condell on X summed up the current thinking among governments and elites at this moment in time:
“The European Union is a model for the planned borderless world run by an unaccountable politburo. Its core purpose is to eliminate the countries of Europe and transform a diverse continent of sovereign nations into a single homogenous political bloc governed by a committee of unelected bureaucrats fronted by a cosmetic rubber stamp assembly.”
Despite the vision of remainers that all who voted for Brexit were knuckle-dragging morons who should not be allowed to vote on anything, many of us shared this view of the EU then and it has been reinforced since Brexit.
We are beginning to see the scales falling from the eyes of many, but not yet enough. This statement has much in it which should be refused but still few in power even acknowledge what is going on yet alone raise doubts and reasoned argument…
Another small taste of what certain politicians regard as the future for us. This has been erased since but was archived by someone who believed it would stand the test of time:
“Remember that time when Hillary Clinton introduced her friend GeorgeSoros and his interest to get involved in US elections? The Internet sure doesn't. Why? Because it has been wiped from existence for the most part. Turns out I found a copy of the file I had archived years ago: https://x.com/i/status/1851690476463628780”
So many paths lead back to Davos; even our new PM has said he prefers Davos to Westminster:
Is he saying that our own democracy is a poor substitute for the elites of Davos? If he is then he has no right to be in the position he now finds himself in, he is a fraud; but then most of them are. Of the current incumbents, the front bench has only one person who has ever worked in the real world for a living, and that one has jusr resigned for a fraudulent crime in the not so distant past. Are any of the others suited to the positions they are hold or are given? As the years pass ever fewer have worked in the private sector in any capacity. This does not bode well.
But then we knew that. His pre-election pledge that the NHS would not receive any more money without reform was ignored like everything else, and a consultation is to be commenced on the reforms that will likely, as with all consultations and inquiries, outlast the government’s tenure.
David Icke is not for me usually a go-to person, yet here he nails it re the farming shut down that appears to be happening simultaneously all over the west.
Back to the NHS. Endless adverts appear telling us that breakthroughs are occurring in the treatment or cure of various diseases, new testing procedures should be insisted on and again all are rightly advised to get tested and pop down immediately to see their GP…
I cannot see all this money spent on advertising as any more than a distraction to the fact that the NHS is failing in many areas and very little will be achieved while waiting lists for standard procedures stretches out into, in many cases a time when the patient will be gone. Perhaps this is the plan; it is a fact that the last six months of anyone's life is the most expensive for the NHS should they need care.
Perhaps the assisted dying bill being presented to Parliament is part of the planned process to eliminate old people before they become a burden on the state.
My own views on this aspect of medical care (sic) have been aired on here in detail, so I won’t be going over old ground, but just a point: the ‘end of life bill ‘ before Parliament and which has just been passed, has no mention of the fact that lives are ended in hospitals and care homes on a regular basis with none of the ‘safety’ provisions that are being put before Parliament in this private member’s bill. That is happening and to say the situations are not comparable is a lie in many cases. It leaves a huge loophole in the law that can be, as during Covid, be exploited. Those responsible for that lawful murder have walked away untouched with their gold-plated pensions intact, and now that ability to end life has been extended.
Old people have very little future to look forward to. They have been discarded or are being so little by little. This once great nation has currently, despite all the bluster to the contrary, probably the worst pensions in the so called advanced western nations, and the withholding of the Winter Fuel Allowance was a deliberate mean act to a group who if they were still workng would be classified as existing well below the poverty line.
These are people who have done more than their bit for this country, paid their taxes, are crapped on from above and are now being told their lives have no value as they are a drag on the State.
And the lies, the endless lies… this from someone who claims there is an imaginary black hole in the finances, yet manages to find billions for nonsense schemes in Africa, public sector wage increases, billions for illegal migrants who get free private health care and free heated hotel rooms plus plus plus…
Can’t say she never acted!
What the hell has happened to us as a nation when this bleak and unholy future is all that can be offered?
