Keir Starmer’s done it again. He’s just out-Toried the Tories.

Keir Starmer on Sky News
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Keir Starmer never seems to miss a chance to ape the Conservative Party. And Sunday 31 January was no exception to this.

Flag-waving once again

The Labour leader has written an article (don’t click the link!) for the Mail on Sunday. It’s about the reopening of schools amid the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. Needless to say, it does little more than pander to the right. OK, so Starmer probably didn’t write the headline. But it’s typical Mail, flag-waving dross:

Let’s harness the spirit that has made us the envy of the world – to get EVERY child back to school

What “spirit” might that be? Britain invading 171 countries during its history? Or our systemic racism, epitomised by the slave trade? Whatever “spirit” the Mail and Starmer want us to “harness”, it sounds like it involves a stiff-upper lip. Because the Labour leader is adamant schools need to reopen.

Starmer: aping the Tories

He said:

I have offered to work with the Prime Minister on this, including calling for the opening of ‘Nightingale-style classrooms’, and I renew that commitment today.

I believe we can take a further step towards reopening our schools by getting our teachers and school staff vaccinated as soon as possible, as The Mail on Sunday has called for.

Read on...

Starmer thinks that vaccinating teachers is the key. He wants the government to roll out the jab to them during February half term and doesn’t think this needs to be at the expense of other groups. He thinks the government can vaccinate both teachers and other people. And he made a point of saying that the Tories’ vaccine roll-out had been a “national success story”. But that’s it. That’s Starmer’s grand plan for reopening schools.

Now, contrast this with what a teacher’s union is saying.

Actual teachers say…

The National Education Union (NEU) has devised a three part plan. This is, it says, to reopen schools safely. But the plan is also to “build a better education system” in the wake of the pandemic. The NEU highlights three areas of focus:

  • “Safety in our schools and colleges”.
  • “Let’s build a better education system”.
  • “The best start in life”.

It too thinks the Tories should roll out the vaccine to teachers. But the NEU goes far further than Starmer does and has included other ideas to support students. These include:

  • “Develop and properly resource a recovery curriculum to run over a number of years”.
  • “A fully-resourced national plan for children’s wellbeing should be launched to support those who suffered trauma in the pandemic”.
  • “Welfare reform is needed so that parents are not working for their family’s poverty”.

Oh, and they want to “end child poverty“. Note how Starmer failed to mention poverty once in his Mail article. So it seems the Labour leader also failed to even bother to consult the NEU at all.

Guilt by association

It’s a damning situation when a Labour leader repeatedly writes for one of the most vile tabloids in the UK. Starmer doesn’t have to write in the Mail to try and change its readers’ minds. Instead, he could start organising his party in communities where the right wing is dominant.

But moreover, this constant arse-licking of, and agreeing with, the Tories will get him nowhere. Because if and when the fall-out from the government’s deadly handling of the pandemic comes, Labour will be just as much implicated as the Tories. What a complete mess.

Featured image via Sky News – YouTube 

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  • Show Comments
    1. Tony Blair destroyed the Labour Party & turned it into Blue Labour. Jeremy Corbyn attempted to resurrect the Labour Party as a socialist party but was himself destroyed by the Blairutes & oligarchs. Keir Stalin is simply carrying on Labour’s desctruction of an unelectable mishmash.

    2. Poverty? Why would Joe Starmer mention that? His strategy is to do nothing. He makes Calvin Coolidge look dynamic. Starmer wants to be PM, after all, mummy and daddy gave him an appropriate name. He wants to defend Israel and give significant influence over Labour to the B o D. Apart from that, he wants to do nothing. Inequality has killed tens of thousands in the pandemic. We lived through ten years of Tory austerity for nothing. The spending Corbyn advised has been outstripped by Sunak. If we can afford to borrow and spend in a pandemic, why not at any other time? If increasing UC by £20 a week is right now, why isn’t it simply right? Starmer is flat, dull, unimaginative, conformist and authoritarian by instinct. He doesn’t deserve to win and , of course, he won’t. Put a bet on that he scores below the 40% Corbyn achieved in 2107. The odds are favourable.

    3. What is so astounding is the 500,000? new members pulled into the Party during the campaigning of Jeremy Corbyn. Yet this huge influx of inspiriation for a different world in a political sense was utterly ignored as having any meaning for a democracy. The Starmer Crowd conspired against this inspiration of democracy with a huge lie as well while using the Right Wing Press
      These people aren’t in the real world.
      Its gone beyond the politics belonging to a democracy, and looks like a “money class aspirations” democracy only.
      In the history books of the past this social failure was a well known “Failured Feature” of this class of people.
      The idea of the monarchy emerged out of this mayhem as it sought the betterment of everyone.
      Reading A Short History of France by Victor Duruy.

      1. Thanks for the book reference and your comments. Just a suggestion regarding “These people aren’t in the real world.”, perhaps they are the real world and they fool us into living and working in an unreal (virtual) world made up of a matrix of inter-related lies and fabrications, such as the one used near the end of your comment; “The idea of the monarchy emerged out of this mayhem as it sought the betterment of everyone.”
        Certainly the history of France does provide a succinct illustration of the attempts to instil the illusion that monarch’s and their aristos are the friends of stability, peace and goodwill to all human kind.

    4. Why can’t Starmer follow Corbyn’s lead and shout from the rooftops how much better the Soviet Union and China’s communist regimes have been compared to the wicked British. Ignoring the millions executed for treachery, the benefits of such regimes cannot be disputed by any self respecting socialist.

    5. What part of “Kier Starmer is a LINO” don’t you understand. He is an establishment plant. He is a Zionist fifth columnist in the party. The reason he’s sounds like a good Tory is that he is a good Tory!

      Between Bogus Johnson and Weird Starmer Britain is completely leaderless. In both cases it appears that foreign influence is dominating British political policies, either from Russian oligarch donors or Israeli Zionists.

      Britain has stupidly left the EU so it should also leave the Russian and Israeli spheres of influence too if it wants to stand alone in the world.

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