SARAH VINE: Keir Starmer’s mask has slipped to reveal the unmistakable smirk of Corbyn and his cronies _ Hieuuk
Last week I caught up with an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in a while. We talked about the usual things – kids, work, relationships – and then the topic turned to politics. My friend is Jewish, and like so many Jewish people in Britain over the past few months she has begun to feel increasingly uncomfortable.
The previous day the Home Secretary, David Lammy, had announced he was suspending some arms sales to Israel. Like many Jews, my friend is no fan of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, or his tactics in Gaza. But she also felt Lammy’s decision sent a worrying signal of latent support for the actions of Hamas terrorists on October 7.
In particular, the timing of the announcement – just two days after six more hostages had been found dead, murdered by their captors – seemed to demonstrate a total disregard for the victims of that atrocity and their families.
Barely a day goes by without Labour ministers announcing radical changes – ALL designed to rewire Britain according to a Socialist agenda, so is Keir Starmer turning into Jeremy Corbyn?
She couldn’t help but sense a nasty whiff of the ill-concealed anti-semitism that dogged the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn – and that was supposed to have been banished under Keir Starmer.
The fact that Lammy’s announcement was so clearly calculated to appease the party’s large Islamic voter base in the face of recent challenges to Labour MPs from sectarian opponents fighting on an anti-Israel platform only made that sense of alienation worse.
But what was troubling her most of all was the fact that she had voted for Starmer.
Prior to the election, she had been one of the people who had told me, in all sincerity, that they thought Starmer was a ‘good man’: a decent, honourable fellow who would ensure that Britain under a Labour government would be a fairer place for all, without any of that Corbyn-era tribalism and class warfare.
Like many, she felt that the Conservatives had run out of road and the country needed a reset. She was convinced that Starmer, the strait-laced lawyer with a social conscience, the chic wife and an innate sense of justice, was the man.
I remember thinking to myself at the time that if she truly believed that, she was deluded. I never believed Starmer’s neo-Blairite act for a second, any more than I believed he had rid the Labour Party of anti-semites. But I’ve lost too many friends to politics to lose another, so I held my tongue.
I wish now I hadn’t.
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How many others, I wonder, feel like my friend? How many who voted for Starmer believing his ‘man of integrity’ spiel have now woken up, just two months into this shiny new Labour government, and realised it was all an act? That they’ve been duped, tricked, sold a pup?
That the mild-mannered, bespectacled face of a modern, moderate Labour Party was, in fact, just a mask? A mask that has now slipped – to reveal the unmistakable smirk of Corbyn and his hard Left cronies as they celebrate finally coming to power.
They admitted as much this week. Or rather, John McDonnell, Corbyn’s former Shadow Chancellor and a hard-Left icon, did so when he boasted to the TUC conference in Brighton that many of the policies now being implemented by Starmer’s administration were his and Corbyn’s, put forward in the 2019 manifesto (a document, you may remember, that the British electorate rejected outright).
A demonstrator wears a mask of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a pro-Palestinian protest in London
‘Incoming Labour government, I congratulate them on the programme they’ve put forward,’ he told delegates.
‘If you look at the last eight weeks, announcement after announcement has been superb.’ And he went on, to cheers from the audience: ‘It’s interesting, most of those policies are derived from the 2017 and 2019 manifestos. But you’re not allowed to say that.’
McDonnell’s Labour is in power after all: they no longer need to keep their ‘swivel-eyed loons’ locked in the metaphorical broom cupboard. They can be out and proud.
McDonnell listed rail renationalisation, trade union rights, social housing, measures against climate change, renters’ reforms and bus policy as ideas he supported. His only criticism was the removal of winter fuel payments for pensioners.
Having failed to sell these policies to the electorate openly and honestly in 2019, the far-Left have got them through by stealth.
And there’s nothing anyone can do about it because, thanks to the equally misguided decision of people to vote Reform (where is that champion of the common man Nigel Farage now?), Labour have an all-powerful ‘supermajority’ – even though, in real terms, just 20 per cent of the country voted for them.
I suspect that few people, when they voted for Starmer in July, would have sanctioned half the things his government has already done.
But that was the genius of his campaign. With a Conservative government weakened and besieged by scandal after scandal and with an electorate desperate for an appealing alternative, he took a Trojan horse approach, delivering reassuringly wooden performances that lulled voters into a false sense of security.
Once safely behind the front door of No 10, he was free to disgorge his true intentions.
Barely a day goes by without Labour ministers announcing radical changes – some big, some small – designed to rewire Britain according to a hard-Left agenda. And the pace at which they are implementing these changes, starting barely weeks into power, is astonishing. Blink and you could miss some quite important stuff.
On Saturday, for example, it emerged that plans to help schools teach a ‘nuanced’ history of the British Empire have been shelved.
A panel of experts including Robert Tombs, professor of French history at Cambridge University, and Blondel Cluff, a member of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, who were conducting a review of how history is taught, were told their services were no longer required by new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson.
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The latter has instead appointed a dyed-in-the-wool Corbynista – a woman who is said never to have taught children in a classroom but whose entire career in education has consisted of pushing the wokest of woke agendas – to review the national curriculum.
Under the aegis of Professor Becky Francis, education in the old-fashioned sense – reading, writing, arithmetic – will become a dirty word, replaced by the mantra of equality. No doubt in anticipation of her influence, unions are already pushing to scale back testing primary school children on times tables and grammar.
Elsewhere, powers introduced by the outgoing Tory government to protect free speech in universities have been halted, no doubt as a precursor to scrapping them altogether.
And a proposed amendment to the Equality Act of 2010 aimed at protecting single-sex spaces for women has also been dropped. No more objecting to male-bodied prisoners sharing cells with women, no more pushback against trans-identified males in women’s sports.
Meanwhile, hereditary peers, who in many cases are among the most impartial in the House of Lords (not to mention some of the most hard-working), are to be booted out, replaced inevitably with new political appointees more in tune with Corbyn’s – sorry, Starmer’s – agenda.
Everywhere you look, the fabric of Britain is being Corbynised. The 14.25 per cent bump to train drivers’ salaries and allowing them to keep ‘Spanish practices’; the spinning of a mythical £22 billion ‘Tory’ black hole, even though around half of that spending gap wouldn’t exist were it not for Labour’s largesse towards the unions. Then there’s Angela Rayner’s workers’ rights package, including flexible hours and the right to ‘switch off’ – and even rumours of a four-day working week – along with the proposed scrapping of curbs on the right to strike for union members (no longer would a 50 per cent voting turnout by union members be required). Might that possibly have something to do with the fact that more than half of Labour MPs took union donations for their campaigns?
And what about Ed Miliband’s £8.3 billion energy fund, which is going to carpet the countryside with solar and wind farms and has already been caught out with false claims that it will save consumers money? That, coupled with accelerating the mothballing of North Sea oil, will jeopardise the only real source of genuine energy security Britain has.
It doesn’t stop. Just yesterday, Left-wing think tank the Resolution Foundation paved the way for a £9 billion tax raid on pensions by urging Chancellor Rachel Reeves to make employers pay National Insurance on staff pension scheme contributions, as well as increasing inheritance tax and capital gains. So much for not hurting ‘working people’.
Is any of this what people voted for? For pensioners to freeze to death (we know that older people tend to vote Conservative, which under the new regime clearly makes them expendable) while overpaid train drivers get another bumper raise?
The dumbing down of the curriculum, the hollowing-out of our constitution, the erosion of women’s rights (in a world that already respects women less and less), the use of public office to secure votes?
And that’s before we’ve even started on the betrayal of promises on immigration and the cosying up to Brussels.
And the bribes, the shameless bribes. Not just the obvious stuff – the huge public sector pensions, the genuflecting to the anti-Israel mob (not only Lammy, but also restarting funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, some of whose employees were allegedly involved in the October 7 attacks), Lord Alli and the ‘passes for glasses’ scandal – but releasing prisoners early.
The latter is a move that, as one jubilant young drug dealer said yesterday as he strolled out of custody, will earn Starmer a few thousand ‘lifelong Labour voters’. And it comes against a backdrop of draconian sentences for first-time offenders involved in the recent riots, some only tangentially.
The same no doubt will be true of the tens of thousands of illegal migrants now granted an effective amnesty, who will have full access to the British welfare system at an estimated cost (by the Tories, admittedly) of almost £18 billion. And the many more heading for our shores now the Rwanda scheme has been scrapped, with no serious deterrent put in its place. They will all become loyal Labour voters, locked in by the endless supply of treats at the taxpayer’s expense.
Not that there will be an awful lot of those taxpayers left at the current rate. The hard-Left despises the middle classes, the hard-grafting, the ambitious and the wealthy on principle – and yet they love collecting their taxes.
That’s always been the flaw in the great socialist plan: how can you smash the rich when you need them to pay all your bills?
All this, and we are only two months in. Imagine what this country will look like in five years’ time, at the next General Election. The damage this administration will potentially be able to do to our culture, our heritage, our identity, our institutions and our economy is inestimable.
So much for the ‘honourable’ Sir Keir. This is a government that’s risen to power on false pretences – and which, I fear, intends to stay there by any means necessary.
