With intentionally spiteful timing, failed prime minister Keir Starmer announced that he’s stepping down as an MP just as his successor was due to address Parliament for the first time. With this move, Starmer has proven that it was all about his ego, careerism, self-aggrandisement, and ambition all along. He’s telling us he has no loyalty to his constituents, or his party and no interest in parliament or parliamentary process. If he can’t have the ball he’s walking away in a sulk.
It’s very on-brand that after being ousted by Burnham Starmer had promised to stay on as an MP until the next general election, yet his last act as an MP is to do a U-turn, a fraud to the very end. He didn’t even last a single hour when Westminster returned after the summer recess. This small-minded, peevish and petty little man just told everyone in a way that leaves no room for doubt that his overweening self-importance was always his true motivation and the claim of his gullible supporters that he was a decent man who only desired to serve the public was just another of his many lies. Having been knocked off one career ladder that allowed him to fill the empty attic of his soul with attention, power, and influence, he’s off to find another.
Rishi Sunak is still serving as an MP. Theresa May remained an MP until stepping down at the 2024 general election, five years after standing down as prime minister. Even Liz Truss stayed on as a backbench MP until the general election. The only prime minister in recent times who stood down as an MP after being ousted as premier was Boris Johnson. That’s who Starmer will be forever bracketed with.
One year to the day after proclaiming: “Phase two of my government starts today.” Starmer has said he is standing down because he is “going to concentrate on international affairs.” You know, like being an apologist and enabler for genocide. Now, like Blair before him, he can suckle on the teat of corporate donations without concerning himself with too much in the way of media scrutiny or having to declare it to the Commons authorities.
Starmer only ever entered parliament as a career move. An empty shell of a politician bereft of policies or principle and willing to lie even more shamelessly than most politicians, he was the perfect vehicle for the right wing Labour Together to become their wrecking ball and to put a final nail in the coffin of the Labour Left post-Corbyn. He succeeded in taking the leadership of the party by dint of lying through his teeth with a raft of left wing policies which were ditched the second he had the power he so craved.
He won the 2024 general election on the back of a vacuous slogan and a public desperate to rid itself of the vile, corrupt, and chaotic Conservatives. Then he found himself in the unfortunate position of having to actually be a politician in government and do real politics instead of the performative politics of opposition. He turned out to be spectacularly shite at it, and with nowhere to hide his popularity and that of his party plummeted.
His departure leaves real questions for the Labour party, just how did a man with no real political experience, no personal or emotional hinterland, who had no real principles or political vision, no real friends in politics, and belonged to no established political faction manage to take control of the Labour party on the basis of bare-faced lies and deceit.
Starmer lied on an industrial scale. Once he took the leadership he embarked upon a ruthless purge of the Labour left, taking the Labour party into the political territory previously occupied by the Eurosceptic wing of John Major’s Conservatives, those he famously described as “bastards”. He destroyed what still survived of Labour’s claim to be the party of the people, rendering it unrecognisable to the party’s founders.
Starmer, the Borg of politics, completed the assimilation of the Labour party into centre-right corporatism, transforming it into a party working to further and defend the interests of those the Labour party was founded to protect the working class from. Burnham, who is equally in hock to Labour’s Blairites, will not break from the path set out by Starmer before him except in minor cosmetic ways. Burnham has followed Starmer’s example by U-turning on a number of important promises even while the Commons was still in summer recess. Like Starmer before him these U-turns are always in a rightward direction.
Starmer leaves the Labour party in Scotland politically moribund. His legacy in Scotland is a party trapped in a hall of mirrors of knee-jerk über-unionism, admiring its own reflection as it diminishes and fades into infinity. Neither of the two intensely uninspiring candidates for the position of Scottish branch manager have the slightest idea how to turn things around, the one contender who did have a plan to rescue the Labour party in Scotland from its decades long pattern of self-indulgent intransigence was stitched up by the entrenched hierarchy and kept off the ballot. That’s as good an admission as you’ll ever get that Labour’s Scottish branch office, like the UK party of which it’s a part, has been stolen from its membership by corporate and vested interests and is incapable of meaningful change. The Labour rose has well and truly wilted.
Labour in Scotland faces an SNP which is embarking on another 5 years in government and which is getting back on an even keel after the upsets and dramas of the past few years. The Scottish Greens are stronger and more confident than they have ever been, and are hoovering up much of the old Labour left which is sympathetic to independence. Meanwhile the opposition to independence is politically fractured and is being increasingly seduced by far right wing ideas which are unpalatable to most people in Scotland. Burnham has not delivered the revival in Labour fortunes which the party might have hoped for. Starmer’s legacy was to deliver Labour a final general election victory at the price of pushing a stake through what was left of Labour’s left wing heart. The end of the Labour party as it was always historically understood means the end of any hopes of keeping Scotland content within the UK.
After wrestling for hours with PayPal, I have finally compiled a list of the emails of almost everyone who makes a regular monthly donation to the blog and will soon launch the weekly bonus premium email article for those who make a monthly contribution to the blog. I had hoped to launch this in June but unfortunately it will be delayed for a while. There are a number of people whose emails I am unable to find. Some people donate monthly by Ko-Fi, one makes a monthly donation to last year’s GoFundMe fundraiser, a few people make monthly payments directly by bank transfer. I cannot access the email addresses of any of these people and so cannot add them to the new mailing list. If you are one of these folk, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com and I’ll add you to the mailing list.
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