‘Effective opposition’…
An Ipsos Mori poll has found that the public thinks TV presenter Piers Morgan – and even the tame journalists allowed to ask questions at the government’s daily briefings – are doing a better job than Labour leader Keir Starmer at holding Boris Johnson’s government to account over its mishandling of the coronavirus crisis.
In fact, it finds that the public thinks everyone is doing a better job than Starmer – except the Labour Party’s other spokespeople.
Even among Labour voters, only 33% think Labour’s front bench team under Starmer is doing a good job.
Starmer’s cheerleaders keep calling his approach ‘forensic’, although normally forensic means deeply and minutely searching rather than enabling and congratulatory. It seems the wider public isn’t fooled by this spin.
Starmer seems to have fallen for the line that highlighting and attacking the Tories’ endless failures and lies will be seen by the public as disloyal or unpatriotic. It’s eerily reminiscent of the spinelessness of Labour under Brown and then Miliband, when the supposed Opposition didn’t dare challenge the nonsensical lie that Labour caused the financial crash and allowed that nonsensical idea to become entrenched – and then fooled itself into thinking the public would be impressed if Labour talked tougher on spending and benefits claimants than the Tories.
Starmer is no novice to the front bench. If he can’t do better than this, he’s in the wrong job at the wrong time. People are dying needlessly – the people of this country need an Official Opposition, not an Official Facilitation.
The SKWAWKBOX needs your support. This blog is provided free of charge but depends on the generosity of its readers to be viable. If you can afford to, please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here for a monthly donation via GoCardless. Thanks for your solidarity so this blog can keep bringing you information the Establishment would prefer you not to know about.
If you wish to reblog this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
I agree with the public🌹🌹🌹
Richard Branson a Tax Exile in the British Virgin Islands and Malta. Virgin Active made 170 million in 2018 and got tax credits‼️‼️‼️ He has not paid APPROPRIATE tax for several years. It is effect money laundering. Our government should not be using taxpayers money to pay Branson a penney‼️‼️‼️
ps I will NOT be downloading any tracing app. We are well able to trace without it. If this government were interested in reducing infections, then they would have been tracing months ago and not allowing people to waltz through Heathrow without screening.
Plus there is NO honest reason for paying MILLIONS to private outfits to harvest OUR private data for their money grabbing and SINISTER interests. If The “Opposition” had any worth, Dire Stoma would insists that this government tell us NOW, how many MILLIONS are being paid to EACH individual, organisation, company and bank, to harvest our data‼️‼️‼️
Never download ANYTHING that has a government stamp and security services involvement.
Unable to tell people what to do, but i most CERTAINLY won’t be downloading any dodgy app. If the govt had any intention of really tracing, they would have done so ages ago and at our air and seaports ESPECIALLY Heathrow, since January. They would have allowed the NHS to test. They DENIED tests to thousands of patients and staff. QUESTIONS: how did Theresa May track and trace Windrush victims??? All the victims of her hostile environment??? Did Theresa have an App???
Which will save lives NOW: PPE, testing, ICU equipment & staff + a halt to discharging DELIBERATELY untested symptomatic patients, and admitting symptomatic patients OR a MULTIMILLION £££ public funded PRIVATE App with an “NHS” lablel⁉️⁉️⁉️ It will be just like the UNBUILT private garden toll bridge that gobbled up between £40 and £75 MILLION of public funds.
Has anyone heard Kier Starmer, the “camel hand-break” ask a question on the above⁉️⁉️⁉️
Indeed. The ‘public’ appears in this instance to have upped its game. If they carry on like this I might join!
Doug or Toffee asked, – Only around 50 patients treated so far at London “Nightingale” hospital. Number of beds – at least 3,500. Almost all of the beds are UNSTAFFED. The rest are extremely understaffed and without ICU training. Those that are were stolen from existing hospitals. Equipment is inadequate.
Therefore, £££ MILLIONS spent, not counting the military but THOUSANDS of patients turned away. Many thousands died. Those deaths were AVOIDABLE.
Midlands and northern deaths are outstripping London. Up to last week, Birmingham “Nightingale” “hospital” had treated ZERO patients. All over the UK, THOUSANDS of people and patients were denied testing, denied ANY hospital admission. Patients already in hospital were pushed out to care homes. RESULT – TESTED NHS hospital deaths ➕ MUCH smaller number of Care-home TESTED deaths are around THIRTY THOUSAND. The true figures of EXCESS deaths due to Covid-19 are horrendous. Effective message management by this government and a compliant Kier Starmer “Opposition”.
By the time the Excess deaths are available, Starmer will ask for an inquiry, the government will OF COURSE agree… to kick their DELIBERATE ACTS & CALLOUS NEGLIGENCE, into the long grass.
Watch out for “We must wait for the Inquiry to report” + “This is not the time to criticise” + “benefit of hindsight”. “Benefit of hindsight” bat, so well coached, that in the first or second press briefing, that bat, was used by the lady “scientist”. In line no doubt for a bauble of Dame-hood or Baroness Covid-19, the bat was used even then. Wish the “Left” could be as prepared even 1% as much as the 1%.
As I expected, Starmer is proving to be useless.
career starmer’s worse than useless; he’s a toerag asset.
Even worse than that‼️‼️‼️ How he manages no one knows. Meanwhile the people of the Isle of Wight will have the snooping App “tested” on them. Fancy that!!! No Covid-19 testing but testing a snooping tool. This government will spin it as an “NHS” App in order to deceive Isle of Wight residents then any other gullible takers. QUESTION: Anyone heard Dire Stoma & Jonnie Arseworth banging their pompoms cheering on johnson for their latest scam⁉️⁉️⁉️ Ferry contract with no ferries Grant Shapps is poster spiv for their flogging our data tool… so expect a sailing success.
BTW, this lousy govt repeats “following the science” but hiding what that science is. They are refusing to answer questions. Cummings sat with the scientist. Yet will try to spin that HE overruled the scientists to implement lockdown. Work that one out. Follow the scientist but over rule them to go against your aim of “herd immunity”… though you are not a scientist. Hmmm Yes, Cummings thinks that everyone is as dull as Kier Starmer. Cummings & johnson thinks the people of the Isle of Wight are as exploitable and dim as the dull Dull DULL kier starmer. 🌹🌹🌹
SPNWC Meanwhile the people of the Isle of Wight will have the snooping App “tested” on them.
That’ll include David Icke, won’t it? 😉
C’mon, give him a chance!
That’s enough…….OK Piers, show Sir Starmer the way.
I am not surprised at all. Max Headroom is and always has been a toady for the ruling class. How he achieved front bench stature remains a mystery. How sorry why did the party elect him. Well, who else did you have to choose from. Let’s see if he will raise the dead, forensically of course. Sympathy to true socialists everywhere, you know that the situation is irretrievable. Take care all.
Erik Armrest is a total political Fraud – a Right-Wing Establishment Stooge who is likely to plumb depths below Gordon Brown and sideline the Labour Party as an effective political force – he is so dull, so wooden, his lack of passion and purpose will be glaringly obvious to anyone who is bothered to look. After Corbyn the Labour brand will be less popular than Macron is in France.
This poll shows more disturbing stuff than simply dissing Starmer.
It’s really not good news. Look at the polling figures in a time of thought-control!
… and before getting too ecstatic about poll findings that seemingly support a particular viewpoint- remember that Corbyn’s approval rating was at 20% at the time of the election.
Such is the judgment of the Great British Public – it’s double-edged.
The difference between the two is stark. One has the media behind them, the other had them against him.
The greasy Easter Island-head is as much use as a handbrake on a camel, and provides as much opposition as eric pickles does to a pie shop.
When he was DPP starmer point-blank refused to prosecute damien grope, and resigned on the day the met police said grant shapps’ *ahem* ‘dealings’ may have constituted fraud.
That told me all I needed know about starmer.
@Toffee
Great post 👍
“greasy Easter Island-head is as much use as a handbrake on a camel, and provides as much opposition as eric pickles does to a pie shop. ”
Toffee – your talents are boundless🥇🥇🥇 May i borrow those two? esp the hand-break. BRILLIANT 😂😂😂
#Starmergeddon
Sir Steer Calmer – up shit creek without a paddle.
Nah, if anyone knows where they are going it’s him.
Too true, Skwawkie. This laughably spineless non-opposition by Starmer’s, recaptured for the careerist, corrupt, status-quo-supporting Right, Labour Party, is all too reminiscent of Labour’s abstention on that vicious Welfare Bill just before Jeremy stood for the first Leadership contest . And that will be the future too, with a Right dominated Front Bench now in full collaborationist mode – quite incapable of offering anything to our lost working class voters to attract them back to the fold. Labour is from now on just a Tory-lite Party, not different in any real way from the Lib Dems – and only speaking to the mainly middle class voters in the South and the big cities. A hopeless political ‘offer’ for a Party hoping to one day be a government. Labour, like the German SPD (in permanent coalition with the Christian Democrat German Tories), the Greek PASOK (and Syriza too now), and the French Socialist Party, are all permanently fucked electorally by their inability to break from the toxic, failed, neoliberal consensus of the last 30 years.
And remember, in the near future, with the costs of coronavirus producing a National Debt of 1918 proportions in the UK and elsewhere, the capitalist class and their Tory Party will demand a new Austerity on steroids, dwarfing anything seen in 2010 to 2019, to repay that debt (to themselves). A collaborationist Labour Party will be utterly irrelevant to the coming struggle against that new Austerity offensive. A new political vehicle for organising mass struggle is vitally needed, no matter how hugely difficult it will be to build, and how pathetically unfit the largely middle class, irrelevant identity politics-infused, UK Left is to build it.
Terrific post! X
“that new Austerity offensive”.
If they try pulling that one again, they’re in for a shock. People won’t stand for it in 2020, though it’d be typically deluded of the Tories to try it on.
I have seen creatures at the bottoms of ponds with more charisma and charm than starmer.
He’s the type of ‘person’ that makes ‘zip-a-dee-doo-dah’ sound like a funeral dirge. Whenever he speaks, somewhere a dog vomits.
John Cooper Clarke wrote this almost 40 years ago… Everything therein fits starmer to a tee. Did JCC see him coming?
https://youtu.be/DBg_wscigZM
Nice one. Particularly prescient is the line “What kind of creature bore you, was it some kinda bat?”
There you have it. The Labour RW are a virus! 😁
But The Guardian told me he was amazing…
Yes, that’s right – They also had an editorial ‘In praise of iain dummkopf-schmitt’.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/29/iain-duncan-smith-welfare
Error message should read “iain dummkopf-shitt’”
There is much more the opposition could be doing which should cover a wide range of issues. The government went into the last election with no published social care policy. Social care has been kicked down the road for years by the Conservative governments. This sector of the health care system has suffered severely in the outbreak. Questions such as when will they publish their full policy and how they propose to solve the crisis are not being asked. Under the cover of this pandemic lots will be going on behind the headlines.
In the last press conference held by Boris he stated that he did not like the use of the word austerity when applied to government policy. This was an admission that these policies have not ended.
Ah the public appears to be responding well to the narrative and banter of the approved ‘controlled opposition’… what a jolly show. In the meantime free speech is being crushed under jack boot and the nanny state ushered in with the ‘left’ as cheerleaders for a totalitarian state.
Maria – I’m glad someone is awake and looking at the wider picture. What frightens me isn’t the virus (even tho’ I’m in that group that *really* does need to watch its back on the basis of real evidence) – it”s the willingness of the public to unquestioningly accept martial law-type restrictions on the basis of ???
That compliance is the major case of much needed opposition lying down and having a fag below the parapet.
Ditto.
I am becoming increasingly afraid of what ‘we’ are walking into willingly, many even asking for Gov to do far more ,for far longer, to restrict us and what we are able to say, read, hear. Many opposed to the oppression and silencing of Assange, who exposed heinous crimes of Govs, are now screaming for non Gov approved, voices they don’t agree with, to be censored and silenced.. that old saying “first they came for…” hasn’t only gone out the window but is being championed by many who have had threat of censorship over their own heads.
In nerd mode, I’ve spent a couple of hours today trying to find evidence, using available data, to support current policies about the severity of this epidemic and the lockdown measures.
There is none – even in a country like this that has an apparently relatively high level of infection.
In scientific terms, it’s all in the 5G category!
I think RH is just pissed off that he took his money out of Boeing and put it in British Airways.
Where are all the cheer leaders for the knight of the realm, where are all his supporters who said he was the best of a bad bunch and told us there was no choice if we wanted a credible opposition. Not a peep out of them!
His supporters are sitting on the government benches, reading the Guardian and giving us orders. One hour exercise a day. What are we ? Prisoners or something?
Brian, you don’t mean steveH by any chance?
Among others.
This from Labour Against the Witch Hunt who are running a to CLPs and LP branches – Furthermore, we note with great concern that Jonathan Goldstein, chair of the Jewish Leadership Council, reports that he had a meeting with Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner where, “it was agreed that no Labour MP should be sharing a platform with anyone expelled from the party for anti-Jewish racism“. The validity of many of these cases is being energetically challenged by many of the accused and their supporters. Furthermore, the leader of the Labour Party is not entitled to make such a promise: The policies and rules of the Labour Party are determined by its members at annual conference. If Keir Starmer has made such an undertaking, he must be reprimanded and ordered to withdraw it.
Thanks for that Carlene, all the way down these comments it’s been bugging me that I couldn’t remember Starmer’s given name.
Keir. Of course. About as appropriate as Vladimir Ilyich Johnson.
In my head he’s been Stuffy Starmer for so long I’d genuinely forgotten.
‘The policies and rules of the Labour Party are determined by its members at annual conference. If Keir Starmer has made such an undertaking, he must be reprimanded and ordered to withdraw it.’
Starmer is making up the rules as he goes along, he thinks he’s still at the CPS, dishing out orders and deciding who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t. This gives us a taste of hiscdecision making at the CPS
‘Starmer is no novice to the front bench. If he can’t do better than this, he’s in the wrong job at the wrong time. People are dying needlessly – the people of this country need an Official Opposition, not an Official Facilitation.’ I think you’ll find he is doing exactly the job he was planted there for.
A petition to CLPs and branches, I meant to say above.
It’s scary, but I have to agree with the statement.
Absolutely. The Tories surely can’t believe their luck! They should be in such deep shit with their appalling performance directly causing tens of thousands of deaths, but Starmer and Labour are self-muzzled, hardly daring to say a word about it all, just some polite ‘oh dear’ hand wringing on the sidelines. Johnson and Hancock et all must be laughing themselves to sleep every night.
“The Tories surely can’t believe their luck!”
… especially with parts of the so-called ‘Left’ endorsing the semi-martial law policy!
All their birthdays have come at once with this diversion from economic reality.
What ‘semi-martial law policy’?
Meanwhile Michael Gove is late with the daily press conference spin fest. Maybe he’s trying to decide a dirty way to wash their nasty turd App the poor people of the Isle of Wight will be “persuaded” … “strongly encouraged” to download. BE WARNED DVLA data was discovered loose in Utah about 9 years ago. I’v been to Utah. How DVLA data of UK citizens got to a place like that ??? Maybe Gove can tell us. Meanwhile lets see if the “journalist” will ask the govt to pledge not to flog the data to their Tory donors directly or indirectly AT ANY TIME❓❓❓
I can’t believe how any sane person can believe a word that dribbles form the mouth of this slimy creature.
Noel
https://youtu.be/8moePxHpvok
Starmer is an establishment stooge imo , dead simple and when you accept /understand that it is much clearer to grasp why he is saying and doing what he is doing.
To some of us it was clear which is why we didn’t vote for him , now the party is finished as any form of real working class socialist representation .
IMO it is futile to waste effort/time on trying to change that fact and much better to expend effort using Labours organisational infrastructure /comms channels and grass roots activists in creating within Labour a new party ready to breakout when sufficiently established .
The RW have effectively managed exactly that via the PLP which is in itself an autonomous party within a party.
We should look listen and LEARN ! and Forward Momentum appears to be an early iteration of that strategy/idea.
rob
Would be happy to bear your children
Any fucker proposing we leave and start another party is a red Tory bottom feeder
A blind man with a shitty stick can see what needs to happen, so let’s just get on with it
rob what we gonna call our first child, Jeremy or Grace
Don’t care so long as it is not still born and we must make dam sure its not hence my support and efforts to Fwd Momentum.. In fact despite despising Lansman I am trying to rejoin it so as to be able to support and vote for the Fwd Momentum candidates that are going to be fielded in the forth coming NCG elections. I’d urge everyone who can stomach Lansman , to do the same and vote to make it a positive change .
Don’t moan ORGANISE as Lavery said !
Doug don’t misunderstand my point here , I don’t see a way of saving Labour , it’s just too far gone imo to change or be changed .I favour the fifth columnist approach of using the established structures and networks to recruit and build the socialist party within and then if necessary breakout and leave Labour if it is obvious that it’s not possible to break the strangle hold of the RW on it , otherwise staying under those circumstances would result in the ultimate strangling of the new party , as we have seen too clearly with the Corbyn project .
The ultimate goal is to help and represent the working class , that is all one wants to do, and the present bunch of PLP bastards as we know have no real interest in doing so
A red Tory bottom feeder… Well mate YMMV on that one.
The right wing corruption is endemic. You won’t stop it. It’ll never go away. There’s no one out there capable of such a feat.
I find myself quoting Jess Phillips (will be off to the bathroom to burn my clothes etc afterwards).
“I owe the Red Rose no allegiance”
In my case, I went without money I could not afford to support Corbyn. I sponsored those shafting me. Never again!
Who is more the fool? The fool? Or the fool that follows?
An alternative pov from Jonathon Cook ref 5G
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=rm&ogbl#inbox/FMfcgxwHNCrgCCJwxcWXWDfDccNrVcQf
Yes I am afraid a translation of Starmer I would siggest is:
Dear Rich & Powerful, I am no threat to you, all I ask for is a few crumbs we can toss to for working people then we can get back to the Parliament cosy club and we will give Neo-Liberal capitalism a free reign!
But perhaps history had passed Labour moderates “The extreme centre” by?
Two questions are: will the great Left in Labour spend 10 years fighting the dominant right for little return?
And for us ex-Labour, can we offer a Left Wing Democratic Socialist Party?
Chris Williamson’s group is intetesting is built around him & Galloway?
When Perhaps when this crisis is over both Lefts need to talk and work out how we can build a left wing democratic socialism WITH and not like the top downers FOR!
Solidarity!
One can only wonder at the motives of the minority of Labour party members that voted for a establishment knight of the realm,With such an apalling track record and the Label of Sir keir Starmer the establishment lacky ….clear for all to see?Could we have seen another rigged election,because everyone I come.across in the international Labour party claim not to have voted forhim Clearly the “Establishment Plant” is little more than the opposite of a Socialist Labour party and the Title and performance reflect this.
ignore the rough boys keiri-dearie, go to your room and i’ll bring you ovaltine and a fairy story.
“…and then fooled itself into thinking the public would be impressed if Labour talked tougher on spending and benefit claimants than the Tories”.
That’ll be terminal fuckwit Rachel Reeves then, newly restored to the Shadow Cabinet. (Sigh)