Starmer so bereft of policies and decent photo opportunities he has to recycle old image with lad placed to disguise it – not the first such embarrassment for right-wing Labour
Keir Starmer has tweeted to thank Holborn and St Pancras Labour members for reselecting him to stand in the next general election – with an image showing him holding a campaign placard from Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership that features Corbyn on it, but with a young boy positioned to disguise the reality.
But sharp-eyed social media users recognised the design nonetheless and Evolve Politics tweeted the original:
Keir Starmer’s party is not, of course, putting people before privilege – in fact the right-ridden husk that now passes for Labour is thoroughly committed to protecting privilege, whether that’s Starmer’s sycophantic reflex ‘I support the government’ or his Heep-like toadying to Buckingham Palace residents.
The image Starmer tweeted of him holding the placard is not a new one. It dates back to at least 2020, according to a Google search. One sure giveaway is the prominent place of Muslim members in the image – Labour’s two-year war on supporters of Palestine and the entrenched, unrepentant and emphatically unpunished Islamophobia and racism of the Labour right mean that Starmer would probably struggle to find Muslim members willing to be photographed with him now.
So he presumably felt forced to regurgitate the old image – which even in April 2020 he felt obliged to disguise to keep his far more illustrious predecessor out of the frame.
And it’s not the first time that Starmer’s Labour has had to steal images from the Corbyn period to try to create an impression of excitement and popularity. The party has notoriously – and more than once – used an image from a Corbyn rally in which the pro-Corbyn message on a prominent placard had been photoshopped out and replaced with the word ‘Labour.
Starmer would have a fight on his hands to fill a phone box, let alone drum up mass attendance for a rally, so ‘needs must’ – but it’s still both hideously embarrassing and simultaneously a chilling reminder of the desolation of current one-party-two-rosettes parliamentary politics landscape.
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