Business Sec stutters and waffles his way through interview but omits obvious
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds was asked this morning why, when unions and others have been warning Labour for months that the UK steel industry is on its last legs, he and his boss Keir Starmer did nothing until an emergency Commons session this weekend.
His waffled and stuttering answer did not mention the fact that Labour is in panic having just catastrophically lost by-elections, including in Reynolds’s home patch:
The point did not escape others:
Even now, Starmer and Reynolds are not doing the obvious and renationalising steel, instead introducing a law allowing the government to criminalise companies who close steel plants if told to keep them open and allowing neo-fascist Nigel Garage to make hay by calling for nationalisation.
Reynolds, who last year sold his time to business bosses at £30k a pop and helped defend his boss’s decision to keep poor children hungry, was happy this week to have allowed the Grangemouth oil refinery to close.
He and his boss don’t appear to actually care much about keeping Britain’s strategic industries alive, but they will act in panic if they think they’re going to lose their seats.
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Compare and contrast. Kuennsberg told us that saving the Scunthorpe steel plant might cost “enormous” sums of £3 billion, “which might mean adjusting the fiscal rules.” Kuennsberg has never mentioned the £10 BILLION London Tunnel….
These economic illiterates – and their cheerleading shills – only look at one side of the balance sheet because they are dumb reductionists and don’t do context and systemic analysis/thinking (if you can actually credit them with such an ability).
What about the savings from not being dependent upon steel imports whose price you cannot control? Workers incomes being spent back into the economy and the exchequer? The savings for social security payments?
What about the costs to economic and political sovereignty? The cost of wage depression, stifling demand in the economy? Debt deflation from the financial speculation in breaking these assets up and reducing productive value in the economy in favour of valueless rentier parasitism?
Who is paying these numpties to pauperise us and our sovereignty and how much are these traitors, quislings and Lord Haw Haw tribute acts selling the country out for?
I tell you what: you won’t get any coherent, grown up responses from this site’s (alleged) Caribbean egg layer and goat-botherer.
“Who is paying these numpties to pauperise us and our sovereignty and how much are these traitors, quislings and Lord Haw Haw tribute acts selling the country out for?”
Thing is, DH, nobody knows – but it’s the same set of reprobates that got Clinton to create a ‘surplus’, Obama to keep Guantanamo open, their successors to make Islamophobia the same as ‘the war on terror’.
Their identity doesn’t matter, just think of them as the “Deep State”. I do! https://off-guardian.org/2025/03/26/the-deep-state-revelations-cercle/
Of course the centrist Starmer Government is in panic-mode. It treats its own left like a dangerous enemy and rejects its advice. “Industrial Strategy”? It’s nothing more than PR statements to them.
LINO-centrists are closer to Netanyahu and Farage than “for the many, not the few”.
Wait till Herr Starmer and his Trilateral Commission/WEF serving administration takes the UK into the ‘Green Bin’ of US economic advisor Peter Navarro and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent – mentioned in this twenty-five minute Janet and John of TTT (Trumps Tariff Tantrum)….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=1ts5wJ6OfzA&ab_channel=Money%26Macro
……which spells out that the US wants to have its cake and eat it (keeping the US dollar as the reserve currency by making vassal states under the MAGA umbrella pay to keep the dollar value low by appreciating their own currency against the dollar to be able to trade with the US to give the US a competitive trade advantage).
Keeping the dollar as the reserve currency but getting vassal states to keep the value low (which I am led to understand from a lot of commentary will also reduce the US debt levels as well as make US exports more competitive) by increasing the value of their own currencies would seem to produce a result in which those vassal states make their own export industries uncompetitive. Effectively undermining their own economies and sealing them into a permanent debt dependency for the benefit of the USA.
This is the three card Monte carried out at a global level.
A betting man would start shorting the British economy, which is odds on favourite to jump straight into the Green Bin total vassal tutelage, effectively tying its currency to supporting a low value dollar as reserve currency against the interests of the UK economy making those of us who live here literal serfs and slaves of, and tied to, the collapsing US economy.
The present political so-called “elite’s” of all the economically illiterate neo-liberal party’s in the UK have all played significant parts in pauperising the Country. The present Continuity Conservatives (previously HM Loyal (to whom and what?) Opposition) are rapidly driving us over the edge.
Reform will be snapping at the heels of Rayner in her adjoining constituency too. Reynold’s Stalybridge & Hyde and Rayner’s Ashton under Lyne are very fertile grounds for Reform….
I wonder if Starmer/McSweeney are pondering on the wisdom of installing a Minister of State for Business and Trade who has absolutely no experience of either. Apart from a short period as ‘trainee solicitor’, Reynolds has spent his whole working life in politics. First as assistant to the then MP in his own constituency, then councillor in the same constituency, and now MP…
The by election defeat in Haringey was in Lammy’s constituency.
Swing to Green Party since 2022: 17.8%
Swing needed to defeat Lammy next time, 19.2% to the Green Party.
Here are the full by-election results
Green – Ruairidh Paton – 1,059 – 55.4%
Labour – Stephen Tawiah – 589 – 30.8%
Conservative – Calum McGillivray – 83 – 4.3%
Liberal Dems – David Beacham – 70 – 3.7%
Reform UK – David Stratford – 69 – 3.6%
TUSC – David Kaplan – 34 – 1.8%
Communist League – Tony Hunt – 8 – 0.4%
Majority – 470 – 24.6%
Turnout – 1,920 – 28.8%
Electorate: 6,657
State of the bold, you nonce-protecting meff.
Your gobshites are gonna get properly tanned in three weeks.
You’re completely unaware that even the toerags are to the left of smarmerism these days.
And after the locals, they’re so bereft of ideas that they’ll shit themselves and lurch even further right, whoring themselves to the fascistic in the idiotic expectation that they’ll appeal.
Well the fash might be thick as fuck**, but even they won’t wear your shower of carpetbagging careerists. At least not while they have an establishment dullard in keef fronting them.
Nobody likes keef. Except you. But then again, you like nonces.
**And almost as thick as you, but far less noncey.
Toffee – Why isn’t ‘the left’ more popular with the electorate?
The greens are on the left. I notice you didn’t bold them, did ya, you sneering wee shite?
I live in Scotland where there has been a left-leaning government for eighteen years, despite the system being set up so that no one party could get a majority (in theory). Remember that Starmer got fewer votes in 2024 than Corbyn in the election of 2019, which the Starmerites kept reminding us was the worst performance since 1935, despite Blair tanking in 2005. Like 2005, Starmer “won” with a tiny number of voters because people refused to vote Tory (and in 2005 Charlie Kennedy’s LDs up-skittled the two-party system. You’ll remember that Charlie Kennedy was well to the left of Blair, but the orange-bookers did to him what the Starmerites did to Corbyn!
Lumpen SH.
Brown 2010 8.3m.
Miliband/Reeves 2015 9.6m.
Corbyn 2017 12.8m (despite Right Wing Lab MPs sabotage & some staff sabotage).
Corbyn 2019 10.2m (despite Starmer, Blair, Mandelson Brexit sabotage hoping for Labour to lose as the only way to get rid of JC because the Grotesque couldn’t beat JC & US, his movement, on IDEAS).
Starmer 2024 9.6m (& Right Wing Lab got lucky as Reform split the Right vote & the Lib Dem’s cleaned up down South against the Tories over sewage in our rivers & sea as the Tories were seen as The Dirty Men & Women in Europe).
Should take steel into Democratic Public Ownership but as a workers co-op with trade union & community support with a Lucas type plan also supported by the finest academic minds.
And UK industry & citizens then encouraged to buy UK steel which is actually one of the finest in the world.
Bazza – ….and yet the 2 candidates on ‘the left’ only managed to attract a whole 42 votes between them. Do you have an explanation why?
42 voted the smarmerite didn’t get.
Does that make them tories?
Oh, no. Actually voting Tory – As you accuse people of doing, bit without calling people out because you have zero evidence – makes you a tory, doesn’t it, wee nonce-protecting gobshite? .
And even they’re to the left of smarmerism’….unless youre gonna finally and definitively tell us all how they’re not?
No? Then be quiet.
Toffee – You are right I don’t have any direct evidence that you or anyone else voted Tory but given that you have declared on numerous occasions on these pages that you’d rather vote for the Conservatives than Labour, was I wrong to take your word. Also at the 2019GE for the first time ever more of the working class (C2DE) voted Tory than voted Labour I don’t think that my assumption that some who contribute to these pages had voted Tory was unwarranted. Especially when one takes into consideration that it was not by just by a small margin but a massive 15%. In another first there were actually more middle class (ABC1) Labour voters than there were working class Labour voters.
Yes.
And given this has already been explained to you numerous times in different ways, one can only conclude that you are either suffering from alzheimer’s or consciously choosing to ignore the obvious because it does not suit your subjective agenda.
Let’s look a little deeper into Bazza’s argument:
Policies which are considered to be ‘left-wing’, such as public ownership, have consistently over time found a majority of the UK public in favour.
This, from IPSO in August 2023, provides a typical example.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/3-in-5-britons-would-prefer-utilities-to-be-publicly-owned-and-operated
Other polls over time are not dissimilar in terms of what are broadly accepted as ‘left-wing’ policies.
Yet, despite this and despite, as Bazza’s figures demonstrate, when such policies are seen to be on offer those offering such policies receive more votes than when they do not, the preferences of the majority for such policies are barely on the agenda of the British Establishment. They do not call the largest non-governing party in any Parliament The Loyal (to whom and to what) Opposition for nothing.
Considering the consistency of polls in favour of the ‘left-wing’ policy of ‘public ownership’ provides an insight as to why this is so. It would be more accurate, though ,to interpret this as being in favour of democratic control of the State in the very obvious face of oligarchic control of the State,
Though, that kind of question will never get asked as a result of the present oligarch controlled faux democracy in the UK and the Collective West in general.
And this was seen in the co-ordinated way in which what was dubbed the ‘Corbyn Project” was attacked not only from the outside but also from the inside of a Labour Party whose controlling bureaucratic and political cadre had, as with their counterparts in all officially endorsed Establishment party’s across the Collective West, been through the approved leadership programmes which have been run by the oligarchy since at least the end of WW2.
Corbyn may have been the individual under attack, but the real target was what policies were represented. And it would not have mattered if, instead of Corbyn, you had someone leading a Party offering policies which when boiled down to their essence are seeking to subordinate oligarch control to democratic control (as is the case with a number of contemporary examples which are out-performing the Western TINA system) who was a combination of Jesus of Nazareth, Buddha, Gandi, and an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) with an IQ in four figures. The attack would have been the same. For the same reasons – the maintenance of TINA.
This also works with other political positions – from nationalism (on which note, Starmer is on record as favouring WEF globalism over Westminster “Parliamentary Democracy”, Go figure!) to what are labelled “right-wing” political positions.
Anything which goes against The Official Narrative (economic neoliberalism and foreign policy neo-conservatism, which is morphing into neo-feudalism) is effectively outlawed – though the contemporary term these days is “Cancelled”. Prevented by various means from even contesting an election on the orders of unelected supra-national bodies stuffed with placemen and women who have been through the training and vetting system to root out non-approved political policies.
A process I have witnessed first hand.
Recent examples, in addition to the UK example we are considering, being Romania, Georgia, France and Germany.
And the majority of people are not stupid. They can read the runes. Which is why, just looking at the UK example, since the turn of the millennium the largest voting bloc in the UK in every General Election – as explained to you numerous times, Billy – has been Non of the above. The majority of voters – who clearly, even from rigged and controlled opinion polls, favour policies which are considered to be ‘left-wing’ by The Official Narrative which you shill for – know a rigged system when they experience it.
It’s why the Starmeroid and what he represents only received 20% of the vote from an electoral majority which voted with their/our feet by refusing to endorse an obvious rigged system which (a) removes favoured democratic control from the menu of options (you can have Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, Virgin Cola and Generic Cola but not Water); and (b) when Water is on offer floods every mode of communication with wall-to-wall propaganda 24/7 to undermine that offer – the way it did when it was offered in the Labour Party between 2015-2019.
Systemically what Tariq Ali dubbed “The Extreme Centre” cannot, as William Butler Yate’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ observes, hold. The majority will wait it out by giving these bought and paid for nonentities and their cheerleaders enough rope to hang themselves with as the TINA system decays beyond recovery – as the historical record demonstrates it has done so before.
That inevitability will certainly take a great many people under – possibly even thee and me, Billy. But your pathetic little attempts to shore it up won’t nudge the TINA system you have committed yourself to away from toppling over the edge. Your time would be better spent preparing a better safe space than where you (allegedly) are then trying to prevent the inevitable.
Dave – I guess that like everyone else you are entitled to your opinion.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Billy, just to recap the implied terms of your ridiculous statement :
You are actually going on record as claiming that:
– Public ownership is not widely considered as a left-wing policy position and is mere subjective opinion;
– Regular opinion polls do not find a majority of the UK electorate in favour of public ownership, and any such claim has no objective basis;
– Public ownership does not equate to democratic public control.
– The General Election vote for the LP has not been greater in recent elections when it has offered left wing policies than when it has not – as per the statistics posted by Bazza.
– Opinion polls on the subject of Public Ownership regularly pose the question as to whether or not the electorate prefer the State to be controlled by a financial creditor oligarchy for the benefit of a minority of wealthy individuals or whether those wealthy individuals should be subordinate to democratic control by the majority for the wider public good.
– The main opposition party in the Westminster Parliament is not officially known as HM Loyal Opposition.
– Jeremy Corbyn and the policies he represented were not subject to a co-ordinated attack from every media outlet and from within parts of the LP. Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, any such suggestion is only an opinion.
– The US have not run leadership programmes since WW2, and more recently the WEF, seeking to place controlled individuals into decision-making positions across political parties throughout the Collective West.
– It is not an objective fact that Corbyn was vilified for his policies.
– The policies of the LP under Corbyn were no different to that of previous Labour leaderships since Blair.
– US officials have not publicly conceded the neoliberal TINA system cannot compete with more successful existing alternatives to that system.
– Keir Starmer is not on record as preferring the WEF to the Westminster Parliament.
– The Overton Window does not exist.
– There are no unelected Officials running the decision-making process in the EU.
– Romania has not had its Presidential Elections stopped as a result of pressure from unelected EU Officials.
– The Georgian Presidential Elections were not subject to interference from European and EU politicians.
– The EU and France have not recently used lawfare to prevent the leader of a political party in France from standing in the next French Presidential Elections.
– The German Coalition was not defeated in the recent German Elections.
– The same German Coalition is not seeking to exclude other parties which were not part of that coalition from being part of the post-Election coalition.
– The majority of the UK electorate are stupid.
– It is not the case that the largest single bloc of votes in every UK election this century (21st Century) has been non-voting/spoilt papers.
– The Labour Party under Starmer did not receive only around 20% of the votes of the entire electorate eligible to vote in last year’s UK General Election.
– It is not the case that every mainstream UK political party has policies which are variants of neoliberalism and neo-conservatism.
– Neoliberalism is not a system at odds with Adam Smith and is not based on a Creditor Oligarchy.
– The historical record does not demonstrate that societies run by a Creditor Oligarchy inevitably collapse.
Now, I can source chapter and verse with objective evidence to the contrary for all of the above, Billy.
You come back to me with your bullshit about subjective opinion if you can ever substantiate with objective evidence your ridiculous claim.
I well & truly skewered you with our side’s Corbyn’s 12.8m & 10.2m (despite your sides sabotage causing millions of diverse w class people to suffer under the Tories cos your side didn’t give a damn about them but only about themselves) in the biggest vote that counts a General Election as the best your side could get (in a free run) is 9.6m in a General Election, could you explain this?
Oh you never ever replied when I said the Left criticised Putin over Chechnya but Blair on your side shortly afterwards rushed to Moscow to congratulate him on becoming President & gave him a UK state visit.
Why there’s Cherie Blair on your side giving Putin a kiss on both cheeks outside No 10 and why there’s Mr Putin in a gold carriage with the Queen on his way to a State Banquet at Buckingham Palace with MPs of all parties fighting to get in!
Could you explain this?
Back in your Box Bonehead!