Mexico’s Sheinbaum puts Starmer to shame on health, care, wages, economy, Gaza and everything else

Left-wing president has vision, competence, backbone, puts the people first – and is likable – everything the Starver is not

Mexica’s socialist president Claudia Sheinbaum’s ‘state of the union’ address to the her people was an object lesson not only for her fascist-ridden neighbours to the north, but to the dire UK Tory/red Tory/Reform triopoly that continues to destroy everything that our country built over decades for the good of the British people, to enrich the obscenely wealthy even further and to protect Israel and other imperial interests.

Sheinbaum trailed her speech with a summary last week of her government’s achievements in health and social care – just over the last year, which make the US healthcare system look like that of a failed state and shames the Tory/red Tory war on the UK’s NHS. Starting from a far weaker economic position than either:

This year we delivered 31 hospitals, 12 health centers and we are equipping 256 operating rooms. And we begin construction of 20 hospitals… we are delivering healthcare to every elderly and disabled person’s home

Claudia Sheinbaum.

Under these policies, Mexico’s economy continues to grow and to exceed analysts’ forecasts. Despite being twice the size of Mexico’s economy, UK economic growth is tiny and slowing.

In stark contrast, the Starmer government – after fourteen years of Tory destruction of the once-great NHS – has announced a ‘slash and burn’ plan of further cuts, closures and privatisation and further embedding of the ‘integrated care’ system designed to ration and deny treatment to maximise profits, while closing or downgrading all but a handful of hospital centres and even replacing fully qualified doctors and nurses with part-trained ‘associates’, a move that it knows will kill people (and already has).

Starmer also binned his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to introduce a free National Care Service alongside the NHS, condemning the elderly to lose their homes and life savings if they need care, and scrapped Tory plans to put a cap on care costs.

In the US, already the most expensive and least efficient service of any developed economy in the world, Trump’s legislation – as US Senator Bernie Sanders’s health lead Warren Gunnels commented in response to Sheinbaum’s video – is:

• closing 569 nursing homes
• shutting down at least 338 hospitals will shut down and potentially well over 700
• depriving 15 million people of their health insurance
• depriving 10 million people of care at community health centres
• increasing health insurance premiums by 75%
• kill an additional 51,000 people every year

But it’s not only on health that Sheinbaum shames and outshines the appalling Thatcher Starmer. While Starmer attacks the UK’s paltry benefits system as ‘unsustainable’ and wages war on the sick and disabled, yet keeps the minimum wage far short of the real living wage, even more so for young workers, Sheinbaum has attacked economic inequality by raising Mexico’s minimum wage in 2025 by 12% – a cumulative real-terms increase of 135% since 2018.

While the UK, one of the world’s notionally richest nations, inexcusably has more than thirteen million people in poverty including more than four million children – and one of Starmer’s first moves was to keep those children poor and hungry – Sheinbaum’s and her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s wage drive has lifted more than thirteen million out of poverty. This has been achieved without causing rocketing inflation – as Sheinbaum put it, this destroys “the absurd belief that increasing [the minimum wage] would provoke inflation”:

For the people

While Trump tries to change US laws to allow him to deport even US citizens – and his minions declare that he’ll do so regardless – and invades US cities with troops if they dare to resist his fascism, Starmer is waging war on UK citizens’ rights of freedom of speech and assembly, to protect Israel, billionaires and corporations, even classifying a non-violent group as ‘terrorists’ so the police can abuse that classification to attack any form of anti-genocide or eco-protest.

In Mexico, as well as lifting millions out of poverty, Sheinbaum has introduced constitutional reforms to recognise and extend the rights of ordinary people and indigenous groups and to return of lands, water concessions and justice to those deprived of them.

While Trump has stacked the US Supreme Court with far-right ideologues and Starmer is subordinating the UK justice system to the interests of Israel and of exploitative corporations, Sheinbaum has this week made Mexico’s Supreme Court a body elected by the people for the first time:

Spine/less

And while Starmer – a habit long before he was ushered into Downing Street thanks to the far right – reflexively grovels and brown-noses Trump and US power and acts more in the interests of Israel and corporate power than of ordinary UK people, Sheinbaum has stood up to all of them.

When Trump tried to browbeat Mexico into accepting punitive and unilateral tariffs, Sheinbaum stood up to him repeatedly and told him that any tariffs imposed on Mexico would be met by similar Mexican tariffs on the US – Trump backed down; when Trump demanded Mexico start calling the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America’, she responded that Mexico would rename a large portion of the US to its earlier name of ‘America Mexicana’; when Trump tried to scapegoat Mexico for US drug problems, she pointed out that 80% of fentanyl traffickers are Americans, 74% of guns in Mexico come from the US and the opioid crisis was started by US Big Pharma.

Trump and Starmer have moved to prevent Palestinian refugees receiving asylum in the US and UK; Trump has banned even wounded children from Gaza from coming to the US for medical treatment and Starmer is actively blocking wounded children from coming to the UK and vowed to close a loophole meant only for [white] Ukrainians that a court used to allow a Gaza family to live in the UK.

Both continue to assist and enable Israel to slaughter Palestinian civilians: without massive US financial and military support the racist colony would almost instantly collapse; Starmer continues to provide the Israeli military with RAF spy flights over Gaza, is waging his ‘lawfare’ war on UK journalism, protest and resistance and constantly provides political cover while involving Israeli officials and pro-Israel groups in the legal decisions of the UK government.

Sheinbaum, who is Jewish, has frequently condemned Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people, called for the immediate and global recognition of a Palestinian state and is supporting a law to allow free access to Mexico for wounded or orphaned Palestinian children.

The impact of these policies and principles are clear: a year into her tenure as president, Sheinbaum continues to enjoy public approval levels of more than 70%. Starmer’s already poor ratings sank like a stone after the 2024 general election and, along with those of his party, are at all-time lows.

While Starmer tries to pretend the people of the UK reject left-wing politics, close to a million have now joined the new, left-wing ‘Your Party’ and overwhelming majorities support the full renationalisation of the NHS, postal service, utilities, rail and other key infrastructure. There’s a reason why left-wing policies are popular and Claudia Sheinbaum, despite the bullying, bluster and sabotage of its neighbour to the north, is showing why – and putting the dire Starmer to shame.

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