Labour is still the party of Greta Thunberg, trans extremists and pro-Hamas hate mobs

Keir Starmer won’t tell us his actual plans, so we must rely on what we know about the Left’s instincts

Source - Daily Telegraph 24/05/24

Since Labour is still refusing to tell us what it will actually do in office – despite the very real prospect of Sir Keir Starmer leading the UK in less than six weeks’ time – we must rely on what we know about the party’s instincts, its supporters, and what its leading figures have said in the past.

Starmer spent most of Friday morning insisting that he isn’t “tribal” in a bid to convince the electorate that he’s more Blair than Corbyn. But in the vein of a former director of public prosecutions, let’s examine the evidence. There’s a paginated bundle on the KC’s radical ideas and it paints a very worrying picture indeed for the future of Britain.

Exhibit one is Starmer’s launch video for his Labour leadership campaign. Released in January 2020, the footage could easily be mistaken for the trailer of a Ken Loach film starring Maxine Peake.

In it, Starmer and his supporters speak of their pride in the man who wants to be the next prime minister defending environmental activists, securing benefits for asylum seekers, and standing up for the trade unions. We are reminded that he was opposed to the Iraq war, battled to stop Brexit, and fought any attempt to “sell off” the NHS. He boasted of wanting to “stand up for the powerless against the powerful” with a “green new deal” and to “promote peace and justice around the world with a human rights-based foreign policy”.

Inviting Labour members to “unify around a radical programme”, he suggested that our economic model needed to be “rebuilt in place of the failed free market one”. He also called for a halt to the division in our country – before taking the knee five months later at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests.

He may have since distanced himself from these unashamedly Left-wing pledges, but as he said back then: “I’m a socialist.” All the flip-flopping in the world cannot change the fact that this man has only ever walked a progressive walk. Sure, he’s abandoned some of his more militant tendencies in the interests of political expediency, channelling his inner Marx (Groucho not Karl): “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them... well, I have others.” But once a socialist, always a socialist.

It also isn’t true to say that he has completely changed his policy agenda since that video was released. With Starmer still seemingly confused over whether or not a woman can have a penis, Labour appears to be plotting to introduce gender self-identification by the back door.

Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, may have had second thoughts about his “trans women are women” mantra, but Anneliese Dodds, who is hoping to be the next secretary of state for women and equalities, has come up with the Sturgeonesque idea of allowing a single doctor to sign off a gender change. So much for the Cass Review.

Such is Starmer’s apparent contempt for his colleague Rosie Duffield, one of the only Labour MPs to speak out against this Stonewall-induced madness, he didn’t even invite her to his campaign launch in Kent, despite her being the party’s only MP in the county until Natalie Elphicke’s defection. Labour: the party of women, provided they think men can have cervixes.

Elsewhere we have David Lammy, who is hoping to be the next foreign secretary, showing himself to be completely unfit to hold one of the great offices of state by implicitly supporting the application by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to seek arrest warrants for two senior members of the Israeli government, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a win for the murderous terrorists of Hamas, Lammy has also jumped onto the bandwagon of backing the recognition of Palestinian statehood, following the knee-jerk, virtue-signalling example of Ireland, Spain and Norway.

It should hardly be surprising, since the Tottenham MP nominated Jeremy Corbyn, a former chairman of the Stop the War Coalition, for the Labour leadership in 2015, and refused to vote for the renewal of the Trident nuclear submarine fleet. He is now in the process of sucking up to Republicans in the US, having once undiplomatically denounced Donald Trump as a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”. Presumably he thinks the Americans have short memories. But the electorate never forgets.

We are already witnessing Angela Rayner, the woman hoping to be the next deputy prime minister, caving in to pressure from the unions for a New Deal For Working People that could well bankrupt a great many of our small and medium-sized business, still recovering from Covid and the cost-of-living crisis. Up with the worker, but down with the employer that pays their wages, seems to be the Labour vibe, in spite of shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s guff about being the party of business.

Labour is pushing ahead with its politics of envy policy of adding VAT to private school fees, potentially forcing thousands of pupils into the state sector, with no extra class spaces to accommodate them. Meanwhile, Labour’s quest to decarbonise the grid by 2030 continues apace, despite confusion over how many billions it will cost the taxpayer – not to mention how on earth we will keep the lights on.

And that’s only to consider those few policies Labour has actually told us about. What will its instincts be in government? How capable will Starmer be of resisting the increasingly radical forces of the Left? Labour has already weakened its policy on Israel after a revolt among some of its voters. Which voters will it seek to appease next? Will it be the so-called centrists? Or will it be those attracted to the Greens and George Galloway’s Workers Party?

This is not 1997. The Labour offering is not moderate Blairism with the grown-ups in charge. Behind the outward facade of moderation, I fear that Labour will revert to the juvenile politics of idealistic but unrealistic university campuses. The politics of the kinds of people who chant “From the river to the sea” with little or no understanding of what it means. The politics of those who feel the need to state their pronouns and suggest that there are 72 different genders.

The politics of Greta Thunberg and the eco-ultras who think it’s legitimate to attack Magna Carta as part of an environmental protest. The politics of those who think nothing of turfing Colston’s statue into Bristol harbour, egged on by an organisation that wants to “defund the police”. The politics of those who want to apologise for this great nation’s history; who think we should bankrupt the country for net zero. The politics of those who advocate an open border policy; the very people who want to stop buses and flights from deporting migrants, even when they are convicted rapists.

The risk is that this is what a vote for Labour now represents: a vote for the eco-zealots, trans extremists and the pro-Hamas hate mobs. And if you think it’s bad now, just wait until these people are in office.