+Better late than never (I was away last weekend too, in Glasgow for the Tectonics Festival) I guess some comments are called for in the wake of the local election results, which have proven that Labour is well on course for general election success. Writing in the New Statesman, George Eaton sees a Labour government developing three strong themes, the Common Good, Securonomics and Progressive Realism. We should see through left-wing criticisms of a lack lustre policy bag and recognise technocratic pragmatism (not Eaton's words). It's less about the what and more about the how. Well, it would be nice to see some policies that actually work - but in the absence of policies, how are we to judge?
Anyway, here in North Yorkshire and York Labour won the newly created mayoralty - an excellent result given North Yorkshire has been Tory since dinosaurs were first invented. The numbskull Tory candidate, perhaps in a bid to demonstrate that having too many policies (idiotic ones at that) could be counterproductive was punished by a surprisingly large margin. Rishi Sunak now has a Labour representative (his constituency 'home' is in North Yorkshire.) It won't bother him - he'll be off to live in California soon enough. I'm not quite sure what our Labour mayor will do now, but I confess it is a relief he was elected. The results will of course make Starmer even more convinced that he is the indispensable right person for the job, and the Starmeroid hegemony will tighten. Little blips like losing some support over Gaza amongst Muslims (the loss of Oldham to no overall control for example) will not bother the leadership very much - it is not particularly the Muslim working class that Starmer thinks he needs to win back, but the far more numerous white working class. My old seat of Morley is a case in point, which is 91% white (it used to be 97% when I was there) and is currently represented by the dreadful Dame Andrea Jenkyns. There's a real danger that the political poison of hubris is already setting in with Labour’s leadership faction, a result of not being punished for putting a foot wrong. Gaza? What's that got to do with us? Closing down democracy in the party? Not an issue. Telling fibs on an industrial scale? No problem. We're getting away with it all! +I nearly forgot to mention that I visited the Ukrainian pavilion in Venice, where I espied this notice. Intriguingly I don’t think Il Papa made it to see this exhibition.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
March 2024
|