Up the creek

+I was alerted by Labour List to a story in the Huffpost which claimed that Starmer had got angry with some of his parliamentary colleagues because of their ‘unattributable attacks on his aides.’ The irony of this may be lost on those who spent a good part of every day of Corbyn’s leadership attacking him and all around him, although to their credit (in a limited sense) many of them did so publicly. The Huffpost article lists the names of some shadow cabinet members who leapt to Starmer’s side and for the life of me I can’t say I’ve heard of any of them. No doubt they would argue it’s difficult to make a breakthrough during a pandemic when nobody is listening to the opposition. There are other explanations of course, but now is not the time to ask. Not when there’s elections coming up (which for those of us who followed the Corbyn defenestration shambles piles irony upon irony)!
 
+I have been contacted by reader asking why I am not terribly enthused by Caroline Lucas MP’s private member’s bill on climate change,  of which my reader writes ‘one of the main aims of the Bill is to strengthen the Climate Change Act by not allowing targets to be missed by planning on speculative negative emissions.’  That is a worthwhile aim, but a bigger ambition has to start with the targets themselves, and the targets which the bill refers to flow from the Paris Agreement of 2015, which are wholly arbitrary, voluntary and worse, delusionary. Passing a law to meet those targets would be nugatory.