At the risk of being hugely controversial, I will not be joining the long line of people demanding that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer resign. While accepting that Starmer has shown some serious errors of judgement, not least appointing Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador, and presiding over some unnecessary policy fuck ups like temporarily removing the winter fuel payment to us old folk, there are good reasons for sticking with him. One is that he has genuine integrity, unlike a number of previous occupants in 10 Downing Street like serial liar Boris Johnson, who has always had no integrity, and he has a deep sense of serving his country and not himself. I happen to think that integrity and public service still matters.
Much of the media has already made up its mind that Starmer should go. The gutter press, by which I mean the press in general, never liked Starmer in the first place, its establishment owners have always opposed the very idea of Labour governments. Even the left of centre Guardian no longer has a single columnist who supports Starmer. Every single hack wants him out.
Now, the press has been joined by major media outlets such as the BBC and Sky News. The BBC’s lurch to the right and more recently the far right will not have come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. The appointment to the BBC board of the right-wing commentator ‘Sir’ Robbie Gibb, who founded the fascist-friendly GB News, had taken the Beeb to some extremely dark places. The current political editor Chris Mason, along with the previous editor Laura Kuenssberg, have effectively abandoned objective, impartial journalism and replaced it with often lengthy opinion pieces and it does not require a political expert to conclude where their political allegiances lie. In truth, they have been little more than quislings, enabling the rise of the far right in general and Nigel Farage’s private company Reform UK Ltd in particular. Sky, with Beth Rigby running the show, is no better. Here’s an example of how it works.
When Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner made an innocent cock-up with her stamp duty, the entire media, and especially the BBC and Sky news went after her. In the end, the weight of voices calling for her departure, amplified dramatically by the media, did for her. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s lies about saying he had bought a house in his Clacton constituency (he hadn’t) and his failure to declare almost half a million quid of outside earnings, went largely unreported. If you really think the media has been genuinely impartial, I am afraid I cannot help you. It’s been no different with Starmer.
Sure, he has fucked up on a semi-regular basis. Well, he’s not a career politician, like Farage, for one thing. He entered politics not as a career move – he would have earned far more by continuing to practise law – but to make the country, and so people’s lives, better. Like him or not, Starmer’s motives in politics are as close as you can get to being factual. He is there to serve.
Beyond the mess that is Mandelson – an appointment, by the way, that was welcomed by prominent right-wingers like former minister and now Spectator editor Michael Gove and with whom Farage offered to work given his close links with Donald Trump – things are beginning to happen under Starmer’s Labour government. You can read about them here. Oddly, there is little coverage in the media about any of this, just the tiresome, negative personal stuff we are familiar with. The negative stuff works, though. Starmer’s popularity levels are through the floor. Many, maybe most, people want him to go. I’ve just heard the Trot-led Fire Brigade’s Union chief comrade Steve Wright join the queue. With the best part of three-and-a-half years until the next general election, my view is that we should ignore the haters and naysayers and stand by our man.
Axe Starmer and the same people who demanding he should quit will then call the new leader illegitimate and without a mandate from voters. A serious campaign would then ensue to hold an election which, at the moment, would see Labour destroyed and wiped out, potentially handing the keys of Number 10 to the Fagash Fuhrer himself. Is that what we really want? The end of the NHS, the reintroduction of the two child benefit cap in order to fund a cut in beer duty, the scrapping of Child Benefit, transferring the money to a new scheme rewarding people for having more children, the scrapping of all efforts to mitigate the worst aspects of climate change and massive tax cuts for the very rich? Maybe it is, in which case the electorate can have the opportunity to do just that in 2029.
The greatest governments of my lifetime were Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s from 1997 to 2010. Things did get better in almost every way, only for the Conservatives, with a little help from the traitorous Liberal Democrats, to reverse most of New Labour’s gains to all but break Britain, as Tory governments always do, presiding over 14 years of carnage and chaos. Quietly, probably boringly, the Labour government is making things better again. It’s happening slowly, probably too slowly, but it is happening. My argument is simple: we elected Starmer’s Labour for a five year term, we’re only 18 months or so into it, he needs to be afforded the time to finish the job.
I do not want our nation’s fate decided by the likes of Chris Mason at the BBC, Beth Rigby at Sky News or any of the billionaire media moguls who own all our newspapers and many commercial radio stations. It doesn’t feel like it at times, but we are still, just about, living in a democracy, even if we only get one chance every five years to exercise it. I would much prefer our PM to be a decent man of integrity whose sole aim in politics is to serve the country than some self-enriching liar who thinks ethics is a county north of London.
We have the unfortunate habit of bringing about self harm in dear old blighty. In 2016, we voted to make ourselves poorer and to remove our own rights to free movement in Europe by supporting Brexit, in 2019 aided and abetted by the worst Labour leader in history, Jeremy Corbyn, we elected a liar and a charlatan, Boris Johnson, as Prime Minister. Destabilising a Labour government with over three years left in office by following a media-led campaign of trying to decapitating the government by removing is leader would represent a version of madness.
I repeat: integrity and public service still matters. Warts and all, we have that at the moment. We threw it all away in 2010 and suffered 14 terrible years. I hope we don’t do it all over again, but with our unique British history, I wouldn’t put it past us. The current alternative is Farage, a man who would make Thatcher look like a lily-livered liberal. If things haven’t improved even more significantly by 2029, the electorate will have the chance to give fascism a go. But not until then.
