Labour leader Keir Starmer (centre) with then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo (R) and then US ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, in London, 21 July 2020. Pompeo said in 2019 “we will do our level best” to stop Jeremy Corbyn getting elected. (Photo: US State Department)
THE SNP have slammed Keir Starmer as a “sell out” ahead of his expected visit to Scotland on Monday.
The party’s depute leader Keith Brown called on the Labour leader to scrap his support for “Tory policies like Brexit and the bedroom tax”.
The MSP for Clackmannanshire and Dunblane also challenged Starmer to answer ‘one simple question: What does the Labour party stand for?’
It comes as the Labour party and its leader have been criticised for a number of policy u-turns, including that a Labour government will not scrap the two-child cap, and associated ‘rape clause’, or bedroom tax, despite previously calling it “heinous” and “inhuman”.
Even older, more right-wing voters dislike or despise ‘Labour’ ‘leader
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Keir Starmer’s approval rating among the public is negative among all age groups, according to the latest YouGov poll, speaking volumes of the impact he makes when seen by the public and for the effect of his ‘red Toryism’.
Among 18-24yos, 25-49yos and 50-64yos, Starmer’s approval levels are significantly negative
JUNIOR doctors walking out for a fifth time this weekend are blamed by Tory ministers for the NHS’s record-breaking waiting lists.
Their pay restoration demands are billed as greedy, though the case they make is straightforward, as the British Medical Association’s junior doctors committee co-chair Dr Robert Laurenson points out: “Over the last 15 years, the government has cut our pay by 31.7 per cent so we’re looking to restore that pay back to what it was like in 2008.”
Rishi Sunak declines even to discuss this — maintaining that the current offer is “fair and final,” on the grounds it has been recommended by an “independent” (by which he means government-appointed) pay review body.
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Labour backs the Tory policy for reducing waiting lists, which is to increase NHS use of private-sector providers.
This cannot possibly work, since the private sector is parasitical on the NHS and poaches NHS staff. Commissioning more private-sector work actively worsens the NHS staffing crisis.
Our demand ultimately needs to be for more resources for the NHS. It needs more staff, it needs to pay them more and it needs to treat them better.
The Westminster consensus against raising spending needs to be challenged. It’s therefore disappointing that Scottish Labour simply carped at the Scottish National Party after research it commissioned exposed the huge funding gap between the NHS and European healthcare systems — with Germany and Norway spending a full third more per head on healthcare than we do.
In thirty years, maybe less, people will ask: why the hell didn’t we do anything to mitigate and prepare for climate breakdown in the 2020s? Scientific predictions about global heating have been surpassed, and temperature records are now broken with increasing rapidity. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called for immediate, radical action on climate change, arguing that the Earth is entered an “era of global boiling”. News reports are filled with stories about people being evacuated to escape uncontainable wildfires in Europe. Globally, heat and floods are killing and displacing people.
Yet despite all this, our leading politicians are rowing back on net zero promises and policies, finding reasons not to act positively for a transition to a socially just and sustainable future. We need environmental policies like those in Labour’s 2019 manifesto and an unswerving commitment from politicians to carry them through. Instead, we have a Tory government that has granted licences for Rosebank, a new oilfield in the North Sea that alone would exceed the UK’s carbon budgets. But this is just the tip of a melting iceberg. The government is also backing airport expansion despite the uncertain and meagre economic benefits.
The government’s failure on climate progress has turned former Climate Change Committee (CCC) chair and Conservative Environment Minister, Lord Deben, into an eco-warrior! The CCC was set up by the Labour government in 2008 to monitor and report on the government’s progress in meeting environmental and climate targets. Their recent report is damning. It highlights a failure to invest in green technologies, to make progress on insulating homes or in rolling out heat pumps to replace gas boilers in homes – and so it goes on. Deben points out that “Defra (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) is a department which has no full programme to reach net-zero, which is a scandal”, and he describes granting planning permission for a new Cumbrian coal mine, as “absolutely barmy”.
Though frequently referencing the climate crisis, mainstream politicians fail to make the connections between climate breakdown, social injustice and the growing risks and crises we face. For example, it’s estimated that environment breakdown will increase forced migration to 1.2 billion people by 2050 and 1.4 billion by 2060. Following that, the numbers will soar. Rather than addressing the urgent underlying factors behind migration, the political response is a poisonous campaign to “stop the boats”!
Rightwing groups penned a conservative wish list of proposals for the next conservative president to gut environmental protections
An alliance of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it has emerged.
Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch.
Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president. Climate experts and advocates criticized planning that would dismantle US climate policy.
The nearly 1,000-page transition guide was written by more than 350 rightwingers and is full of sweeping recommendations to deconstruct all sectors of the federal government– – including environmental policy.
Very rich US right-wing interests intent on destroying a transition to sustainable energy. UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and UK Labour leader Keir Starmer are aligned with and not in any way opposing these interests. There is little doubt that climate denier – I think that it’s just beyond his abilities to understand tbh – Trump will go along with this. Charles Koch is involved with this initiative.
Labour leader Keir Starmer (centre) with then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo (R) and then US ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, in London, 21 July 2020. Pompeo said in 2019 “we will do our level best” to stop Jeremy Corbyn getting elected. (Photo: US State Department)
Exclusive: Jamie Driscoll says some voters think Starmer is ‘a liar’ and backing ULEZ would win votes
The ex-Labour mayor of the UK’s poorest region has slammed Keir Starmer for watering down the party’s environmental commitments.
In an exclusive interview with openDemocracy in his office in Newcastle, North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll said: “There is no contradiction between protecting us from the climate emergency, and prosperity. In fact, if you fail to protect us from the climate emergency, you’re going to lose all prosperity in the future.”
Labour’s leadership has blamed its failure to take Boris Johnson’s former constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip in the recent by-election on London mayor Sadiq Khan’s plan to expand the city’s ‘ultra-low emission zone’ (ULEZ) into the area. But Driscoll, who dramatically quit Labour last month, said the party would have won the seat if it had stood by the scheme and campaigned against Tory cuts to bus services in the capital.
“Labour would have won the Uxbridge by-election if they had said: ‘Yes, it [ULEZ] is a problem, because the Tories have cut public transport in London – if we had better buses here, which we will do, you’ll be better off,’” he said. “That would have won them it… A lot of people who voted Green because they were outraged by Labour’s abandonment [of ULEZ] probably would have voted Labour.”
Labour’s candidate in the by-election had publicly opposed the ULEZ expansion during the campaign; the Green candidate won 893 votes, more than the margin separating Labour from the Tories.
Driscoll also argued that politicians’ failure to take climate breakdown seriously contributed to falling trust in politics: “We’ve got a climate juggernaut hurtling towards us, and [politicians] are saying ‘some people in outer London didn’t like ULEZ so let’s just burn the planet because we need their votes’. Almost any rational person, which is the majority of the electorate, I still believe, would say: ‘It doesn’t add up any more.’”
Deselected by Labour
Driscoll is currently mayor of the North of Tyne region, which extends northwards from Newcastle to the Scottish border. He has successfully negotiated an expansion of the region, meaning that when the post comes up for re-election next year, it will also cover areas of north-east England south of the Tyne, including Sunderland, Gateshead and County Durham.
With an engineering background and his own software business, Driscoll was first elected as a councillor in Newcastle in 2018. He was quickly chosen by Labour members to be the party’s candidate for North of Tyne mayor when the post was created in 2019, beating the longstanding leader of Newcastle Council in the selection. Calling himself a “pragmatic socialist”, he is generally identified with the left of the party, and was supported by Momentum.
But when Labour announced its shortlist of candidates for the mayor of the newly expanded North East seat, Driscoll’s name was notably absent. Party insiders briefed that he had been ‘purged’ because he once spoke at an event alongside the filmmaker Ken Loach, who was himself banned from Labour because of his prior support for the Left Unity party. While much of the media parroted this line, a simpler explanation is that he was binned because of his left-wing views, and as revenge for defeating one of the party’s big beasts.
Driscoll’s deselection was slammed by politicians across the political spectrum, with Labour mayors Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham praising his approach to the role. His interview with openDemocracy is the first time he has so clearly attacked the Labour leadership since standing down from the party.
Speaking about Starmer’s recent equivocation on previous climate spending commitments, Driscoll characterised the Labour position as: “We might put £28bn into tackling the climate emergency at some point in the future if the fiscal rule allows it – a fiscal rule which we decided on, which is not real and has no legal basis in anything, on the basis that we just think it makes us look a bit more credible to some people.”
If you do a vox pop and say ‘do you think Keir Starmer keeps his word?’ you would have no one say ‘yes’
He added: “There is an underlying reality to people’s lives. Either your bus comes, or it doesn’t. Either you can get an operation, or you can’t. These are the things that are concrete and in the real world. The climate emergency is absolutely one of those.
“The science is uncontroversial – we already now have enough CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that even if they remain stable at that level, global heating is going to continue and we will pass way beyond 1.5°C. Even if we live in a magic world where no tipping points kick in, that will lead to mass people movements and crop failures around the world.”
For Labour’s leadership to respond to this reality by saying “yeah, but we need a fiscal rule” isn’t good enough, he argued. Criticising his former party for saying it won’t cancel oil and gas licences recently issued by the Tories, and for comments Starmer reportedly made to shadow climate change secretary Ed Miliband that he “hates tree huggers” (which he denied) and isn’t “into hope and change”, Driscoll asked: “What are they there for?”
‘Dishonest’
Speaking more broadly, Driscoll said some people perceive Starmer as a “liar”. He claimed: “If you would go out and do a vox pop and say ‘do you think Keir Starmer keeps his word?’ you would have no one say ‘yes’. Or some people think, ‘yes, he’s a liar but he’s not as much of a liar as the Tories’ – you know, lesser of two evils. But the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.”
Referring to an event during Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign, Driscoll added: “I interviewed him in 2019. He said that you have to inspire people to party unity – you don’t discipline people to party unity.” Referring to Starmer’s promises at the time, Driscoll said: “Ten pledges, has he kept any of them? I don’t think he has. And the public know that.”
He added: “Regardless of what people say in politics, regardless of their ideologies, there is an objective reality. And when politicians forget that, they find themselves unable to tell the truth. The reason they are unable to tell the truth is that what they propose does not tally with reality.”
He also claimed Starmer and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting are unduly influenced by big business, pointing to Streeting’s donations from a hedge fund manager heavily invested in private healthcare and Starmer rowing back on commitments to tax Big Tech after a meeting with Google. “To abandon that,” he said, “shows you in whose interests they are operating.”
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