Labour Party leader Keir Starmer speaks during his visit to the Backstage Centre, Purfleet, for the launch of Labour’s doorstep offer to voters ahead of the general election, May 16, 2024
…
On the economy, Labour offers only a commitment to “stability” based on austerity-style control of public spending and a hope that growth will nevertheless appear.
Establishing a publicly owned clean energy company, GB Energy, is all that remains of the radicalism of Sir Keir’s 10 pledges when seeking the Labour leadership.
Other ”first steps” include setting up a grandiose border security command to halt Channel boat crossings to outflank the Tories and a crackdown on “anti-social behaviour.”
Sir Keir told his audience that even these “first steps” could take two full terms in office — 10 years — to fully implement.
That makes their modesty still more striking. One pledge is to recruit 6,500 new teachers when 40,000 leave schools each year, equating to one-fifth of a new teacher each for Britain’s schools.
On the NHS, a first step commitment to provide 40,000 more appointments each week is equivalent to just a 2 per cent rise.
All this was welcomed by Lord Cameron’s friend, Boots chief executive Seb James, who particularly praised Labour’s “sensible fiscal measures.”
It was less welcome to Labour left organisation Momentum, which decried the party’s lack of radicalism.
A spokesman said: “These fixes fall desperately short of the bold policies needed to fix the Tories’ broken Britain.
The far right is set to piggyback on agricultural discontent to capture votes in June.
A large blue billboard stands outside a park in the town of Conegliano in northern Italy. On the left, a man pops a vast cricket into his mouth. On the right, are the words, “Let’s Change Europe before it changes us” – and the dates of the upcoming elections.
The poster – an advert for the country’s radical right party Lega per Salvini Premier – refers to a conspiracy theory that has swept across Italy in the last 18 months. Elites in Brussels are planning to replace meat with bugs and are using environmental regulations to do so, or so the theory goes.
As millions of voters across the EU prepare to head to the polls from 6-9 June, conspiracy theories and misinformation on food and farming could pull voters towards the far right and parties opposing climate-friendly laws.
In the face of this onslaught of misinformation, DeSmog is launching a new series that investigates misleading claims and their impact on climate policy in the farming sector.
Over the next two months DeSmog will monitor the spread of misinformation across the continent, working in seven different languages. We will look to identify false claims and uncover who is spreading these narratives online.
Agriculture accounts for 11 percent of carbon emissions in the EU, and has contributed to plummeting bird and bee numbers. But tackling the sector’s harms has become one of the most divisive issues on the continent, with tractors blocking highways across Europe during demonstrations this year.
The protests – attended by thousands of farmers in several countries – reflected a wide range of concerns, from unfair food prices to calls for protection from increasingly extreme weather. Yet this complexity was barely represented in the media where demonstrations were cast as opposition to environmental measures.
Far-right groups also weaponised the protests. In January, Jordan Bardella, lead EU candidate for France’s National Rally (formerly National Front), accused the country’s President Emmanuel Macron of pursuing “the death of agriculture” while Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s far-right party Vox, wrote to Macron demanding an end to “aggressions” against Spanish producers, who he described as “victims” of EU policy.
In the eyes of its critics, green reforms agreed in the last EU term would destroy farming. Plans to cut chemical use and make farmers protect natural habitats would lead to monumental job losses, they claim. The same arguments are used by agricultural corporations that stand to lose out if green reforms are enacted.
The most extreme opponents, including radical right think tanks and hardline farming groups, see green reforms as part of a plan by Brussels bureaucrats to control the industry and “grab land”.
These claims, however, contradict the facts: last year, more than 6,000 scientists said that such nature-friendly measures were “the cornerstone of food security and human health”.
The policies that are currently being attacked aim to tackle climate breakdown – the biggest threat to producers across the EU, who are already feeling the effects of global heating. A “staggering portion” of the continent has been exposed to high drought risk in recent years, according to the European Drought Observatory, leading to widespread crop losses.
Right-wing and far-right groups stand to make massive gains from stoking these tensions. A recent study by the EU’s Committee of the Regions showed that discontented rural areas could be a major source of votes.
This series will shine a light on those candidates that are weaponising false claims for electoral gain.
“He is well aware what those weeks of national TV exposure have done for him – and the position he could be in to help Reform.”
Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage is set to announce a return to frontline politics it has been reported, as he seeks to capitalise on the increased media exposure he has gained following his appearance on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!
The Mirror reports that the former UKIP politician, 60, who retired in 2021, ‘is understood to want to stand as a parliamentary candidate this year. And it comes after sources say he is determined to make the most of the exposure he gained in the I’m A Celebrity jungle.’
There have previously been rumours that Farage was considering joining the Tory party, after his appearance at the party’s conference and after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hinted that he could be welcomed in the ‘broach church’ of the Conservative Party.
However, sources have told the Mirror that he wanted to capitalise on the recent media exposure he has gained, including on GB News.
The NHS overtook the economy as voters’ biggest concern in February, according to polling by Ipsos. Small wonder when waiting lists have hit 7.5 million: there can hardly be a person in the country who doesn’t have a friend or relative who has been affected.
And the Conservatives bear a heavy responsibility.
In the decade up to the pandemic, real-terms healthcare spending per head rose on average by just 0.4 per cent a year — in four years it actually fell, despite rising pressures on the service.
That compares very poorly to the record of the last Labour government, which raised spending by 5.7 per cent a year on average from 1997-2010. It even compares badly to that of the Thatcher and Major Conservative governments, which averaged a 2.1 per cent annual increase.
But we should be more cautious than Poulter about endorsing Keir Starmer’s solution.
Starmer and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting have pointedly refused to offer the increases in NHS budgets that the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments delivered. Streeting is emphatic that he will not “pour money into a 20th-century model,” instead demanding reforms which, in increasing reliance on the private sector, both mimic existing Conservative policy and are unlikely to make a difference to waiting lists (because private healthcare in Britain recruits from the NHS, so overall capacity will not grow).
…
Britain’s public services are collapsing under the strain of decades of neoliberal policy. In the NHS, hospitals have been undermined through outsourcing services to the private sector as well as by the cost of PFI debt — both issues with their origins in the Blair years.
To restore our NHS to health, we need a reversal of privatisation and outsourcing and a forced end to all PFI contracts, as well as a significant increase in overall funding to bring us closer to healthcare spending levels in France or Germany.
‘This should end Ben Habib’s career. It won’t. But in any rational universe it would’
Deputy leader of Reform UK has suggested that migrants should be left to drown in the Channel by the UK in a shocking exchange that has caused widespread outrage.
Ben Habib made the disturbing comments in an interview with Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk TV when asked how his right-wing party would handle migrants coming to England on small boats.
…
He told the presenter: “I said that we could, as an idea, provide them with another dinghy into which to climb and then go back to France. And if they choose to scupper that dinghy, then yes, they have to suffer the consequences of their actions.”
“Then you would leave them to drown?”, asked Hartley-Brewer.
Habib replied: “Absolutely, they cannot be infantilised to the point that we become a hostage to fortune.”
