Unclear, Keir
KEIR Starmer’s big speech was rousing enough if you didn’t listen too closely.
Superb for quickening Labour pulses. Less so as a genuine blueprint for a better Britain.
AFPKeir Starmer’s big speech was superb for quickening Labour pulses… less so as a genuine blueprint for a better Britain[/caption]
His party wants to be taken seriously after the Corbyn debacle.
Yet Starmer and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves still fall too easily into cartoonish attacks on the Tories for being incompetent and evil while claiming Labour works solely for the greater good.
Starmer reeled off New Labour’s supposed achievements while conveniently ignoring Iraq, uncontrolled immigration or our near-bankruptcy by 2010.
And, like Ms Reeves, he painted a false picture of Tory failure which overlooked Covid and war battering every economy and sending global inflation sky-high.
He berated the Tories on the environment, neglecting that they have cut emissions faster than the rest of the world and far faster than Labour did.
Meanwhile it is not hard to catalogue Britain’s woes and vow to fix them — if you omit how.
Starmer’s NHS “revival” funded by a “non-dom” tax is dubious.
It’s possible it would raise nothing if the highly mobile super-rich emigrate. What then?
And while we cannot fault his delivery, nor his stoic handling of the protest, his lack of hard policy contrasted sharply with Rishi Sunak’s boldness last week.
Where Starmer did prevail was on housing.
The Tories, shamefully, have all but given up on building the millions of homes we need. Labour at least sounds determined on that.
The rest — a fuzzy vision of a happier, kinder, richer, “rebuilt” Britain — will need a proper roadmap and real money.
Labour will be happy with how the conference has gone. The extremists of the Corbyn years were banished.
The Shadow Cabinet was disciplined to the point of being boring. But for undecided voters there wasn’t much on offer.
Many will be left wondering if all that glitters is not gold.
Nazis of Left
THE pro-Hamas cretins taunting Jews illegally on our streets will now have to justify the reported beheadings of babies.
And they will. “Gas the Jews”, one mob chanted in Australia — a vile new low.
What once was perhaps benign sympathy for Gazans is now genocidal race hate indistinguishable from the Nazis’.
Once again our Jews live in fear.
When will police keep order?
Potty punts
GOOD news. The IMF forecasts our growth will be the G7’s lowest next year. Which guarantees it won’t be.
Its predictions are useless. This one is based on figures wildly out of date.
The bad news is the IMF also predicts we will TOP the G7 table in 2026.
Bet on a recession.
Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
