Konstantin Kisin on X - "It genuinely amused me that people think replacing Starmer will make things better. From Boris Johnson's election onwards, we've been shuffling the bollards on the Titanic. You have to actually change direction if you want to avoid crashing into the iceberg:
- End Net Zero
- Make business viable again
- Get welfare under control
- Fund defence
- Ensure equality under the law
- Arrest criminals and keep them in jail
- Deport illegal immigrants and close the border
- Bring the civil service to heel
Burnham will become as unpopular as Starmer within months since he isn't going to do any of that."
Keir Starmer was an appalling prime minister, and he never realised - "He was the accidental prime minister. Keir Starmer never quite got the hang of politics, let alone the job of prime minister. And now he won’t have to keep trying. And he did try. Watching him make the effort was at times painful. Part of Starmer must have known there was something different, something lacking in his personality that made politics a foreign language to him. Being a lifetime card-carrying member of the Labour Party doesn’t by itself give you a deep understanding either of the party or the environment it operates in. The Prime Minister has his talents, to be sure, but they belong in chambers, not in Westminster or Whitehall... As the new leader, he had a shaky start, having to address the nation and the party in the midst of a Covid lockdown, with onlookers forgiving his stilted, uncertain, robotic delivery because it was via Zoom. But his first in-person conference speech, more than a year later, was hardly better: plodding and uninspiring, his hesitant delivery provoking so many bursts of audience applause that he took 90 minutes to deliver it. That was only a few months after his first major leadership crisis, when Labour lost the Hartlepool by-election to the governing Conservatives, an almost unheard-of event. It is known that Starmer seriously considered resigning and was only dissuaded by Morgan McSweeney, who went on to reshape his entire leadership and became his chief of staff in government. From the moment he became Prime Minister, in July 2024, there were complaints from his (suddenly vastly increased number of) backbenchers that they never got to meet him or talk with him. He started his tenure in Downing Street as he meant to go on: depending on a small number of advisers and senior ministers. As a new prime minister, it felt to him like the best way to handle the workload; to his MPs it bred resentment. And so it proved. Throughout his leadership, four years in opposition and less than two in office, he never achieved the level of oratory that many more experienced MPs manage to achieve through regular exposure to party conference and even party branch meetings, as well as the Commons. As Prime Minister, he would respond to criticisms in the chamber with a loss of temper and, occasionally, personal insults. His ability to avoid answering direct questions from the Leader of the Opposition, to an extent rarely achieved by his predecessors, became a defining characteristic and led him into conflict with the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle. Another defining characteristic of his premiership was his inability to take an unpopular stand – an unenviable but inevitable part of national leadership in these straitened times – and stick to it, too often marching his backbenchers to the top of the nearest hill, ordering them to defend the latest cuts to pensioners’ heating allowance or prospective benefit cuts, then marching them back down and retreating. This, more than any other aspect of Starmer’s leadership, even more than his misjudgment in accepting gifts in the first few months of his time as prime minister, was what quickly eroded any trust or loyalty his MPs might have otherwise shown in him. But it was his gross misjudgment over Peter Mandelson that provided the second-to-last nail in Starmer’s political coffin... By the time Starmer landed upon a policy position that seemed at least notionally popular – his opposition to President Trump’s war against Iran – the rot had set in too deeply to save his job. May’s local and devolved elections confirmed Labour’s extreme vulnerability to the new political kids on the block – the Greens on the Left and Reform UK on the Right – taking large chunks of Labour’s support. It was Starmer’s cack-handed response to that crisis that sparked the end. He trumpeted his recruitment of Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman as government advisers as if it were an ingenious move, even as the vast majority of MPs and ministers looked on completely bewildered. It was an answer to a question no one was asking. His tin-eared response to Reform’s electoral advance – to reheat an old commitment to put Britain at the heart of the European Union – was seen by a large number of backbenchers as irrelevant, politically inept or even provoking to former Labour voters who had switched to Reform. And, in the face of the increasing certainty that Andy Burnham would return to Parliament in the Makerfield by-election, Starmer had nothing to say beyond a hollow claim that he was hoping the then Manchester mayor would triumph. Triumph he did, resoundingly. It was the scale of that victory that definitively convinced wavering MPs, ministers and – eventually – Starmer himself that he could not continue as PM. The tragedy of Starmer’s premiership is that the man himself might never understand why he was ditched by his MPs because he is simply unaware of the political talents a party leader and prime minister needs. Even his resignation speech was a lesson in delusion, reeling off a list of achievements that almost nobody will believe to be real."
Starmer’s resignation speech exposed his premiership’s fatal flaw - "As he stood behind the podium outside Number 10 for the final time, Keir Starmer claimed that the election of his Labour government was “a page turned”. Yet here he was being written out of the story two years later. It must have been a short chapter. Announcing his resignation as leader of the Labour Party, with his staff and a smattering of Cabinet loyalists standing off to the side looking respectfully grim, Starmer reached for a legacy but could grasp at only the most tenuous threads... Starmer dedicated himself so completely to detoxifying the Labour brand that he neglected to come up with a governing agenda for the day after the party was no longer toxic. The Conservatives’ final years in office, suppurated in scandal and sleaze, directionless and riven by division, meant Labour was under no real pressure to set out an alternative programme. Starmer’s resignation speech was thus heavy on platitudes and light on substance. There was vague talk of investment and infrastructure.An “end to austerity”, from the man who brought down an alleged Tory government that spent its final years hosing the country down with Covid and other cash. There had been a (recent) fall in NHS waiting times. On defence spending, there was to be an unspecified “uplift”, the same one his Chancellor was still battling to keep down... Not even Starmer’s enemies, of which he managed to accumulate many, could have felt schadenfreude at the dreary, monotone exit speech of our dreariest, most monotone prime minister. It had all the joy of a hastily arranged leaving do for the guy from HR whom no one liked but whose name no one could quite remember. The goo-goo eyes the London liberal media made at Starmer, who was one of them and could finally prise power from the hated Brexiteer Tories, meant the Labour leader was exposed to minimal scrutiny. That only came once he was in power and proved cripplingly indecisive, almost predisposed to poor judgment, and either incapable or ill-disposed (or possibly both) to good relations with his backbenchers... Far from having turned a page, Keir Starmer’s premiership was a run-on sentence in Britain’s long, stream-of-consciousness narrative of national decline. He made little impact, was of little import, and will be quickly and enduringly forgotten. "
Labour MP quits Keir Starmer’s frontbench, warning party taken over by ‘woke social media warriors’ - "Labour MP Khalid Mahmood has quit Keir Starmer’s frontbench, warning that the party has been taken over by “a London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors”... Mr Mahmood said that Labour had moved away from working-class voters’ priorities under the leaderships of not only Starmer, but also Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband. “In the past decade, Labour has lost touch with ordinary British people,” he said. “A London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors, has effectively captured the party. “They mean well, of course, but their politics – obsessed with identity, division and even tech utopianism – have more in common with those of Californian high society than the kind of people who voted in Hartlepool yesterday. “The loudest voices in the Labour movement over the past year in particular have focused more on pulling down Churchill’s statue than they have on helping people pull themselves up in the world. “No wonder it is doing better among rich urban liberals and young university graduates than it is amongst the most important part of its traditional electoral coalition, the working class.”"
From 2021
The biggest myth about Keir Starmer is finally being blown apart - "Whether they want him to stay or go, practically everyone on the centre-Left agrees on one thing. Sir Keir Starmer is “a decent man”... Where to begin? How about with the brazen perfidy of his machinations to become Labour leader? In 2020, he spent his entire leadership campaign gushing to party members about how much he loved his dear “friend”, Jeremy Corbyn. He solemnly promised them all manner of juicy Corbynite policies, from scrapping tuition fees to restoring free movement with the EU. Then, having won, he swiftly ditched almost every pledge he’d campaigned on, and denied that Corbyn had ever been his “friend” at all. It’s not often I’ve felt sympathy for the Corbyn fan club. But on that occasion, they were shamelessly screwed over. The Waspi women will know exactly how they felt. In opposition, Sir Keir noisily endorsed their campaign for compensation for the way they were affected by changes to the State Pension age – in government, he has flatly rejected it. Once again, he’d promised people the earth, pocketed their votes and betrayed them. Is that the behaviour of “a decent man”? Or how about his despicable treatment of Rosie Duffield, the former Labour MP he spinelessly failed to defend from intimidation by trans fanatics? Or his attempt, alongside his Chancellor, to strip millions of pensioners of their winter fuel allowance, despite never having mentioned any such plan during the general election campaign that had taken place mere weeks earlier? Was that “decent”? Perhaps we should ask Lucy Connolly. Or Northern Ireland veterans. Or the millions of people who are being prevented from voting out their Labour councils, because this year’s elections have been spuriously delayed. Or, most importantly of all, the victims of the child-rape gangs, who heard Sir Keir initially dismiss pleas for a national inquiry as a “bandwagon” of the “far-Right”. Would any of the above people call him “decent”? Oh, and while we’re at it, did he only appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador because, being so terribly “decent”, he just wanted to give this poor, maligned chap one more chance? In the same vein, did he ennoble Matthew Doyle, his former spin doctor, in January, simply because “decent” men in power reward “paedophile apologists”? Of course, I realise that it’s not exactly unusual for politicians to renege on their promises, or to take a somewhat flexible approach to the truth. But the reason it’s so much more enraging when this particular politician does it is that he has always presented himself to the nation as “Mr Integrity”. The shining man of principle who was going to restore probity to politics, after 14 years of sleaze and lies by the wicked Tories. Indeed, this was his sole selling point. It certainly wasn’t his dazzling charisma. Still, not everyone has given up on him. On Monday night, his ministers all rushed to state their support. I’m sure this was merely because they’re so steadfast and loyal. And certainly not because they were terrified that, if they declined to support him, he would punish them by calling a snap general election, which – as both he and they must know very well – would cost most of them their seats. After all, they believe he’s a decent man. And a decent man would never do something so vicious and vengeful, would he?"
Trump says he is ‘not happy’ with UK as he criticises Starmer for being overly reliant on advisers – as it happened - "'You don't need to meet your team, you're the PM' - Trump slams Starmer for being over-reliant on his advisers"
"[Starmer] only discovered that Sue Gray, his chief of staff, and Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, had given striking train drivers a new pay deal after it had been agreed. The civil servants who had just begun to work with Starmer were baffled at first. Then, as the months ground on, the confounding realisation struck them. Why would Haigh have bothered to consult him? In the frantic meetings after the winter fuel allowance announcement he was a conspicuous, unfelt absence. “We were surrounded by people, who had worked for Blair and Brown,” one adviser said. ‘They would have known exactly what they would have said had they been in a room like that. None of us could say the same about Keir. It wasn’t just that we didn’t know what he would say. We didn’t know whether he would have said anything” … Cabinet ministers and No 10 advisers strained for loyalty. But it proved too difficult for some. “He is,” said one influential aide upon their departure from Downing Street, “the least intellectually curious person I have ever met.” Said another politician upon whom Starmer relied heavily: “He can only prepare by reading briefing books for hours on end. He doesn’t brainstorm. He has no fixed views on anything. There’s no clarity because there’s no belief. There’s no belief because there’s no understanding. There’s no understanding because there’s no curiosity.”"
"Since last Wednesday, it’s become increasingly clear that either the government did not follow due process in its appointment of Peter Mandelson or that it is not disclosed all of the relevant documents. In different terms, either the prime minister’s assurances that full due process was followed were misleading, or the government has not complied with the humble address. Either would be a contempt of parliament … There are many, many documents missing. I have detailed 56 to him in a letter that I have sent [to Darren Jones, chief secretary to the PM] to give a few examples. There is no prime ministerial readout on the advice he received. This is a breach of protocol. A prime ministerial decision, even if made oral orally, should be formally recorded. Where is that record? It starts to stink of the sofa government we had under Tony Blair. There are no minutes of any meeting at which this appointment was discussed by anyone at any time. Most suspiciously of all, we have no material from the prime minister, from the chiefs, from his chief of staff or from Peter Mandelson. No box returns, no emails, no forms, no WhatsApp, nothing. It is as though their fingerprints have been forensically removed."
Releasing everything is only good when it pushes the left wing agenda
You’ll miss Keir Starmer when he’s gone | The Spectator - "The best way to understand Starmer is as a drug. Precisely because he was so mind-numbingly tedious and so terrible at politics, he was the perfect escape from our national decline – Britain’s last diversionary tactic. You won’t understand the extraordinary and, frankly, shameful abuse directed at him unless you grasp his role as scapegoat for a deeply dishonest political culture... His background told against him. Starmer spent most of his life in the law. After his rapid rise to power, commentators gushed that it was marvellous to have a prime minister who wasn’t a ‘professional politician’. They forgot that politics is a profession, as Max Weber said. You must learn the skills to manage and persuade, and if you don’t, the pressure will destroy you. We have now witnessed the destruction of two amateur prime ministers. Rishi Sunak entered Parliament in 2015 and became prime minister a mere seven years later in 2022. Starmer entered the Commons in 2015 and was prime minister nine years later. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher wasn’t PM until she had spent 20 years in Parliament. Starmer did not serve his apprenticeship. He did not acquire the necessary skills to take credit for his achievements, fight his opponents or advance his ideals. All he could do was become an object of abuse. Jess Phillips made this point well when she said with evident regret in her resignation letter, ‘I think you are a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things however I have seen first-hand how that is not enough. The desire not to have an argument means…leaving opportunities for progress stalled and delayed.’... By blaming Starmer millions of voters, most of the left, all of the right, and what remains of the mainstream media could avoid facing their own complicity in the national disaster. The underlying reason for the failure is economic. Since the crisis of 2008 revealed our overdependence on financial services, real GDP per person has grown by just 0.6 per cent a year compared to 2.3 per cent per year in the previous 50 years. Add it up, and you find that our real incomes are 30 per cent lower than they would have been. No wonder we are so angry. In any thoughtful country decline on this scale would have provoked urgent debate. Instead, we decided that hating Starmer was far easier than confronting the vested interests and half-mad ideologies that stand in the way of escaping stagnation... The dark secret of so much of Britain is that it wants change in theory but hates it in practice."
Kemi Badenoch: Tony Blair’s New Labour legacy is a country run by HR - "Mrs Badenoch said: “The Blairite legacy is that the entire country is now run by HR as Labour junk your best ideas and champion your worst.” Sir Tony published a damning 5,000-word essay on Tuesday, accusing Sir Keir Starmer of retreating into a Left-wing “comfort zone” of high taxes and red tape, which had crippled growth while failing to tackle the ballooning welfare bill. He also intervened in the Labour leadership crisis, warning it would be “dangerous” for the party to shift to the Left. Following the extensive critique, Andy Burnham, who is attempting a return to government by standing in the Makerfield by-election, accused Sir Tony of “not understanding what’s going on”. Mrs Badenoch wrote in The Times: “Andy Burnham’s reply proves your point better than I ever could. Faced with your warning that Labour needs growth, cheaper energy and welfare restraint, his answer is more state control, more public spending and another attack on markets and enterprise. “Burnham will learn the hard way that spending taxpayers’ money as mayor is much easier than finding it as prime minister.” Mrs Badenoch added that Labour politicians were “embarrassed” by Sir Tony’s three general election victories and were on the path to “test to destruction all the Left-wing ideas ... mothballed in 1979”. She said Sir Tony’s “restraints on trade unions” had been undone by Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, while Wes Streeting, the former health secretary, “congratulates himself” for reducing waiting lists when “he simply deleted names off the list”. On immigration, Mrs Badenoch said: “Your Human Rights Act has created a system where Britain struggles to deport foreign criminals. It rewards asylum claims that are an insult to common sense: sudden ‘conversions’ to Christianity, followed by a return to Islam once settled.” She accused Labour of not being able to articulate British identity, insisting that “culture matters” and “this country is our home not a hotel”. Sir Tony’s comments marked his first public criticism of Sir Keir’s administration, having previously criticised only policies. He was particularly opposed to the Prime Minister’s handling of welfare, after Left-wing backbenchers forced No 10 to drop reforms to personal independence payments. Mrs Badenoch said: “The Conservative project is relentlessly focused on delivering a high-growth, lower-immigration economy, cheaper energy by scrapping Miliband’s net-zero targets, reducing Starmer’s ballooning welfare bill and putting the money directly into defence to increase our military strength.” Mr Burnham and Mr Streeting, his potential leadership rival, criticised Sir Tony’s analysis for not mentioning inequality. Mr Burnham said: “If you don’t get how [inequality is] driving politics now, if you are not rooting your analysis in the fact that people are unable to live and that things that were taken for granted are no longer affordable, then you are not understanding what’s going on. “The last 40 years have given us wide inequality – that’s what’s responsible for the abandonment of the centre.”"
The UK has similar income inequality as the USSR, but left wingers will never be satisfied till everyone is equally poor
Britain is facing a 1938 moment - "Never in my lifetime has there been a bigger or more necessary shock to the defence strategy of this country than the resignations of both John Healey and his most accomplished and experienced minister of state, Al Carns. When we get past the political smoke, this double blow to the Government has existential implications for our whole nation. We are facing the very real prospect of war in the next few years, every bit as much as we did in the 1930s. And we are not ready. Healey, until yesterday the defence secretary, attacked the shortfall in terms of money. But Carns addresses an even more fundamental failure: we are simply not organised to face the next war. In his words: “The character of conflict is changing faster than our procurement can keep up with. We are still purchasing capability suitable for the last war while our adversaries arm for the next one. Platforms that cost billions can be defeated by systems that cost thousands. Any serious Defence Investment Plan has to start from that reality.”... we have to build from scratch a complete new military-industrial ecosystem. It has to be one that can invent and produce weapons systems that cost thousands, not billions, and that are on the battlefield in months not years. Such a system will be almost certainly based around small start-ups, not corporate monoliths. It can be done. Ukraine had seven domestic drone manufacturers at the start of the war with Russia, it now has 500. FPV (first-person view) drone production has grown from 3,000-5,000 units in 2022 to more than eight million this year. Equally importantly, it innovates at unbelievable rates... But the technology itself is not the headline. The organisational model is. Ukraine has built a distributed observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) architecture at industrial scale, where feedback between battlefield observation and production action operates faster than any comparable system in history. Observation nodes sit at the point of use, not at the top of a reporting chain – the opposite of traditional Western procurement hierarchies."
Healey’s resignation exposes Starmer’s indefensible priorities - "You might have thought Keir Starmer’s government had run out of ways to surprise us. Between the scandals and U-turns and the entire sorry Mandelson affair, it has crammed a whole parliament’s worth of dismal headlines into less than two years. Quite a run rate. What the 60s were for pop music, the 2020s are for bad government. Who knows what they will have achieved by the next general election. If only the same efficiency improvements could be made in other areas of the economy. Naturally, there has been a smorgasbord of resignations to go with all this incompetence: 18 in less than two years, more than any other recent prime minister. Such a variety, too. Starmer’s ministers have quit over past criminal convictions (Louise Haigh), evicting tenants while minister for homelessness (Rushanara Ali), dodgy family finances (Tulip Siddiq), dodgy tax (Angela Rayner), dodgily paying a PR firm to investigate journalists (Josh Simons), not to mention a smattering of health and personal reasons. Recently, there has been “naked ambition” (Wes Streeting et al). Given such stiff competition, credit to John Healey for rummaging about in his top hat and coming up with the last thing anybody expects from a Labour minister in 2026: a resignation on principle. Shocking stuff. Apart from Anneliese Dodds, no other minister has quit over policy in their own department, although Vicky Foxcroft resigned as whip over disability benefits. On Thursday, Healey joined their meagre number. Here was a defence secretary who felt that when it came to the matter of national defence, his prime minister had been all talk and no trousers. Or all carrier and no aircraft, to use a more pressing analogy... it is not as if Starmer does not know the scale of the defence problems. He watches the same news as everyone else, it’s just his response to it is different. He sees a terrifying drone war in Ukraine and doubles down on the £5.5bn Ajax chunderbus. He sees a lonely HMS Dragon make its glacial way to Cyprus, while the French put a full carrier group to sea, and concludes that our defence spending is basically fine. Still, a man must have a code. One’s priorities are one’s priorities. For the Prime Minister, defence is important, just not as important as net zero or winter fuel or the thousand other commitments Labour has been unable to trim. Of course taxes will go up, just not for anything as naffly old-fashioned as an army. Still, as Putin’s tanks rumble up Whitehall, they may pause to admire the scope and variety of our recycling bins."
Government is favouring HR over Armed Forces improvements, say Tories - "The number of Ministry of Defence (MoD) workers responsible for implementing government policies has fallen by almost 40 per cent in four years, while Whitehall has taken on about 2,000 more human resources (HR) staff."
