Tag: Keir Starmer
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Party Games
A parliamentary vote on the UK-EU trade deal is imminent. If it gets voted down, the UK leaves without a deal. In the real world, a vote means a firm choice. You either want one thing or the other. And if you have no particular desire for either, you go with the lesser of the…
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What Account
Another day, another high-profile tosspot slithering into the breach to ‘hold somebody to account’. It is habitually virtue-signalling, foghorn journalists who have larger gobs than mandates, but space-wasting politicians also love to flex their mouth muscles as the moral accountants of the social mire. This is not holding to account, which takes courage and most…
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Base Graft
We’ve had backstops, level playing fields, hard & soft Brexits and a veritable shower of various other petals of EU word-confetti. The UK has of course added its own: oven-ready, Canada-Plus and Australian terms. All of them designed to label something that their patrons never progress to articulate beyond a one-liner. And now, there is…
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Abstained Character
Now, I do get the concept of abstention. It is a signal to express disdain for both options of a Hobson’s choice. In other contexts, it is a luxury; a risk-free gesture when a vote one way or another changes nothing. It is used as a ploy to avoid confrontation with opposing, warring factions, but…
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Fact Up
It’s the one most striking paradox about 21st century democracy. The moment a politician starts to lose their grip on power, they lose their grip full-stop. Invariably, this heralds a bullish attempt to unpick the legitimacy of those who had exercised their democratic choice Of course, the very same rogues had employed fakery and charlatanic…
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Leaving Party 🎉
The golden rule for the cognoscenti when you leave a job is to walk out and don’t look back. Any glance in the rea-view mirror offers you only a glimpse of second-raters picking bits off your professional reputation for their own ends. It’s a harsh blow to be basking in your own irrelevance, which is…
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Steer Calmer
So, the man Diane Abbott had once inadvertently christened ‘Steer Calmer‘ has finally made an impact. Unfortunately, it was not in matters political, and some hapless cyclist was upended at a junction in Kentish Town by Sir Keir’s quintessentially social democratic SUV. Comatose Keir likely indicated left but moved to the right before toddling off…
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Clowning Glory
Looking at the free school meals row, you might feel that this is a classic confrontation between a government and an opposition with diametrically opposed positions on social welfare. It isn’t. It’s actually an artificial squabble for political ground that distracts from a much more damaging affliction: local government incompetence. If local government agencies had…
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Noes Out of Jaunt
The UK’s chief Brexit negotiator, Lord Frost, has told his opposite number, Michel Barnier, not to bother coming over for the final bout of trade talks unless the EU fundamentally changes its position. In response, Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission’s head Beurocrat has noted that her own team will go to London anyway,…
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