Thread: The British Prime Minister - for as long as there is a Great Britain

Originally Posted by Seekingasylum

In ten years Putin, Xi and Trump will all be dead.

.....

The 'three out of four ain't bad' line might have seemed disrespectful to Jim Steinman.

considering he cant explain his stance on what a woman is its no surprise he can't explain his policy position. 20 minutes to make this post, its hardly worth bothering on here now, ridiculous.



Keir Starmer seeks an Attlee-style landslide without having to explain why he deserves one




All parties are evasive about how dangerous our current situation is. I fear that is because they don’t know what to do about it




CHARLES MOORE
24 May 2024 • 6:57pm
Charles Moore
Related Topics
General Election 2024, Keir Starmer, Labour Party, Net Zero, China, Russia




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Clement Attlee, Britain's new Prime Minister, is shown (center) with his wife as they were acclaimed by supporters after the great Labor Party victory
Clement Attlee (centre) winning in 1945. The post-war Prime Minister explained why he wanted power. Keir Starmer has not yet done so CREDIT: Bettmann
Could Sir Keir Starmer be Clement Attlee and could July 2024 be July 1945? That is the hope of the Labour Party: now, as then, a landslide general election victory, after 14 years of Tory-dominated government, for a party led by a moderate and public-spirited man, who, in Sir Keir’s own words about himself, “doesn’t do the tribal stuff”.




The comparison is not obviously idiotic. The two men have similarities – born in Surrey, bourgeois backgrounds, well-educated barristers, boring speakers. If he becomes prime minister, Sir Keir will be 61. At the same moment, Attlee was 62. It all feels reassuringly respectable.




Yet the differences between the two men are instructive. The defining experiences of Attlee’s life were as an Army officer throughout the First World War (breaking with his brother’s pacifism), his close encounters with poverty and the politics of poverty in east London over four decades, and his role in the Second World War coalition as deputy prime minister to Winston Churchill, whom he consistently admired.




Out of all this emerged his well-grounded (if misguided) set of beliefs about economic and social reform and an unchallengeable patriotism. With victory in Europe just achieved in 1945, Attlee could lead a party which offered a new social contract to a war-battered people. In doing so, he could rely on the highest level of public trust in our history.




With Sir Keir, the case is different. Obviously, it is not his fault that he has never fought in a war and has not yet been in government. But it is significant that, whereas Attlee early abandoned his career in the law to minister to the London poor, and rose in politics by doing so, Sir Keir built his main career in the sort of law which is itself political – everything to do with the doctrines of international human rights.




For Attlee, Gallipoli, Stepney and Limehouse were the crucible of his political beliefs and Westminster was the place to act upon them. For Sir Keir, his legal/political heart is with Strasbourg (home of the European Court of Human Rights) and Brussels.




One senses he knows this is an electoral problem, especially among poorer voters. In his opening campaign interview with the BBC’s Mishal Husain, he kept talking about “the way I think”, yet never disclosed what that way is. He must fear that, if he did, voters would not like it.




It is true that no modern society can function without large numbers of well-trained lawyers, but Britain, in particular, has traditionally understood the difference between the rule of law (good) and the rule of lawyers (not so good). In Sir Keir’s view, the world will be safe only if the lawyers are in charge.




Normally, when a party wins a landslide, it is because it convincingly offers change. The key victories since the Second World War were achieved by doing so: Labour in 1945, the Conservatives in 1979 (Mrs Thatcher’s assault on state socialism and Western weakness in the Cold War), Labour in 1997 (Blair’s Third Way) and the Tories in 2019 (Johnson’s “Get Brexit Done”).




Change, of course, is also Sir Keir’s cry – the sole word, indeed, on his placards. He has the massive advantage that so many voters want a change from the Conservatives, but what change is he offering? In 1945, Attlee had earned the authority to explain what Labour change would mean. Hence his landslide. That is not the situation today.




This lack of analysis of our true situation is not a uniquely Labour problem. It afflicts all our parties. As the campaign begins, one’s overriding sense is that evasion has dominated our politics for years.




It would be nice – but surprising – if this election were to change that. I felt positive pleasure at the news that the “wash-up” following the calling of the election means that several government Bills have fallen. One was Rishi Sunak’s smoking ban. Another was Michael Gove’s extraordinary attack on private rented housing. How did a Conservative government ever fall for such distractions?




Here at home, we have weak economic growth, poor public finances, massive welfare bills, failing public services, ill-controlled, large-scale immigration, and poorly drafted, gesture-led legislation.




We are taught to revere the NHS, yet are plagued by its crises – the need to protect it, rather than us, as soon as Covid struck; the 40-year infected blood scandal; the recent ideological unprofessionalism revealed by the Cass Review on trans services; the selfish strikes of the junior doctors. Still politicians dare not address its innate inadequacies.




Across the world are problems of public spending, government and personal debt, and the shakiness of banks and financial systems. These, which have weakened all of us in the West, form a backdrop to the rise of tyrannies which are waging full-scale war against another country (Russia against Ukraine) or threatening war against a nation which dares to act democratically (China against Taiwan, intensifying the threat only this week), or supporting terrorism against another state (Iran arming and directing Israel’s enemies).




We and our allies suffer directly the outworkings of this extremism and instability in our homelands – high energy prices, Russian and Chinese spies, cyber-attacks and social media campaigns, Chinese infiltration of leading universities, Islamist/hard-Left Gaza marches and student encampments which capture the public space and threaten Jews.




We also suffer a cultural attrition against our free way of life, manifested in social media, “decolonisation” and politicisation of the Civil Service and the workplace. Sir Keir, who will be our first declaredly atheist prime minister if he wins, pays no obeisance to God, but took the knee to Black Lives Matter. The Conservatives were only slightly less cringing.




It is extraordinary how reluctant political leaders have been to join up the dots of danger. Instead, they have preferred to concoct the “emergency” of climate change. The issue may well be serious, but an emergency it is not. The arbitrary 2050 net zero target, hastily imposed, has been allowed to expose this country to unnecessary state interference and expense, avoidable energy risk and therefore political insecurity. This has benefited China, allowing it to undermine the European car market without making the same net zero sacrifices, and Putin’s Russia, which had a jolly good go at taking the West’s energy needs hostage.




The Conservatives now tacitly admit problems by postponing green deadlines. Even Labour has ditched its vast £28 billion per year green energy investment plan. But no party has broken explicitly with green unreality and turned to look full-on at the emergencies we really do face.




Are we ready, for example, for the breaking of the next debt bubble? We may spend the promised 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030, but what would we actually do if Russia widened its attack on the West next week? How would we secure our supply chains if China suddenly seized control of the Taiwan Strait? We are not told. I fear this is because our leaders do not know.




Watch electoral argument on television in the coming weeks and you will see most of it revolving around voters understandably annoyed that their costs are too high or their benefits too low. No one is telling them this is the future if we go on as we are.




As this election campaign begins, Rishi Sunak is making clearer arguments about rising risk in the world. This is very welcome, but very late.


Keir Starmer seeks an Attlee-style landslide without having to explain why he deserves one

Poor old Telegraph. With the death of the Conservative Party and the slaughter of its Brexitory iteration, it’ll have no purpose in life and dinosaurs such as the increasingly decrepit Charles Moore will finally be put out to grass with all the other extinctees.

Starmer is for everyone now, the day of the fat cat, money grubbing, Tory lickspittle is over.

And you ghastly Essex lower end drag ups with your tongues firmly inserted in the anus of the Reform/UKIP/BNP can just forget any notion that hard work will change your miserable ignorant worthless little lives.

We civil servants and other important folk will now find our place in the sun.

Tax the greedy wealth hoarders and give it back to the middle classes.

Sunak will be back in California in six months.

Fuck him.