A Message from Keir Starmer after the Local Elections Victories

I got this message from the Labour leader celebrating Labour’s victories in last Thursday’s local elections, and praising the great work he expects the new Labour councillors will do.

‘David, last week’s local election results saw Labour become the largest party in local government.

Labour offered a positive alternative, and people have given us their trust. It’s now our duty to tackle the Tory cost of living crisis and ease the burden on working people.

Now, we cannot waste a day in delivering on the Labour commitment to put money back in people’s pockets.

That’s why we’re setting the pace. I’m working with our new council leaders to create emergency cost of living action plans and review local housing plans.

We’ll act now, to ease the squeeze on people’s pockets, and support their aspirations.

Our new leaders will review their inheritance and pull every lever possible to relieve the pressure that this government has placed on working people.

Because, where Labour is in power, we deliver. We make fairer choices for working people and their families, and we improve lives.

I’m proud of the gains we made last week, but that pride will now fuel our pursuit of change.

We have a chance to show that Labour can not only improve communities across the country, but that we have plans to build a better Britain for everyone.

It’s time for change and Labour will make that change happen.

Thank you,

I’m sure the new councillors will work hard for their communities, but last week’s elections weren’t the golden victories Starmer seems to believe. To many people, Labour doesn’t offer an inspiring alternative that fills them with enthusiasm for a Labour government. It’s why the cephologists are predicting a hung parliament. Starmer has rejected all the socialist policies that gave working people such hope for real change under Corbyn. And Starmer has also shown himself to be personally vindictive, persecutory and untrustworthy. When Rachel Reeves was called upon to defend him during a brief TV interview and the list of all the promises he’s broken was mentioned, she could only reply with telling the interviewer all he policies he had kept: that’s right, all three of them. Policies to tackle the cost of living crisis and provide proper, affordable housing are sorely needed. But I’m not sure Starmer can be trusted even here. His promise that the new Labour councillors would cap council tax was meaningless. By the time he stated the policy, the tax had been set for the year. And it was only a cap. The tax would still remain at a level many citizens would find difficult to afford. Any true reform could only come from a Labour government.

There are a whole range of local issues that require reform at the national level. Bus services have been cut so that many working class, suburban communities around the country – my home city of Bristol is one example – don’t have them are effectively cut off. Privatisation of the bus companies has failed. But national legislation passed by Thatcher prevents local governments from renationalising them. This needs to be repealed, but I doubt that Starmer will do it. Similarly, we need a return to council housing, but Thatcher again banned local councils from doing so. A piece of legislation that also needs to be repealed. But I doubt he’ll do that either.

Labour offers to make things a little better than the Tories, but that’s all. It won’t do any more when the leadership, the bureaucracy and the parliamentary party are still in thrall to Blair and his brand of Thatcherism. I’m glad Labour did do so well last Thursday and want it to win the national elections. But I also want a leadership that recognises that, whatever the establishment says, Thatcherism is a dismal, destructive failure.

But that won’t come from Starmer.

Hurrah! The Green Party Wants to Renationalise the NHS

I don’t usually watch the party political broadcasts. I find them too boring, depressing and, in the case of the Tories, infuriating. But I caught a bit of the Greens’ broadcast last night, and was impressed. They stated that as part of their platform of policies they would renationalise the NHS, end its outsourcing and make social care free at the point of use as with the health service. Excellent! This is what the Labour party should be doing, and should have done 16 years ago when Blair won his landslide victory in 1997. But I’m afraid Starmer won’t. Everything he’s said has raised warning signs that he means to privatise more of the health service following Blair’s precedent, starting with using private healthcare providers to clear the backlog of cases. This is exactly what the Tories have been saying. Or course, Jeremy Corbyn wanted to renationalise the NHS, along with the public utilities and restore and revitalise the welfare state. Which is why they smeared him, first as a Communist, then as an anti-Semite, enthusiastically aided by Starmer’s allies in the Labour party.

I’ve very mixed feelings about the Greens. They’re very woke. There was a controversy a few years ago about the schools in Brighton, which I think is a Green council or their MP is Green, teaching Critical Race Theory and White Privilege. In Scotland the Greens are behind the SNP’s wretched Gender Recognition Act, which would lower the age people can legally declare themselves trans to 16 amongst other reforms. I don’t doubt that it’s meant well, but I strongly feel it will do much harm by encouraging confused young people to pursue medical treatment that may be totally inappropriate for them and could lead to lasting harm.

But I entirely support their demand for a properly nationalised and funded NHS.

I am just annoyed that it’s the Greens, who are regarded as an extreme, fringe party, demanding this and not Labour.

Well, a few years ago the Greens took a number of local seats from Labour in the council elections in Bristol until they were only one or two behind them on the council. I would therefore not blame anyone if, in the forthcoming council elections, they turned their votes away from Starmer’s Labour and voted Green instead.

Dan Hodges Predicts Inevitable Challenge to Sunak from Boris

More on the infighting breaking out in the Tory ranks as their popularity continues to crumble. The right-wing mouthpiece dubbed by Zelo Street as the Blues musician ‘Whinging Dan Hodges’, according to a video put up this morning by That Preston Journalist, has said that it’s only a matter of time now before Johnson tries to get back into power and oust Sunak. This will probably happen after the Tories take a kicking in the council elections in May. That Preston Journalist felt that even if Johnson was able to improve the Tories’ popularity a little bit, it wouldn’t be enough and they should spend some time in opposition in order to rebuild.

I agree, but with one difference. They should go into opposition and never come out.

Chumbawamba Sing Their Farewells to Maggie Thatcher

Okay, I’ve put up a series of left-wing and socialist music videos over the past couple of days laying into the Tories and other right-wing pundits and blowhards like Piers Moron and ‘Depeche Toad’ Farage. The results of the council elections are coming in, and it seems the Tories haven’t done terribly well. Not as disastrously as I’d like, but they’ve lost several councils to Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens. And I thought I’d rub it in a bit further with this musical reminder that Maggie is no longer with us. This is a performance by the pop band Chumbawamba singing their song anticipating Thatcher’s death, ‘In Memoriam – So Long So Long’ at a concert in Bedminster, one of Bristol’s suburbs, way back in 2009. It was put up on Random Planet’s channel on YouTube in 2013.

The song was written and performed before Thatcher’s death and the band were going to release it as an EP. Hence they ask people not to put it up on YouTube just yet, and also give instructions on how you can order it directly from them. As the performance is over a decade old, it’s doubtful this arrangement is still working. You can, however, hear the full EP on YouTube as well. This includes a short piece in Spanish which is supposed to be General Pinochet’s regards from beyond the grave, as well as Frankie Boyle’s joke that when Thatcher dies, the Scots are going to dig a hole so deep they’ll be able to hand her over to Satan personally. It’s an interesting piece musically. It’s jazz-inflected and actually really laid back, for all that it’s celebrating Thatcher’s demise.

Thatcher’s long gone, but unfortunately Thatcherism still remains a force in British politics as zombie economics – a doctrine long shown to be dead and useless, but which is still propped up into a kind of ghastly semblance of life by right-wing politicians and the media. It’s about time it was laid to rest as well.

Cassetteboy Vs the Tories at the May Elections

Well, it’s the council elections today and that’s one of the reasons I’m putting up these left-wing, socialist and simply anti-Tory music videos and mash-ups. This one’s by Cassetteboy, and makes their views about the sheer vileness of the Conservatives very clear. It begins by stating that according to the polls, Johnson should be on the dole and the elections are a good way to give them rejection. It points out his and his party’s connection to Putin through Russian donors, has a dig at them for watching porn in the commons, before then going on to condemn them for rising energy costs. Ordinarily people freeze ’cause they can’t pay their energy bills, but the Tories keep their money safe in offshore accounts so they don’t pay tax and certainly aren’t going to tax BP and the rest of the oil companies for the massive profits they’re making. It talks about them scuttling off to Russia, and Priti Patel wanting to lock us all up if we demonstrate and send us to Rwanda. It concludes with Johnson stating openly that you shouldn’t vote for any of them, because they’re all the same.

Appearing in the video and having their words and speeches edited to create this indictment are Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and others.

Cartoon on the People Starmer Likes and Dislikes

I’ve been putting up various cartoons I’ve drawn which express my anger at certain political issues, and particularly the anti-democratic and destructive current Labour leadership. Starmer and his allies, like General Secretary David Evans, seem determined to purge the party of any socialist content as well as attack its historic connections with the trade unions. All this is being done to turn it into another Tory party. The results have been disastrous. Labour took a hammering at the council elections, and when it has won, it’s been by a very bare margin. But Starmer and the Blairites carry on, firmly convinced that it will lead them to victory after they have purged the party of all those wretched ‘anti-Semites’ and ‘Trots’.

I got so annoyed with Starmer and his mercenary leadership that I drew this cartoon expressing my view of who Keef Stalin likes and who he doesn’t. What he likes is big corporate donations, while standing behind him are Blair and Thatcher. And the people he likes are the Israel lobby, right-wing journalists and big business.

The peeps he doesn’t like – who I’ve put in a dock marked ‘purged’ are non-Zionist Jews, Muslims, Blacks and the working class. Because most of the people being purged for anti-Semitism are Jewish critics of Israel. Muslims are experiencing rising islamophobia in the party, while Starmer has ignored the instances of bullying by members of the right-wing apparat against Black MPs and activists, like Diane Abbott. As for the working class, the Blairites never had any time for them. They were too keen chasing middle class Tory voters in swing constituencies. One of the women Stalin has taken on as his advisor also worked for Blair, and advised him to ignore the ‘underserving poor’. Thus Starmer and his fellows see the working people who physically build and make this country. And, of course, he hates socialists. I know some of the people really don’t look like who they’re meant to represent, but I hope you’ll forgive this.

Starmer’s a disaster, and the more he tries to tighten his grip and purge people, the further down the polls he goes. He must go.

Right-Wing Internet Host Belfield Now Pushing for NHS Privatisation

It’s now the morning after the council and elected mayoral elections that were being held up and down the country yesterday. And to no-one’s surprise, Labour lost the Hartlepool bye-election to the Tories. The media commenters have identified Brexit as the cause of the defeat. For those of us on the left of the party, Brexit was a major factor, but it was also partly due to the shoddy, ineffectual leadership and arrogance of the current leader, Keir Starmer. Starmer parachuted into Hartlepool his preferred candidate, a Remainer, over the heads of local Labour party members, activists and supporters. Mike on Vox Political predicted that this would lead to defeat, and so it did. Because of this, the right-wingers on the Net were putting up videos stating that Labour was insulting Hartlepool’s working people. This was further compounded by the fact that Starmer has been such an ineffective opposition leader, that some people didn’t know who he was. Mahyar Tousi, one of the Brexiteers with arch-Thatcherite views, included a clip from Sky News on his video about Labour in Hartlepool yesterday. This showed Starmer earnestly talking to people. The presenter then stopped a passing woman and asked her if she knew who that man was over there. She didn’t. The presenter told her it was Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party. The woman still didn’t know. So much for Starmer’s glittering leadership.

And it was also yesterday that right-wing internet radio host, Alex Belfield, put up a video openly calling for the NHS to be handed over to private management. This isn’t the first time he’s done this, and I doubt that it will be the last. He’s already put up videos with titles like ‘Private NHS Now’. Belfield is vehemently against the lockdown, which he feels is unnecessary and actually harmful, as it has prevented the elderly in nursing homes being visited and comforted by their relatives. It has also created another crisis in the NHS, as the concentration on the Coronavirus has meant routine operations, examinations and treatment have been postponed to the point that waiting times have increased. Highly vulnerable people, like those suffering from cancer, are going untreated.

This is a terrible problem, and much of it, like the grotesque mishandling of the Coronavirus crisis that has seen well over 100,000 die from the disease, can be put down to Boris Johnson’s ineptitude and his cavalier disregard for human life over the economy. Plus the way the NHS has been run down, starved of funds and partially privatised over the past ten years.

But not to Belfield. The ginger-headed man with the tiny man-sausage, as he has described himself, knows better. He put up a rant yesterday claiming that it was all due to increased bureaucracy and ‘box-ticking Celia Imrie types’. Belfield has a feud going with the BBC, and he never fails to include jabs at that organisation. I don’t know whether he has anything against Celia Imrie, or whether it’s just he’s using the kind of parts she’s played as an example of a certain kind of fussy, totally unnecessary management type. You know, the sort of people the Golgafrinchams put into an ark to send into space and crash on Earth on the grounds that they were ‘a bunch of useless bloody loonies’ according to the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The solution, according to Belfield, is for the NHS to be handed over to private management.

This is no solution, as it is private management that has created this situation.

Jacky Davis and Ray Tallis have comprehensively shown in their book, NHS – SOS, that private enterprise is very definitely not as efficient as state healthcare. It’s actually more bureaucratic, as the US private healthcare companies can spend as much as 40-50 per cent of their income on management and legal issues. A book I bought a few years ago discussing the privatisation of healthcare in places like Canada as well as Britain found that the privatisation of parts of the health service over here had actually increased costs by 6 per cent. Parts of the NHS are being handed over to private management, and the effects are not good. Private enterprise is all about profit, not service, and so we’ve seen the private healthcare chains close down doctors surgeries even though they were needed by local people who were then left without a local GP. At the same time, Tory MPs have been demanding the levying of payments for users of certain NHS services, which are supposed to be free at the point of service.

This is all part of the long-time project of privatising the NHS, and turning it into a for-profit healthcare system like the American.

And Belfield is fully behind it.

Belfield likes to present himself as an ordinary working class lad without a degree, who’s despised by the middle class White liberals. His audience seem to be the middle aged, White working class, who feel left behind, excluded from political representation in favour of ethnic minorities. The kind of people, who voted for UKIP.

But these are exactly the people, who will suffer if Belfield’s political aims are realised. If Belfield and the other Tories have their way and privatise the NHS, it will be the working class – and that includes the White working class – who will struggle to pay for healthcare treatment. It’s already happening now, through hospital and GP closures due to private management. And thanks to the privatisation of the dentists, many people have been struggling for a long time to find dentists, who will take NHS patients.

Belfield may well be a working class lad, but his politics are those of the upper classes, who wish to impoverish and exploit working people.

And that means privatising the NHS, even, or especially, if it harms working people’s health.

They won’t care, so long as it turns a profit.

I’m not going to post his video, but if you want to see it, it’s on YouTube at Booze 🇬🇧 Disaster 🍻 Told Ya 🤦‍♂️ Chickens 🐓 Coming 🍺 Home To Roost 🍷 Price Of Last 14 Months – YouTube

Just remember, it is right-wing, pro-privatisation propaganda.

Bristol South Labour Candidates Will Oppose Ring Road

Going out for my constitutional this morning I bumped into Carolyn Jenkins, one of the Labour candidates for my part of south Bristol. She was going round the houses leafletting. As I’m a member of the local party, I stopped and talked to her. She seems affable, chatty, and with a deep interest in education. She’s a governor in at least one of the local schools. The major issue locally is the proposed south Bristol ring road. This is supported by the elected mayor, Marvin Rees, despite very strong opposition by local people. The existing road is far too narrow for the sheer volume of traffic that the new ring road would be expected to carry and runs past a primary school. This obviously brings the danger of traffic accidents not to mention air pollution. We asked her about the ring road, and she said that all of three Labour candidates for the local ward intend to oppose the road even if that means defying Marvin and the rest of the Labour group on the council.

I am very glad that she and her two fellow candidates are doing this, and really do believe that they will serve the local community very well. I wish them every success today, along with all the other Labour candidates up and down the country.

Are Starmer and the NEC Plotting to Sabotage Labour’s Chances in the May Council Elections?

This is a question I’m forced to ask after reading Zelo Street’s article about the NEC interfering in the local Labour party’s election for candidates for mayor of Liverpool and the NEC’s interference in the selection meeting for my local Labour party, Bristol South. According to the Street, Liverpool’s Labour party had decided on an all-female shortlist to replace Joe Anderson. The probable favourite was Anna Rothery, who had the support of several MPs, one other mayor, three trades unions, as well as activists, academics and business people. This shortlist was then cast aside by the NEC and the three candidates on it told they couldn’t reapply. No reason was given for their decision. Zelo Street observes that nominations close tomorrow, which means that the NEC has probably decided on a favoured candidate. It’s a political stitch-up, with Starmer and the NEC parachuting a favoured candidate in over the heads of the local party and community. This has left quite conundrum about what should have been done instead. The Street writes

With party membership in freefall, many activists disenchanted, and Liverpool one of the few parts of the country to remain a Labour stronghold, what would have been the sensible thing to do? What would the Keir Starmer of February last year have done? What would Nietzsche have done?

I wonder if something similar is also being done to Bristol South for the local elections. We were to have an election meeting earlier this month, but were told we couldn’t. The party secretary has asked for another date at the end of the month or perhaps early in March, but has not received an answer. Meanwhile the Lib Dems have got out of the starting blocks early. We got a load of their bumf through the post this morning.

So what kind of game is Starmer and the Blairites playing? If they’re planning to parachute in their own candidates, then Starmer’s broken another of his election promises. This was something he said he would end. The Street quotes him as saying at the Labour leadership elections last year

“The selections for Labour candidates needs to be more democratic and we should end NEC impositions of candidates. Local Party members should select their candidates for every election”.

As Mike’s pointed out many times on his blog, Starmer has very quickly broken his promise to stick by the policies and promises laid out in last year’s election manifesto, so it really shouldn’t be a surprise if this is another promise the slimy turncoat is going to break.

But I also wonder if he and the NEC aren’t plotting to wreck Labour’s chances at the May election with such interference in order to push through a further purge of the left. The Blairites in the party bureaucracy did their best to sabotage the party’s chances in 2017 and then last year as part of their long-term campaign to oust Corbyn. Discussing the catastrophic decline in party membership and finances, Novara Media considered that it might be a deliberate plot to engineer a crisis that would allow Starmer to purge the party further, and push it even further to the right to solidify the Blairites’ hold on it.

Unfortunately, this is all too possible. Liverpool and Bristol are cities where Labour has traditionally been strong. A few weeks ago the NEC intervened to suspend three local Labour officials and activists in Bristol, prompting a letter of complaint signed by local Labour party politicos, officials and activists. My guess is that Starmer’s treacherous faction aiming to lose the elections in these cities and blame it on the lingering influence of Corbyn. This would give them a pretext for further restructuring and moves that would turn it into Conservative party MK 2.

Of course, I could be a little paranoid here. But with the Blairites’ record of plotting against their own party, as well as Tony Blair’s active strategy of imposing the candidates he wanted on local communities, this seems all too possible.

See: Zelo Street: Labour’s Liverpool Louse-Up (zelo-street.blogspot.com)

Scumbag Starmer Sacks Nadia Whittome Behind Back But Tells Fascist Guido Fawkes

This is another incident which shows the real, intolerant, treacherous face of Starmer’s administration. And it could have come straight out of the Blair playbook. Yesterday Starmer sacked three MPs from their posts as Parliamentary Private Secretaries – Nadia Whittome, Beth Winter and Olivia Blake because they had the conscience and the guts to vote against the government’s Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill 2019-21. The ladies objected to the bill’s provisions that would have exempted British service personnel for prosecutions for torture committed overseas. Starmer, however, had set up a one-line whip demanding that the Labout MPs abstain.

Other MPs from the ‘Corbynite’ wing of the party also had the courage to vote against the bill. They were: Diane Abbott, Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Jeremy Corbyn, Ian Lavery, Rebecca Long-Bailey, John McDonnell, Kate Osamor, Kate Osborne, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Zarah Sultana, Jon Trickett, and Claudia Webbe. Kudos and respect to all of them.

Lobster has put up a number of articles about the involvement of British armed forces in war crimes and supporting brutal dictatorships. At the moment the British military is giving training to 17 regimes, including the Chinese, that are on a list of thirty which are of concern because of their history of human rights abuses. The SAS was also involved in training the Sri Lankan army in its brutal war against the Tamil Tigers, which included reprisals and atrocities against the civilian Tamil population. A recent book on war crimes by the ‘Keenie Meenies’, a British mercenary company, also notes that, although they’re not formally part of the British army, they too have been used by the British state to give military support to some very unpleasant movements and regimes at arm’s length. Like the Mujahiddin fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Fascist regimes in Central America in the 1980s. Going further back, British armed forces were also responsible for brutal reprisals against Black Kenyans during the Mao Mao rebellion, including torture and mutilation. The victims of the atrocities were only granted compensation after a long legal campaign a few years ago. For details of the atrocities themselves, see the book, Africa’s Secret Gulags.

Mike also points that Starmer’s order that Labour should abstain on the bill, but not vote against it, is similar to Harriet Harman’s order a few years ago that Labour should also abstain on a Tory welfare bill that would further cut benefits and impoverish claimants. It’s all part of the Blairite strategy of trying to appeal to Tory voters at the expense of the people they should really be standing up to protect. But they try to make it seems that they’re also paying attention to their working class and socialist base by abstaining. It’s unconvincing. To me, it recalls Pilate in the Gospels washing his hands and walking off when the Sanhedrin brought Christ before him to be crucified.

What makes Starmer’s decision particularly noxious, however, what adds insult to injury, is the way it was done. Whittome was not told she was sacked but a Labour ‘representative’ – some of us can think of other epithets for this unnamed person – instead went of an briefed Guido Fawkes. That’s the far-right gossip and smear site run by Paul Staines. Staines is an extreme right-wing Tory and libertarian, who’d like to ban the trade unions and other working class organisations, privatise everything, including the NHS, and get rid of the welfare state. When he was a member of the Freedom Association back in the 1980s, the organisation invited the leader of a Fascist death squad from El Salvador as their guest of honour at their annual dinner. Other guests, I think, included members of the South African Conservative party, who were staunch supporters of apartheid. He was also mad keen on the various psychedelics that were coming into the rave scene in the 1990s, including and especially ‘E’. It’s disgusting that anyone in the news should have been told before Whittome herself, but especially a Fascist like Staines and his squalid crew.

And Mike has pointed out on his blog that this is exactly the same tactic the Blairites in the Labour party used to stab him in the back. Mike was suspended for anti-Semitism the evening before he was due to stand as a Labour councillor in the mid-Wales elections. But he only found about it when a reporter from one of the local Welsh papers rang him up to ask him about it. And then some other weasel at the NEC went off and leaked Mike’s details to the Sunset Times, which then ran a feature smearing and libeling him as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Which Mike has never been, and very strongly and utterly condemns, as he has all racism.

But this also brings to mind the negative briefing Blair himself conducted against those MPs, who dared to go ‘off-message’ during his regime. Notable victims included Clare Short, who I think also clashed with him over his definitely unethical foreign policy. If a Labour MP or senior figure dared to contradict one of the Dear Leader’s policies or announcements, Blair and Campbell called the media hacks in for an anonymous briefing in which they or a representative then attacked the dissenting MP.

And now it seems that these old tactics have returned under ‘centrist’ Keir Starmer.

The Labour party is haemorrhaging members because of the way Starmer has turned his back on the great, socialist, genuinely Labour policies that Corbyn and his team were determined to return to. Mike’s pointed out that so far Starmer has broken 9 of his pledges to uphold them. Including his commitment to add 5 per cent tax to the upper right for big earners. That’s the multi-millionaires who have benefited from massive tax breaks, funded by savage benefit cuts to the poor and starving at the bottom of society, and who have squirreled their money away in offshore bank accounts. Including companies like that well-known patriotic group of papers and media, News International. Black members are particularly bitter and disappointed because of Starmer’s scant regard for the Black Lives Matter movement, which he dismissed as a ‘moment’.

Starmer has done nothing against the intriguers, who cost Labour the 2017 and 2019 elections, and who were responsible for the racist bullying of three senior and respected Black Labour MPs. Instead, the intriguers are arming themselves with lawyers and claiming that they have been smeared. And it shows how low Private Eye has fallen that the satirical magazine is uncritically pushing these claims, just as it was an enthusiastic supporter of the anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn and his supporters.

Mike yesterday put up a piece commenting on this grossly shabby action by Starmer, including citing some very excellent tweets from the public. They include people like Tory Fibs, Kelly-Ann Mendoza and Rachel Swindon. But my favourite comment is this from Mark Hebden

Nadia Whittome has essentially been sacked for voting against war crimes.

The Labour Party is the Party of War criminality again then

Yes, just as they were when Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq.

Mike has pointed out that Labour is behind the Tories in the polls, although Starmer himself is actually more popular than Boris. He asks, quite credibly, if this is because the Labour party acts like this to betray its own members.

What comes out of this is that Starmer himself is another intriguing Blairite and that he and his scuzzy advisors really haven’t learnt that not only are such tactics against one’s own unacceptable in themselves, they will also make you unpopular with the public. The press didn’t hold back on using these negative briefings against Blair and Brown when they did it, in order to make them look personally unpleasant and untrustworthy. Which they were.

Starmer is damaging the Labour party. I wish the poll result were the reverse. I wish Labour was surging ahead of the Tories, and it was Starmer behind Boris. It is no more than he deserves.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/09/24/keir-starmers-labour-is-unpopular-because-he-supports-war-crimes-and-sacks-people-who-dont/