Be Careful What You Wish For...

There used to be an adage during the Cold War: ' ...if you hear the four-minute warning, put your head between your knees and kiss your arse goodbye ...' On so many fronts at the moment we are hearing but not heeding four minute warnings every day of our lives. We've had a decade-plus of complete political inanity and insanity, with the Tories going full-tilt lemming over a cliff of their own making, and leaving the country in a post-Brexit swamp of rising prices and with a complete lack of our previously hard-earned freedom of movement between us and own nearest neighbours foisted upon us. Then they showed themselves to be the libertarian self-interested toss-pots we always knew them to be during the global disaster that was Covid, with so many of their number exploiting the gaping holes in the procurement process at our - great - expense; is it any wonder that the current Labour government is under siege at the moment, trying against all odds to mop up this mess? Unfortunately, rather than getting their collective noses to the grindstone and exploiting their actually completely unassailable mandate to govern to a full term, they are fretting and bickering about a by-election that will at the very most return Andy Burnham to parliament as a sitting MP.

I've no beef with Burnham himself: he's a very capable and charismatic politician and he sits on the side of the angels. Where I do take issue with him is in his timing and choice of action. He is abandoning his electorate as mayor and threatening to attempt to destabilise the only government in recent decades that has actually - albeit slowly so far - started to make some inroads into repairing the damage left by the libertarian right [New Labour included]. Yes, Starmer is boring and uncharismatic, as are the policies they are trying with some success to implement. But the Party voted for him for just those reasons, and so did the wider electorate. Nobody wanted a reprise of the total circus that preceded them: that bloody freak show of egos and hubris that saw so many ineffectual and ineffective idiots go through the revolving door of Number Ten for far too long and causing so much collateral damage in so doing.

It's been less than half of the current government's allotted tenure thus far, and despite the media, the internet and even many Labour MPs' naysaying, so much under the hood policy is already showing quiet progress without fanfare. Maybe that's the nub of the government and Starmer's PR woes: despite its obvious missteps and misreadings, it hasn't actually capitalised on its successes, including on the perennial bugbear of illegal migration: still the subject of the big lie propagated by all on the right, funded by self-interested capitalists who need a supine government to head further down the road of deregulation in search of ever more profit. I hope Andy Burnham does win his by-election - he's a Labour candidate, and a damned good one after all - but I hope he uses that victory to good end, if and when he eventually gets called to government. He'd make a damned good Prime Minister too, and I would stand behind him as a lifelong Labour supporter and party member; but now is not the time for yet another change of leadership: the country has had its fill of such frequent vacillation. On the other hand, if there's anyone in that particular constituency thinking of voting Reform, you might just consider heeding that old Cold War adage seriously. Seriously, folks...