Even if Starmer could fix Labour, I still wouldn’t vote for it
By Pete North - April 14, 2021
I have a bit of a confession to make. I don’t mind Rachel Reeves. Sure, she’s a remainer to the core and is occasionally prone to virtue signalling, but she is the least awful of all the Labour front bench. She does work hard, she does ask good questions, she’s a pretty good constituency MP.
She first got my attention during those first days of the referendum campaign where her barely concealed contempt for Dominic Cummings in those now infamous select committee meetings shone through. She was right to be seriously underwhelmed.
Fast forward to today and she’s now leading the charge against Tory sleaze on the back of the Cameron affair. The opposition smells a weakness here and they’re probably right. There’s dirt there and there are too many unanswered questions about where all the Covid money is going. There are also far too many people close to the Tories failing upwards.
If Labour could focus its attentions on this, and somehow managed to bury its legion of intellectually subnormal backbenchers, then they could rebuild the façade of a halfway competent party. At the very least we could take Labour seriously.
No doubt Reeves faces the usual charges of being a Blairite, and she certainly does possess that very middle class left wing paternalism, and Labour will never shake that, but this is the first glimmer that Labour is prepared to partake in relevant politics.
The problem for me, however, is that I don’t see Labour as any less corrupt. More so on on the local level. When it comes to grubby shenanigans, in the inner cities, there’s usually a Labour councillor in the mix. And just supposing Labour could rid itself of its wokesters and Israel obsessed far-leftists, you still have a party that wants to spend big, directing public money at its own favoured causes.
Ironically, this is where the Tories are more transparent. They just steal the money directly and hand it over to their mates. Labour, on the other hand, would rebuild the aid and development NGOcracy and the quangos that go with it, awarding all the contracts to entities headed up by former Labour MPs and MEPs, with a supporting cast of policy wonks who go very suddenly from scraping a living to living the NGO high life. At least with Tory sleaze it’s just raw greed out in the open. It’s not pretending to be saving the planet.
It’s essentially this NGO architecture through which Labourists get paid and ensures left wing agendas stay in place even when he Tories are out of power. Though I’m not opposed to aid and development spending, when Labour is at the helm, it’s the goose that lays the golden egg for middle class kids with politics degrees who are then awarded a safe seat in a godforsaken Northern slum town. It’s little wonder they got kicked out of the red wall seats. I will never forgive Farage for saving Yvette Cooper’s skin.
Meanwhile, there’s no way I’d trust Labour on the Europe question. I very much doubt re-joining the EU will ever be on the cards, but sector by sector Labour would give up control to the EU because it doesn’t have the ambition or imagination to do anything else. The shadow trade commission is made up of lackeys funded by the former remain campaign, who will be pressing for the UK to sign up to EU SPS rules (if they’re not already).
Labour could reform, and it could kick out its deranged Corbynista trash, but I shudder to think what a Labour government would open the door to. When it comes down to it, they would be no different from Johnson, and would immediately installed their own SpAds and gurus, all from the humanities departments of mediocre universities, rolling out the red carpet for the decolonisation agenda.
For as long as the Westminster system functions the way it does, corruption and cronyism will remain endemic and voters really only get to choose the flavour of the mass larceny they prefer. Proportional representation makes no difference. You still end up with MPs. If forced to choose, I’ll stick with the devil I know.
Though Labour is essentially a coalition of two equally disagreeable factions, the one thing that unites them is a dislike of the British people and a desire to correct them through coercion and social engineering. For sure, the Tories may be robbing us blind, and are no more likely to leave us alone, for as long as Labour doesn’t even like Britain, they have no business running it.