The End of 2Tier Keir
He's got about two weeks from now. Probably
I don’t know how Keir Starmer’s pack of incompetents manage to do it, but even when facing electoral annihilation and a popularity rating somewhere below raw sewerage they can manage to gratuitously make things worse. As seen by the guidelines to update stationary etc. to refer to the British Government as “UK Government” rather than HM Government as it used to be and has been for several centuries. It’s a small thing, to be sure, but also a completely unnecessary one. No one beyond a couple of anti-monarchist nutters was offended by references to His (or previously Her) Majesty and I expect most people, to the extent that they cared about it, thought it was a nice bit of quaint tradition and a pleasant way to distinguish the British state from all those foreign ones with their Johnny come lately presidents and the like.
But yet, they found time to attend to that and make sure that henceforth it is the YooKay government. The result is to irritate a few more people who will decide they need to support Reform.
See also Chagos, another gratuitous decision that was driven by no one (except 2 Tier’s legal buddies who stand to make some significant moolah out of representing Mauritius?) which has caused the fraying UK-US special relationship to be almost destroyed. No one wanted it. No on was campaigning for it. It wasn’t mentioned in the Labour manifesto but yet mysteriously it became a top priority. Quite why the Yookay should pay Mauritius for the privilege of giving it some islands it had explicitly renounced a claim to in 1968 is even more confusing. But there you are, Starmer and his mates do things that seem quite bizarre to the rest of the nation.
And that leads us neatly to…
The Mandelson Affair
This week we have seen the Epstein documents in the US provide a comprehensive take down of the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is seen, yet again, as a fundamental incompetent with no clue. As comedian and fake journalist Jonathan Pie puts it in the middle of this monologue, Mandelson was a known acquaintance of known pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
This was known back in 2010s. He had plenty of other red flags - not least being forced to resign from Labour party governments twice in the past for basic scummy behavior - so why would 2 Tier want to appoint him to anything? let alone a prestigious ambassadorial post?
Well the answer is that several of his senior advisors are Mandelson protegés and apparently 2 Tier is such a lover of process that once those advisors told him everything was fine, he was happy to oblige. This despite the fact that the vetting process must have uncovered all those emails to Epstein in ~2009 where Mandelson was literally sending him tips about government policy. If the vetting process didn’t discover that, then it was clearly run by incompetents, which TBH is possible, however almost certainly it did discover them and someone in the reviewing part decided they were unimportant. Who that was is unclear, my guess is Jerome Powell and/or McSweeney, but possibly Cabinet Secretary Chris Wormald may be to blame. In any case I suspect that in the next few days both Powell and Wormald will be thrown to the wolves and 2 Tier will be turning over a new page and starting afresh and all kinds of other clichés. Those 2009 emails, however, are another place where 2 Tier might have a problem since at the time he was Director of Public Prosecutions. If subsequently it turns out that the DPP’s office knew about them there will be a genuine question of why they did not lead to prosecution.
Anyway while 2 Tier will probably escape being forced to resign over Mandelson, that doesn’t mean he’s home free. That’s because of what happens on Feb 26 and
The By-Election Blues
Or rather the by-election teals and greens.
On Feb 26, the voters in Gorton and Denton go to the polls to replace their MP, who stood down for “health reasons”. It is widely believed that in actual fact, despite having tossed out of the Labour party for being indiscreet on Whatsapp, he actually resigned to let Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, return to parliament. If that is the case then it failed, as 2 Tier recognized Burnham’s threat to his leadership and rigged the selection process so that he was unable to be part of it, let alone chosen.
For once, IMHO, 2 Tier did a good thing, because Andy Burnham is, as documented in the post linked above, and in my comment to it, exactly the sort of person you don’t want as Prime Minister since he has never had a job outside of politics/government and has shown zero talent at anything prior to becoming mayor. Not being a Mancunian I can’t comment on his effectiveness as mayor, but I’m fairly sure it’s not been as wonderful as he likes to claim.
Anyway, the result of this pre-election hobbling is that the constituency, which Gwynne won at the last election with just over 50% of the vote, is looking like it is now highly competitive and anything but a safe seat. Indeed as this spectator article (archive) points out, the seat is now a three-way race between Labour, Reform and the Greens. There is some evidence that a three-way race is optimistic.
There’s some excellent on the ground reporting from Gawain Towler, where he reports encountering next to no Labour support in parts where you might expect it
While he, as a long time Farageist, is clearly going to be biased in favor of Reform other evidence suggests that he is mostly correct. For example this Manchester Evening News article, despite protestations from Labour, indicates that both the Greens and Reform see the other as the main rival. I think the chances are high that not only will Labour lose the seat, they will come third and quite probably a distant third at that.
Professor Rob Ford (quoted out of context by the Greens) has some very detailed analysis on his substack.
Sadly he hasn’t, as of writing, posted Update 2.
The seat is a real mix, demographically, with lanyard-class people, working class whites, blacks and muslims as well as a significant number of students (a.k.a. aspirational lanyard classers) so it is hard to make predictions. Mind you, that also makes it a decent proxy for the country as a whole so lots of people are going to be spending a lot of time analyzing the results.
Sticking my head out, I expect Reform to either win or come second and the Greens likewise. Which one wins depends IMHO on how loyal Labour voters are to their candidate and the potential attractions of the various minor parties. My gut tells me that Reform will squeak a win because enough Labour voters will still vote Labour and more will switch to Reform than the Greens, but I won’t be shocked if the Greens beat Reform.
2 Tier can only survive IMO if Labour win the seat or come close to the winner.
If, as I think is likely, the Labour brand is now perceived approximately as toxic as the Tories then he’s stuffed. My guess is “other” gets around 15-20%, Labour gets 10-15% and the remaining 65-75% is split between the Greens and Reform. In that case it doesn’t actually matter which one wins because Labour will have seen its share of the vote tumble from 50% to ~10% and that kind of a loss of vote is going to cause panic amongst all the other Labour MPs. Panicking MPs will definitely toss their leader out in the hopes that a new one can turn things around. I think if Labour get anything less than 25% of the vote he’s in trouble and the lower it gets the worse it gets. Only if the Labour vote holds at 30% or so is he safe… for the time being.
What if I’m Wrong?
What if, one way or another, 2 Tier manages to hang on after the end of the month? Well it’s not looking good. There are elections in Scotland and Wales for their devolved parliaments and, even though quite a few have been cancelled, numerous local council elections all over the UK. These take place in May.
Based on present polling Labour is going to be wiped out in Wales, do little better in Scotland and probably lose most of its local election council seats. I do not see a way that the aforementioned panicking MPs decide to stick with him, though it is even harder to see any of the plausible alternative Labour leaders making things better.
Bluntly the Labour party is almost certain to fall as hard as the Tories have and for exactly the same reason - an inability to stop immigration let alone do as Amelia wants and start “remigration”.
The bigger question is not how long 2 Tier lasts, but when who ever leads Labour decides to throw in the towel and call for an election. Nigel Farage thinks it will be later this year - perhaps October - and I hope he is right. The Yookay can’t survive years more of Labour party misgovernment.
What I don't understand is the claim that the government isn't able to stop immigration, as though immigration is an irresistible force. It's the government! They can do whatever they like within the law. If they wanted to reduce or halt immigration, as almost everybody desires, they could.
In reality, both the left and right of politics, for reasons unknown, promote and facilitate mass immigration, to the ultimate detriment of the nation.
First, let me say "GO AMELIA! She may very well be the UK's last hope. Rather ironic, all in all. Second, for us dumb yanks, what the hell is a "lanyard class people?"