Captain Hindsight or Caption Forensic?

Starmer must grow in courage and make the difficult calls earlier.

Yesterday evening Keir Starmer called for tougher lockdown rules within 24 hours. This morning, Matt Hancock indicates the govt is considering just that. Keir Starmer has made a habit of this; saying the right things and making the right call, but at the last possible minute when every focus group okays it, and the govt is clearly about to announce just that. Maybe it works politically, maybe it doesn’t (I think it looks snarky and opportunistic), but either way, it’s ineffective opposition. The opposition NEEDS courage and conviction.

Keir Starmer is a novice propped up by a compliant media willing to write puff pieces about the latest polling or direction of the party they would never have written to talk up Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer must make these calls early, and push the govt (as is his job), not wait until the last second, an utterly spineless way of “opposing”.

Starmer should offering daily press conferences during this next phase of the pandemic, propose an alternative roadmap from lockdown, and make the tough calls on schools, lockdowns, and the economic recovery that he’s shied from making. Politics aside, this is a dangerously useless way to deal with a govt this criminally negligent in the middle of a national pandemic. Both parties are playing party politics and the PR game, and it is disgusting.

Labour has abandoned not only their core principles and those they are meant to defend, but they’ve returned to a politics of capitulation that has no precedent of winning power in this country. Attlee had a vision, Wilson had a plan, Blair had a mission, what does Starmer have, what does he stand for? Soundbites are no long adequate.