Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

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48 hours in government and Starmer has already taken up the baton of neoliberalism without breaking stride.

Starmer’s election campaign was (just as we predicted) a glittering triumph for the electoral strategy of promising nothing, having no manifesto, saying very little and avoiding the public almost entirely – while standing behind big banners that said ‘change’.

People were free to project whatever fantasies they wanted towards a blank piece of paper or just unthreatened enough to use a vote for Labour to punish the Tories. It didn’t matter that Labour majorities were slashed in safe seats (Starmer’s own majority was halved) nor that Reform was launched as a viable national player. Labour studied the first-past-the-post data, realised they only needed blankness sprinkled with a bit of racism to triumph in marginal seats and it worked perfectly.

Those that voted Labour just to stick it to Jacob Rees Mogg et al have had their money’s worth and are perhaps content to just have a crew mildly less bonkers, arrogant and incompetent. That is a low bar and Labour may manage it. Those that expect Labour to be a mildly less toxic shower of careerist grifters are pitching their expectations realistically.

Voters who indulged in the fantasy that Starmer and the Thatcherettes would turn into Micheal Foot and the Bennite ensemble once in power are obviously going to horribly disappointed. One of the many reasons why Starmer perfected the art (which comes naturally to him) of studied blankness was to hoodwink traditional Labour voters that they would get a Labour government. What we will get instead is a plate spinning Tory government: a slick PR operation designed to pass off activity as attainment. Cue the music and await the whizzy new ‘initiatives’ to replace the ‘Levelling Up fund’ and the ‘Northern Powerhouse’.

The great washing machines of spin (so characteristic of the Blair years) were already spooling up yesterday, tasked (as always) with shining up shit as gold.

The wonderful Ash Sarkar wisely advised viewers of Novara Media to start two columns when reviewing Labour’s flurries of ‘policy’ announcements and gimmicks: one labelled ‘cheap’ and the other ‘expensive’. I would suggest ‘hollow / Tory’ and ‘meaningful / socialist’.

Yesterdays policy announcements set the pattern. All hollow / Tory.

This was yesterday’s stand-out policy headline from the Labour / Guardian axis:

Wes Streeting pledges billions to GPs in order to ‘fix front door’ of NHS

Health secretary wants to bring back family doctors, cut pressure on hospitals and solve pay disputes

As always with Blairites, one needs to look carefully at the small print, which said:

“Ministers will divert billions of pounds from hospitals to GPs to “fix the front door to the NHS”, Wes Streeting has promised, as he said millions of patients will be able to see the same family doctor at every appointment.”

So there will be no new money for the chronically underfunded NHS, just money diverted away from hospitals to (maybe) fix the PR eyesore of the long running strikes by junior doctors.

So the pressure on hospitals is to be eased by cutting their budgets? The pressure on doctors eased by saddling them with another unattainable target? Who else did this trick of passing off reallocations as extra money? Why, the Tories did it for years!

Next up was another natural Tory, Rachel Reeves, banging on about housing. Not that Labour was going to build any council houses (heaven forbid that a house should be built in Britain that might deprive banks and rentiers of their profits) – no she was just going to cut ‘red tape’ around planning.

Property developers will be delighted by this: the UK already has the lowest house building standards in Europe and now it can all be made worse by building even worse houses on flood plains and green belt land. There is a reason why pan-european building firms giggle over UK houses as ‘twat boxes’.

What party also had the deregulation of house planning always in their sights? The Tories of course! The housing crisis is to be solved by building no council houses? The homeless will benefit from giving property developers an easier ride? Perhaps a house will trickle down to rough sleepers? So it’s less regulation for powerful companies and f*ck all for those not on the property ladder. Thanks Labour!

We also had Ed Miliband spunking his pants about Labour withdrawing the Tory ban of onshore windfarms. This is less than lipstick on a pig. Labour’s entire economic strategy is borrowed from Liz Truss and relies on endless economic growth to give the UK some more billionaires, with a few crumbs shaved off for Hoi Polloi.

You cannot deal with climate vandalism by allowing the 1% to grow their asset base via more consumerism and swagger box electric cars. The people who build these wind turbines are in many cases the same fossil fuel firms pushing us towards extinction.

This is a classic New Labour move, providing a big PR gimmick (in this case a wind turbine) and leaving the underlying acceleration towards disaster entirely untouched.

To complete a quartet of turd releases, Israeli stooge David Lammy was boasting about ‘seeking’ a wide ranging new agreement with the EU as regards security and energy. Essentially more integration for the spooks and the military. The EU will most likely tell us to go f*ck ourselves, as such benefits are what you get from being in the EU: not a vassal of the U.S. Still it made for an impressive headline so job done.

To summarise 48 hours of Starmer’s Labour in power:

• no council houses to solve the housing crisis (or monetary or banking reform)
• no new money for the NHS – just a Tory reallocation trick and a gimmick
• deregulation for planning developers and wind turbine firms.
• big plans for ‘security’ and the spooks that probably won’t happen anyway.

How inspiring! Meet the new boss…same as the old boss.