Keir Starmer has landed himself in the soup. It appears that his own opportunism may have cooked his goose. For months, he and other opportunist Labour politicians have attacked Boris Johnson for having attended social gatherings in Downing Street, during a period when the idiotic lockdown rules made them illegal. They have demanded that Johnson, and Chancellor Sunak resign for having broken the law. Now it appears that Starmer and other Labour politicians may have done the same, and are also under investigation by Durham Police. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, it may be said, and so, if also penalised, Starmer should abide by his own rules and resign.
Starmer is said to have gone for a few beers and a Chicken Korma with other Labour members, in breach of the lockdown rules. Now, of course, those lockdown rules were themselves illiberal, irrational an idiotic, and that Boris Johnson, having introduced such rules, should himself be found in breach of them, is rather fitting. That irony does not change the fact that the rules were illiberal, irrational and idiotic, and that it never should have been a crime to hold a party in your own home. But, Starmer et al, true to their opportunist politics, needed to add some spice and colour to their own drab politics that differ only from those of the Tories in degree and presentation, saw a perfect opportunity to attack Johnson on a personal level, without the need to consider any question of political principle. That it has come back on them, is quite simply political Karma.
Starmer's defence is that the social gathering in question was really a work meeting, in other words, exactly the same defence that Johnson used. However, this also illustrates the irrational nature of the lockdown regulations, and the irrational and opportunist politics that surrounds them. At the start of the lockdowns we were told that a blanket lockdown was required because the virus was “indiscriminate”. That was, of course, never true. It was a deliberate lie. The virus is, in fact, one of the most discriminating there has been. For the vast majority of the population, you could contract it and never know about it – it was asymptomatic. For many more, it had only mild, cold like symptoms, not surprisingly, because as a coronavirus, it is one of the group of pathogens responsible for the common cold. Those at any risk from the virus were only the elderly, particularly those over 75, or who had other medical conditions.
As Professor Mark Woolhouse has stated, this claim that the virus was indiscriminate led to the imposition of lockdowns that were a wholly irrational, ineffective and counterproductive response. They were part of what he called a collective madness that swept society. It was a madness, of course, stoked by a sensationalist media, and by opportunist politicians who saw it as a means to again beat the government over the head and demand that it always did more, which actually meant continuing to act in an even more illiberal and irrational manner. The virus was highly discriminating, and, as Woolhouse says, an elderly person was 10,000 times more likely to die from it than a young person, yet it was the young who were most grievously affected by the lockdowns that were mindlessly imposed, and which these illiberal, irrational laws were introduced to enforce.
But, whilst the virus is highly discriminating, no one has suggested that it is so smart and discriminating as to act in a way that Starmer's defence requires it to do. For that defence to have any rationality, we would have to believe that the virus could discriminate between people attending a social gathering that was “work-related”, and one that wasn't! Otherwise, why does it matter whether people infect one another at a work related social-gathering or some other? The effect is the same. We saw the same thing more than a year ago, when many of the people who were up in arms about young people congregating, in the Summer, on the beach, shortly afterwards were likewise up in arms about police breaking up a social gathering of people protesting in relation to the murder of Sarah Everhard, again as though the virus would be able to distinguish between the two types of social gathering!
The defence, in terms of law, of course, stands, because the law itself is irrational and allows one type of gathering as against the other, and that again just illustrates the arbitrary, irrational and illiberal nature of such laws. But, of course, those laws were precisely the ones that Starmer and other opportunist politicians, including some on the statist Left were pushing. That opportunist, statist politicians, be it Starmer, Johnson, Davies, Sturgeon, or those of the various left sects, should push these illiberal, authoritarian measures is not surprising, because it is part of their political DNA. They believe that the masses are rather stupid, and have to be led and controlled by a paternalistic state treating them like children. Lenin made the same observation of the Narodniks and other petty-bourgeois politicians in Russia.
The last thing they want is that the working-class should realise that it already is the force that makes society run, even if it does not run society. It is ordinary workers that produce the goods and services, that drive the public transport, and that also perform the managerial and administrative functions of society. If it realised its own position in society, it would realise it has no need whatsoever of those that run society, the shareholders and bondholders, and their representatives that control the boards of companies, or the top ranking civil servants, judges, and military brass. They are the ones who exercise control, and who appropriate the greatest riches of society, but they contribute nothing, and have no real social function. The last thing that Starmer or Johnson and the rest want is for workers to understand that, and to exercise their own self-activity, and self-government.
So, of course, Starmer and the rest, having essentially the same reactionary, petty-bourgeois and nationalist politics as the Tories, when they wanted to curry favour with voters believed that the way to do it was to simply do more of the same. And, when you do just more of the same, the only way of adding spice and colour to your own bland menu is on the basis of personality politics, and personal attacks. On the former Starmer is on to a loser, because no matter how hard you search for it, he appears to have no personality, as well as having no principles, as his volte face on the question of Brexit illustrated.
Voters in Thursday's elections seem to have come to a similar conclusion. As with the French elections, the big winner seems to have been None of The Above. Given the open goal that the Tories represent, Starmer's Blue Labour, predictably failed to score into it. The biggest gains came to the Liberals, Greens, and SNP, itself no doubt a reflection on the fact of Blue Labour's growing symbiosis with the Tories. Given the third party status of these other groups, their performance was much better than the actual numbers suggest, but it still leaves them way behind, and in a position where they will only split the anti-Tory vote, which is why the Tories continued to win in the former red-wall seats.
I will give a fuller analysis when all the results are in.
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