You are reading a single comment by @bens0n and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@bens0n
Agree that Starmer is good at PMQs, as you'd expect him to be. I do fear that his alleged qualities of 'electability' aren't really founded in anything material, as when he's outside of a parliamentary environment he can be a very uninspiring speaker in my opinion. Hopefully this will change though. He will certainly be a better media operator than Corbyn regardless, and the Telegraph front page was impressive: Labour is manifestly unpopular amongst the older voters who make up much of the Telegraph's readership so this seemed shrewd. I will put to one side for now the question of whether Starmer will be able to sustain any good favour in the press.
Policy wise the alarm bells are ringing for me personally, though—he's appeared almost completely unwilling to push the government for anything substantial in terms of Coronavirus policy, or even to criticise the government in general. I understand some of the reasons behind this (the government are polling very highly and Starmer doesn't want to be seen to be playing party politics during a moment of international crisis), but asking the difficult questions now can shift policy in a positive direction which will lessen the material impact of the virus. Like them or not, Corbyn and McDonnell have been doing exactly that for a long time now. There are signs that Starmer is starting to take a more interrogative approach but he needs to be more vocal and more comprehensive in his criticism of the government in my opinion.