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I think Starmer's had an easy ride of it until Beergate, frankly. Principally because he's presenting himself as no danger to the status quo and offering little if any meaningful alternative to the current government beyond perhaps being more professional and 'competent' in carrying out policy.
I think this is just warmed over 'they're all the same' cant but spoken eloquently and with a hint of 'the system always wins' 70s paranoia. The only people who benefit from such are genuinely unethical politicians like Johnson. There is a fundamental difference between politicians like Starmer and Rayner and Cooper, and politicians like Johnson and Raab and Patel. Competence is one of the metrics. But seriousness of purpose, ethics, and policy are equally important.
I think in the 90s it was a legitimate criticism to say that a politician stood for the status quo, because the status quo - by which I mean the rule of law, rational self-interest, an independent judiciary, a respect for the truth, a respect for our obligations on the world stage - was not under constant and fundamental attack by our government. I think now that kind of invective is pure self-indulgence.
ReekBlefs-
I think you're, perhaps deliberately, missing my point here. So for the avoidance of that again, my point is that the press have largely given Starmer a free ride because they don't believe he'll do anything particularly radical and - as you yourself intimated - he has 'considered' what he says at every turn precisely to avoid antagonising them/giving them any ammunition. My assertion is that won't matter a jot come election time and he'll still be on the receiving end of insane amounts of horseshit from the media, as proven by Beergate. And so he might as well fucking grow a pair and stand for something. Like the status quo positives you list, for example, but also on things as fundamentally batshit and deeply unethical about shipping refugees to camps in Rwanda.
But seriousness of purpose, ethics, and policy are equally important.
So far, he's definitely got the face for the first one, failed dismally with the second and continues to prevaricate on the third. D+
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I think this is just warmed over 'they're all the same' cant but spoken eloquently and with a hint of 'the system always wins' 70s paranoia.
Bit of a stretch.
ketsbaia
neu
I think Starmer's had an easy ride of it until Beergate, frankly. Principally because he's presenting himself as no danger to the status quo and offering little if any meaningful alternative to the current government beyond perhaps being more professional and 'competent' in carrying out policy. How far that is a winning electoral strategy is anyone's guess; I'm not convinced and by the looks of it, not many of those the current leadership says he needs to win over are either.
That we'll see certain sections of the media engage in the kind of furious, all-guns-blazing front-page horseshit we saw in the previous two elections is, I'm cynical enough to believe, a question of when rather than if. Beergate proved that without a shadow of a doubt. No amount of mealy mouthed non-positions and columns in The Sun are going to change that, sadly. It doesn't follow the press is a hostile rump and the only good strategy is a defensive one. He can engage all he likes, but at some point he's going to have to tell those people who need to hear him what he's about. And so far, he's only succeeded in telling people what he's not.
Of course, his real issue in the coming months is surviving the rumblings and briefings being initiated by 'The Worst People In PoliticsTM'. They've undermined the last three Labour leaders and they're sharpening the knives again.