Starmer is turning the UK into an even bigger neoliberal hell hole
Somehow he is doing even worse than Rishi Sunak
If you think everything is going a bit shit at the moment, don’t worry, Sir Keir Starmer has a solution no one is asking for: five more freeports! Comically (actually, I’m not sure it’s a laughing matter), Starmer was not supposed to announce five new freeports. His chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is introducing five customs sites at existing freeports. Starmer never noticed the error on his script because he has no idea what is going on. I mean he is only the prime minister.
Imagine being such a robot that you’re given a script about plans that don’t exist, and instead of demanding to know why you were never told of those plans, you announce them anyway. If this doesn’t tell you Starmer is not in charge of the country, I don’t know what does. The prime minister is basically Labour’s PR guy, only he’s shit at PR. His only purpose is to expel people from the party who look like they might have integrity, like Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.
Starmer told us Rachel Reeves would introduce “five new freeports as part of the government’s package of measures to fix the foundations and rebuild the country”. A Labour official described the announcement as a “total cockup with the comms”. I’d love to be a fly on the wall when Reeves gives Starmer the blow dryer treatment for making her look like a twat.
Starmer’s such a robot, he told us he didn’t really want freeports, that they were inherited from the previous government, but now they’re here, he plans to maximise their potential and put his stamp on them. This clearly makes no sense. If you acknowledge an idea is bad, you’re supposed to get rid of the bad idea, not expand it!
For those who are unaware, freeports are low-tax, tariff-free zones where control of poor areas is handed over to the rich for effectively nothing. The government invests the money, takes all the risk, and the rich take all the profit. The UK set up seven freeports in 1984 which were phased out in 2012 because they didn’t work. The data showed they were a net loss to the economy because they moved economic activity from one area to another, costing us tax revenue and driving down wages. Plus, they attracted criminal gangs and became international targets for money laundering.
If freeports were such a brilliant idea, we would expand them to the whole country, but we don’t, because they would collapse the economy. Ask the locals in any freeport if they appreciate living in a neoliberal utopia and they will laugh at you.
A perfect example is the Teesworks freeport, a scandal which defies belief. A chunk of Teesside was sold to “investors” for £97, only for them to make £50 million a year without any meaningful investment (because the government spent £500 million for them). How was this possibly good for ordinary people?
There is no better example of the government not being on your side than its determination to continue with freeports, just like there is no better example of it not being on the side of humanity than Gaza.
In one disgusting moment, foreign secretary David Lammy said it undermines the word “genocide” to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide. This is the calibre of shithead we’re dealing with here. Don’t worry though, Labour gets the best people in politics now, such as Mike Amesbury who just punched the shit out of one of his constituents, and then kicked him while he was down, and then repeatedly yelled in his face. Somehow, I can’t imagine Jeremy Corbyn behaving like this.
Starmer was forced to suspend Amesbury after agonising for much longer than he did when Rebecca Long-Bailey called Maxine Peake “an absolute diamond” (she is an absolute diamond). Don’t worry, though, as a close ally of Wes Streeting, and presumably a fan of freeports and NHS privatisation, and a card-carrying Labour Friend of Israel, Amesbury will be welcomed back faster than you can say Zarah Sultana… unless he goes to jail. They can’t send neoliberals to jail, can they? All our prison space is reserved for people who think Palestinians are human, but especially for journalists…
Starmer has reassured us he will do everything to protect press freedom, although exceptions apply for journalists he doesn’t like. Those exceptions include Sarah Wilkinson, Asa Winstanley, and Richard Medhurst, all of who have been treated as terrorists for doing journalism Starmer doesn’t like.
While all this has been going on, Matt Taibbi and Paul D. Thacker have published documents in their Disinformation Chronicle showing Labour has been conspiring with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate to influence the US election and destroy Twitter. I don’t mean give Musk a telling off here, or force him to stop calling it X, I mean kill Twitter by triggering an advertiser boycott and regulatory action in the EU.
CCDH is reportedly working with Labour’s Morgan McSweeney, a guy who has previously plotted to destroy the Canary, saying: “kill the Canary before it kills us”. The Canary was almost destroyed by an advertiser boycott but saved by its readers who subscribed in huge numbers to keep it going.
Absurdly, CCDH has tax exemption status as a charity, but it’s supposed to lose that status if a “substantial part of its activities is attempting to influence legislation”. It seems all the CCDH does is try to influence legislation, manipulate elections, and censor speech under the guise of tackling hate and disinformation. Remember, election interference is only bad when Russia does it and the same goes for attacks on free speech.
The Disinformation Chronicle described the CCDH as a messaging vehicle for Labour Together - a group of the worst neoliberals in the Labour Party, led by Jonathan Ashworth whose ideas are so popular, he lost his seat at the last election, even though Labour won by a landslide. These people can’t allow free debate because they lose, which is why they’re obsessed with censorship. This explains why any platform where people can criticise the government is becoming a target. Both social media and journalism are only tolerated if their censorship standards meet Labour’s approval. We can’t have people talking about the war machine and the corporate take over of the country and the world, can we?
Leaders in free societies don’t set out to destroy social media platforms (or any business), and certainly don’t target journalists. Plus, foreign election interference is supposed to be a big no-no. This type of behaviour is blowing the lid off neoliberalism and showing us what it really is: authoritarianism. Neoliberals claim to believe in free markets, but they offer a rigged system where selected winners always win and everyone else always loses.
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Already the worst, most evil government in my lifetime, and that includes Thatcher's. Starmer may be a robot, but he's certainly programmed "correctly" re Palestine. But let's never forget - assuming we're still here - that Starmer's government has condoned genocide, ethnic cleansing, countless war crimes, and reckless warmongering that threatens WW3, and in a sane world there would be a reckoning. The fact that we are being screwed royally by an ultra-neoliberal government is no surprise. The fact that they've been so politically inept but don't seem to care about their cack-handedness suggests that, like their bedfellows the Democrats, they are full authoritarian and plan to do away with inconveniences like democracy. Blackburn and Preston had Labour councils that were reversing the usual neoliberalism and outsourcing of everything to major corporations, who pay and treat their workers badly, with excellent results that benefitted those towns, but the Guardian barely mentioned it (which we've come to expect), and now I've little doubt that one way or another those councils are being or will be "sorted" by Starmer's fascists. We can't have thriving communities, can we? People are able to breathe and think more.
Unfortunately, politics has been captured by super charged neoliberalism for so long now that those who get to the top are already damaged goods by default.