https://anotherangryvoice.substack.com/p/keir-starmers-infantile-petulance
Keir Starmer's infantile response to Plaid Cymru's Liz Saville-Roberts proved how fragile and scrutiny-averse he is.
Another Angry Voice
May 15, 2025

Keir Starmer’s infantile and petulant response to Liz Saville-Roberts legitimate question has to be one of the most unstatesmanlike responses ever given by a British Prime Minister at PMQs, and that’s after we’ve suffered preening, out-of-touch buffoons like David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak at the dispatch box!

Saville-Roberts made a very good point about how Starmer has changed his position from defending immigration and criticising the scapegoating of migrants as cover for policy failings in 2020, to channelling Enoch Powell and using the exact same immigrant scapegoating tactics as his Tory predecessors this week.

If he’s willing to switch positions so dramatically on immigration in response to Reform winning the local elections, how is anyone supposed to believe in anything else he says?

Liz Saville-Roberts was merely asking the kind of question that’s on the minds of millions of progressive people’s minds over Starmer’s lurch to the far-right on immigration, and Starmer’s response was to evade the substance of the question and childishly accuse her of "talking rubbish".

It’s interesting to watch the opposing responses of the women behind him. Rachel Reeves clearly found his infantile comeback utterly hilarious, while Angela Rayner looks like she immediately realised how bad it looked.

This childishness is all so far from the image that the Starmerites tried to create of the competent and academic lawyer who was going to restore grown-up politics after the buffonish ineptitude of Johnson, Truss, and Sunak.

And Rayner is probably right to look concerned, given that the bigger danger to the Labour vote isn’t actually people switching directly from Labour to Reform, it’s traditional Labour voters switching to more left-wing or liberal parties like the Greens and Lib-Dems generally, the SNP in Scotland, and Plaid Cymru in Wales.

After forcing his ever-dwindling band of Starmtroopers to spend the first three days of the week performing demeaning mental gymnastics to defend his Enoch Powell style anti-immigrant rabble rousing, they all seemed to just evaporate when it came to the overwhelmingly critical social media response to his infantile response to Liz Saville-Roberts pertinent question.

It’s interesting to see where the limit lies with liberal-capitalist Starmer acolytes. Apparently they’re fine with a Labour government materially supporting a live-streamed genocide; they’re fine with continuing the diabolical Tory policies of austerity ruination, infrastructure and public service underinvestment, and wanton social security vandalism; and they’re fine with using and legitimising far-right anti-immigrant rhetoric. But hardly any of them dared try to pretend that such an infantile and petulant response to a legitimate question is appropriate behaviour for a Labour Prime Minister.

Right-wing ghouls like Rachel Reeves may well find it hilarious to see Starmer using the same kinds of oafish putdowns as Boris Johnson, but the horrible right-wing faction that’s seized control of the Labour Party under Starmer is hardly representative of the majority of traditional Labour voters.

They might find this kind of thing hilarious, but I’m quite sure that most traditional Labour voters are strongly put off by it.