Since cruising to a landslide majority last summer, Labour’s fortunes have been absolutely tanking, and things have got so bad that the toxic Tories are even appearing ahead of Labour in some polls.
There’s no way Kemi Badenoch can try to take any credit for these recent poll leads. She’s so hopelessly out of her depth that even a slow-witted and humourless haircut in a suit like Keir Starmer easily runs rings around her at Prime Minister’s Questions.
It’s not like the Tories were left a lot of choice after Rishi Sunak resigned though. They were reduced to a rump of just 121 MPs, and Boris Johnson’s 2019 night of the long knives style purge of most of the brains behind the Tory operation clearly didn’t help their selection options either.
The Tories were stuck with a choice between a hopeless posturing charlatan like Badenoch, or a bunch of even more useless (James Cleverly), opportunistic (Robert Jenrick), or downright toxic (Priti Patel) options.
Badenoch is so hopeless that she’s openly stated that she doesn’t think the Tories actually need any policies, seeming to imagine that vapid posture politics and spraying infantile insults at PMQs will be enough.
You wouldn’t really expect anything more from a politician who admitted hacking and vandalising a rival politician’s website though, would you?
So how have Labour found themselves training this hopeless charlatan and her miniature clown car of a political party?
Sunak’s diabolical 2024 election performance (23.6%) proved that no matter how bad the Tories get, there’s still a rump of about 20-25% of voters who would vote for a dog turd if it had a blue rosette on it.
So, it’s not like the Tories have dramatically gained in popularity, because they’re still averaging around the mid-20s, it’s just that Labour seem to be trying to sink below the Tory 2024 low water mark.
Badenoch’s strategy in opposition is actually quite reminiscent of Starmer’s, namely doing almost nothing, offering no real change, and waiting for the party in power to collapse in popularity.
The only reason it seems to be working for Badenoch, is that Starmer is doing such a lamentable job as Prime Minister.
Starmer caused this by immediately killing any sense of optimism with a load of dispiriting rhetoric about how things will only get worse upon his ascent to power, and to be fair, for once he wasn’t lying.
A punishing new round of austerity ruination justified with economically-illiterate baby babble; repeated attacks on pensioners (Winter Fuel Allowance, WASPI); refusal to repeal even the most senseless and diabolical Tory policies (Two-Child policy); dodgy-donor scandals; allowing greedy privatisation profiteers to keep hiking energy bills and pumping our nation’s water full of raw sewage; and endless other screw-ups, U-turns, and betrayals.
Thanks to Starmer’s predictably dismal performance as PM, the Tory tortoise is beginning to win the race because the Labour tortoise is now inexplicably running backwards.
Any vaguely competent Prime Minister would be making mincemeat out of a posturing lightweight like Badenoch (imagine how 90s era Blair would tear her to shreds).
However, given Starmer’s lamentable performance as Prime Minister so far, any competent opposition leader would be making giant leaps forward in the polls rather than standing still too.
It should be an absolute joy to watch the simultaneous failing fortunes of both of the Westminster establishment parties, and the fading popularity of their shared right-wing agenda of austerity ruination, privatisation profiteering, genocide complicity, and elitist disdain for the millions of ordinary people they consider to be below them.
However it’s the Faragists who are taking advantage with their even more radically right-wing agenda, making it look likely that Badenoch would only ever get back into government as a junior partner in a viciously right-wing Tory-Faragist coalition, or as part of a last gasp Tory-Labour coalition aimed at keeping their beloved Westminster gravy train rolling for one last electoral cycle.
It’s beyond irrational to hope that an empty vessel like Starmer will manage to turn things around, especially given his autocratic tendency to punish, marginalise, and expel anyone in the Labour ranks who dares to tell him where he’s going wrong.
The Greens are alright, and their leader Zack Polanski talks a lot of sense, but they’re hardly an alternative government in waiting. In fact they’re going to have to up their game dramatically from the 6-8% they’re polling at if they’re hoping to bag more than half a dozen seats or so at the next election.
In conclusion, Kemi Badenoch is about as useless as they get, with exactly the kind of vapid student politics vibe that Tories always say that they hate, but Starmer’s doing so badly as Prime Minister that she’s beginning to win by default, just by standing almost still at the worst level of popularity the Tories have ever seen!
But however bad they both are, in the absence of a viable alternative with a plan to actually improve the material conditions of ordinary people’s lives, what comes next is likely to be even worse.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Capitalism is failing - neoliberal, globalist capitalism particularly so. It doesn't matter which version of capitalism you follow, the US one, the Chinese one, the European one, it's failing. As neither party in the UK, nor anywhere else for that matter, is willing to face this fact, then neither party can formulate any rational policies and have been reduced to mouthpieces of a failing status quo, they are the political "Band that Played On" the same as the one on the the Titanic as it foundered, playing the same well rehearsed music that had got them the job on board in the first place, but didn't help them much in the end. It earned them immense respect for human stoicism in the face of failure, but I doubt our political masters will get much respect in history.
on February 5, 2025, 6:25 pm