TO be clear, I’m not suggesting Keir Starmer is about to rant on about migrant folks having family pets for dinner in rural Kent.
Nor that there’s any danger he’ll suggest newborn babies will be executed by pro-choice activists. And if he started making up polling numbers from non-existing polls, the UK media – not to mention the sainted John Curtice – would very soon be on his case.
Just the same, he does resemble Donald Trump in one particular regard, which he may have cause to regret. Like The Donald, Sir Keir has perfected the art of always looking on the black side of life. Not for this Labour boss, any upbeat music to accompany a bright new political dawn. His theme tune is “things can only get worse.”
Sure, the books looked in rather better shape in 1997. Sure, there probably is an alarming black hole in the UK’s treasury sums. But two things; the electorate were not expecting a Labour Government to infill it by nicking the Winter Fuel Payment allowance long paid to pensioners.
Plus it might be smarter to acknowledge that after 14 years of Tory austerity, the last thing voters want to look forward to is more of the same with a pink label. (Red is so over).
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Sir Keir, or his minders, or both, have dressed up this endless gloom as just being honest. Telling it like they think it is. But just maybe, as Kamala Harris observes of Trump, they’ve grabbed the wrong and tired playbook. It’s no accident that George Osborne, King Austerity himself, was pretty well the first out of the traps to laud the new Chancellor’s speech. He would have made the same choices, quoth he. I’ll just bet he would have. When in doubt, bash the poor and protect the rich.
Last week came the astonishing admission from one of Team Starmer that they hadn’t taken time to model the likely effects of killing off the pensioner payments. Which is passing odd since they took time to predict the precise likely number of elderly deaths when the same policy was considered by a Tory PM.
It’s not as if there weren’t other targets available. The nettle of wholesale tax avoidance and evasion has never been grasped. Meanwhile, the new Scotland Secretary was spotted rowing back on plans to hit the fossil fuel guys with bigger tax bills.
As the feisty general secretary of Unite, Sharon Graham, observed on the airwaves, the top 50 wealthiest families in Britain have roughly the same amount of dosh down the back of their sofas as the UK as a whole. Around £500 billion.
Her notion of a 1% wealth tax is not a Denis Healey-like appeal to squeeze the rich till the pips squeak, but instead to tax anything higher than £4 million held by mortgage-free families. How many kids are in line to get a cut of £4m?
Meanwhile, I note that the determinedly right-wing Telegraph has been running a feature on how to put your cash where the taxman can’t get his or her hands on it. Otherwise known as how to avoid paying the taxes you would legitimately owe.
I doubt their avid readers don’t use our roads, energy suppliers or anything else funded by taxation – with the possible exception of the NHS, given their abhorrence of standing in line. I also rather doubt most of them haven’t already figured out how not to pay their fair share. Level playing fields do not feature in their sports of choice.
Last week all those shiny new Labour MSPs bar one doughty soul, voted to endorse this brand of Labour-style authority. There was a strange silence on the subject from Anas Sarwar. You remember him, surely? The chap who said: “Read my lips, no austerity under a Labour government.” Really must brush up on my lip reading.
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Maybe we should be grateful to live in a “united” kingdom where the choices are only between Tory and Labour austerity. I keep reading the US press declaring that their election is on a knife-edge in the handful of states where their election will be effectively won or lost. (The Electoral College is their version of winner-takes-all, like First Past The Post.)
How it can be on a knife-edge at all is one of life’s enduring political mysteries. Like how the entire USA has embraced the “post-truth” society. How else can they explain why a convicted felon, serial sex pest, and tax-dodging real estate “magnate” can win the endorsement of a party which has become little more than a cult?
Watching the so-called Presidential “debate” last week was as jaw-dropping as it was surreal.
You might imagine that all Harris had to do was not be Trump. Yet the old fraud still seems to command total loyalty even from people like the evangelical Christian lobby who are supposed to be in favour of old-fashioned stuff like monogamy and fidelity.
You might imagine that America, which reveres the gun-toting second amendment of its constitution, would shy away from any politician who tramples all over it. Who still insists he won the election which he lost; who talks about the Justice Department being “weaponised” against him; who threatens to put any and all opponents in the pokey if, God forbid, he wins another term.
You might imagine that a bloke whose besties are Hungary’s hardline, right-wing Victor Orbán and the Taliban (who made the error of calling him Your Excellency) would be beyond the pale in any country which still insists on calling itself the leader of the “free” world. A bloke who played footsie with the North Korean leader and openly admired Vladimir Putin until the latter committed the unpardonable sin of saying he hoped Harris won.
Anyway, as I say, I’m not suggesting Sir Keir is some kind of Poundshop Trump, or even that the Conservative Party – who have its own difficulties with finding a leader – is a UK version of the Republican variety.
You would like to think the Tories would run a mile from Trumpism until you remember Liz Truss and that queen of culture, Nadine Dorries. Not even to mention the home office combo of Priti Patel and Suella Braverman. It seems nobody despises migrants more than the children of them.
On which subject it’s certainly true that trying to catch the trafficking criminals makes more obvious sense than sending asylum seekers to Africa. But thus far it seems to have resulted in yet more families being piled into yet more inappropriate craft to maximise income while the scam lasts.
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In any case, those countries trying to stop or minimise migration will surely learn – in the inelegant words of one of my previous employers – that you might as well “fart against thunder”.
Neither half-built walls nor beefed-up border patrols will prevent people from fleeing countries from whence they have been forced to flee through anything from persecution and poverty to climate change and cultural demonisation.
Some time ago I had the privilege of interviewing Gulwali Passarlay who fled Afghanistan as a 12-year-old and had a series of horrendous adventures crossing Europe till he wound up in the UK where he became a university graduate and activist.
I imagine he recoils in outrage from the world now inhabited by the female relatives and friends he had to leave behind. Now living with the Taliban mark two, the folks who think Donald Trump is “Your Excellency”.
Typically, Donald chose to boast about this saying “I bet they don’t call Joe Biden Your Excellency”.
You would fervently hope not. Just as you fervently hope the next people to accost Mr Trump in mid-November work for the Federal Prison service.
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