There’s no real mystery behind Keir Starmer’s awful start as PM

It suggests that the trigger for a new vote should be some vague combination of election results and opinion polling which suggest Yes would win … and that the hand on that trigger should be whoever holds the position of Westminster’s Secretary of State for Scotland. Really? You have to question whether Dugdale or Noon have been paying attention.

Let’s put aside the highly questionable notion that Yes supporters have to somehow prove they would win the referendum before getting the slightest chance of actually having a referendum.

That’s completely barking and a condition applied to no other vote in a democratic system, but it’s not the worst aspect of this crazy plan.

READ MORE: Andrew Marr admits he was 'completely wrong' after Gaelic road sign row

That accolade is reserved for the fact that there is no Westminster party willing to consider approving indyref2 in any circumstances whatsoever. Dugdale and Noon’s plan will not change that and proposes no challenge to it. It is a plan NOT to hold a referendum and therefore every bit as undemocratic as the current position.

The Tories would certainly never support it but let’s consider what it would mean under the present Labour Government. It’s almost impossible to know what Labour’s position is on any of the many issues facing them, so frequently do they tear up promises and act in direct contradiction to whatever they said yesterday.

That’s the main reason why Keir Starmer’s dramatic fall in popularity is among the steepest and quickest in living memory. The man simply can’t be trusted.

Nevertheless, the one issue on which he has displayed an uncharacteristic and unwavering consistency is Scottish independence and a second referendum. He did not support it yesterday, he does not support it today and he says he will never support it tomorrow.

Kezia Dugdale has published a report on breaking the constitutional deadlock in Scotland (Image: PA) The Labour Secretary of State for Scotland would never be allowed to call another referendum. It would be a meaningless power because his master would never allow him to use it.

It’s hard to remember any government having such an awful start as Starmer’s has experienced over the last few months. In only one sense has he kept his promise to bring about change, even if it has not been the change we thought he meant.

He hasn’t changed the country from one mired in austerity to one looking forward optimistically to better days.

We are as much in the grip of grim austerity as ever. If anything it has become even worse.

It is the very nature of the Labour Party itself that the new Prime Minister has fundamentally altered, its central belief system, its DNA.

We saw the new Labour Party unmasked when Starmer turned on a heckler at the party conference.

READ MORE: The Coatbridge couple launching legal action over the Winter Fuel Payment

Cruelly laughing and mocking the very notion that the party’s position on Gaza should even be discussed, he accused the heckler of mistaking the event for a 2019 Labour conference, pouring scorn on the days when Jeremy Corbyn believed Britain needed a genuine left-wing alternative in which to place its trust.

“We’ve changed the party” Starmer said. “While he’s been protesting we’ve been changing the party”.

The sad truth is that, for once, Starmer was telling the truth. But it’s hardly the proud boast he thinks it is. Labour are now unrecognisable as the party founded in 1900 which grew out of the trade union movement and stood as the champions of the working class, facing down the naked greed of the Tories.

Like many of its former supporters, I have not voted for Labour in a long time, but I continued to at least recognise its long and often honourable history.

Like many, I still admired the pledge it made at the end of the Second World War Two to destroy the five “evil giants”: war, squalor, disease, ignorance and unemployment.

Keir Starmer at the Labour Party conferenceLike many, I marched with Labour Party and trade union members against the policies of Margaret Thatcher, which threw thousands out of work and ravaged communities all over the country.

SO strong was the relationship between Labour and Scotland that it was said voters here would elect a monkey if it wore a Labour rosette. We owed many of the advances ordinary working people had made to the dogged determination of the Labour Party.

That lingering affection – if not support – survived even Tory Blair’s new Labour, the Iraq war and even Labour’s idiotic decision to stand alongside their Tory nemesis to deny Scotland its independence.

But Starmer’s dismal performance in office has finally confirmed that today’s Labour Party has severed all connections with its heroes of the past.

All we’re left with is a party on the take from its many rich friends willing to shower it with gifts; a party willing to ditch benefits to the most needy in society; a party which refuses to even allow the words genocide and apartheid to appear in the title of a Palestine Solidarity Campaign fringe event at its conference.

READ MORE: Labour's new 'climate envoy' Rachel Kyte linked with £4m party mega-donor

The nature of the Labour Party became all too clear all too quickly after its General Election victory: the pledges to continue and deepen the Tories’ cuts in public spending; the naked jealousy with which senior party figures eye Scottish benefits such as free tuition fees; the macho mantra of taking difficult decisions just to look tough.

Worst of all, of course, was Labour’s decision to scrap the Winter Fuel Payment for all but the very poorest of pensioners when he should have found the money to pay for it by taking it from the energy companies pocketing billions by hiking their prices.

The Prime Minister is now inviting us to believe that two contradictory statements are both true. He’s insisting that Labour have ditched austerity while it imposes a cut that even the Tories shied away from.

Meanwhile, the media dutifully reported Starmer’s obviously false insistence that every pensioner will be better off under his government, which is frankly about as likely as a heatwave at Christmas.

We’re supposed to accept that fake news is the preserve of social media but here it was splashed over the pages of the mainstream media. Does anyone really believe this guff?

There was still some resistance at conference to toeing the Starmer line that cutting the universal Winter Fuel Payment was one of those tough decisions that reduces Labour MPs to tears but has to be imposed because … well, tough guys got to do what tough guys got to do.

Conference voted against the cut, which shows that there are some measures favoured by their leader that some party members cannot stomach – but that vote is non-binding and will change nothing.

I know independence supporters who “loaned” Labour their vote at the General Election because a Scotland-only party like the SNP had no chance of replacing the Tories at Westminster and the Tories had to go.

But that decision has been pounced upon by the pro-Union mainstream media as evidence that independence support is disappearing. Anas Sarwar – and where is he hiding while policies he opposes are being imposed by his leader? – is being seriously talked of as Scotland’s next first minister.

READ MORE: Baroness Warsi resigns from Tories over 'how far right' party has moved

And Dugdale is posing as a friend of the Yes movement by collaborating with a former leading independence strategist to produce a report which purports to open the door to indyref2 but would actually close and lock that door more firmly than ever.

It should be glaringly obvious by now what the effect would be of an improved Labour performance at the next Scottish Election.

It would further boost Starmer’s covert plan to diminish the welfare state and NHS by continually depicting them as broken and therefore urgently needing the invasive, dismantling surgery that only he is “tough” enough to perform.

He’s already busily engaged in reframing his own unpopularity as a positive because, he argues, it shows that the unpleasant medicine her prescribes is working.

If he were alive today, George Orwell would weep.

And a 2026 Labour victory would also erode devolution, reduce the powers and budget of the Scottish Government and strengthen the block on the route to independence.

It’s not yet too late to prevent that 2026 Labour victory but we need to start working now towards that goal. There is not a moment to waste.