No one’s fooled by Keir Starmer’s new ‘patriotic’ Labour Party
WATCH your backs and count your spoons. The Labour Party may be about to change its mind on a whole bunch of stuff in order to win the next election.
In particular it wants to grab back those “red wall” seats in the working-class north of the country which, incredibly, it lost to Boris last time around.
So party bosses ordered a study of What Must Be Done, with focus groups and so on. And it concluded that those voters are quite patriotic.
They prefer the Union Flag to, say, the Palestinian flag (which is the only flag Labour members seem to admire. Apart from the Cuban flag).
It also suggested they should be nice about ex-servicemen. And they should dress smartly. Rather than looking like a polytechnic lecturer who has just been digging his allotment.
Lordy, I don’t know how much they paid the consultants. I could have told them that for nowt.
I wonder if they were surprised to find that so many voters are a bit patriotic? But how on earth do you change the mindset of an entire party
One that was successfully taken over by middle-class (and largely southern), infantile leftists?
This is Sir Keir Starmer’s big problem. It is all very well waving around the Union Jack, patting a war veteran on the head and wearing a nice tie.
It’s not going to fool anyone unless there’s a major change throughout the party. From the membership to the National Executive Committee.
What those red wall voters want is a party that respects Britain’s history and traditions. Not one that seems to despise everything our country stands for.
And which always — always — seems to take the side of whoever we’re having a row with. Be it the USSR, Argentina, apologists for the IRA.
They also want a party that does not actively despise as well the very people it was set up to represent — the working class. That means respecting the values and aspirations of working-class people.
Do you remember Labour’s Emily Thornberry sneering when she saw a white van parked outside a terraced house with a flag of St George in the window? That sneer was Labour’s attitude to the working class, writ small.
It cannot abide the lower classes. It thinks them thick and racist. It has become a party for metropolitan, well-orf liberals.
Those red wall voters don’t want anything to do with identity politics, the bizarre obsessions over race and gender. Ask them politely and they’ll probably tell you that they think a person with a todger is a bloke, end of.
They are tired of the hierarchies of competing, largely imagined, victimhoods. They want better education for their kids and a higher standard of living. And the yawning gap between rich and poor reduced a little.
POWER OF PATRIOTISM
They want a chance to do well in life.
Already the usual suspects have been howling about this study. The Labour MP Clive Lewis has said that the party shouldn’t adopt the vocabulary of the Right.
Clive equates love of one’s country with racism and nationalism. On that, as on so many things, he is very wrong. Plenty of Labour leaders before now have understood the power of patriotism. Not least Clement Attlee.
Good luck, Sir Keir. I have a feeling you’re going to need it. Both Tony Blair and Neil Kinnock fought the left-wing extremists, and won.
The trouble now is that those extremists make up the bulk of your party. How will you manage to change that?
Dozy idea is bird brained
WHAT’S your Sleeping Personality? An Australian sleep “expert” has divided the population into four categories.
Olivia Arezzolo says there are “bears” – the majority of us who get up at about seven o’clock.
Wolves, meanwhile, go to bed late. Dolphins have irregular sleep patterns. And lions get up early.
Gawd, I’ve read some cack in my time, but this takes the biscuit.
Not difficult to work out what sleeping personality I have. I get up very early indeed. Then I peck at the silver foil on the top of the milk bottle.
Before hanging upside down to access peanuts. Yes, that’s right. I’m a tit.
Millennial-friendly knock-knock jokes
APPARENTLY millennials don’t understand knock-knock jokes.
This is according to a new survey by people with too much time on their hands.
One reason is that they never actually knock at a door any more. All their liaisons are arranged on WhatsApp or Instagram. Probably accom-panied by a photograph of their genitals.
Maybe we need to introduce them to this clapped-out old genre with jokes they might get. Here are a couple of millennial-friendly knock-knock jokes I made up.
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Miss Jen.
Miss Jen who?
Misgendered pronoun, you actual phobe.
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Rhea.
Rhea who?
Reality. Now stop whining and man up.
Border battles ironic
ONE of the reasons we’ve had such a high death toll from this bloody virus is a failure to close our borders when the crisis struck.
In the three months up to and including March 2020 some 18million people arrived in the UK. Quite a lot of them with a slightly ticklish cough at the back of their throats.
It seems that the Home Secretary Priti Patel wanted the borders closed. But she was overruled by her Cabinet colleagues.
I reckon Priti was right then – and right now. The Prime Minister says it is “not practical” to close our borders.
Why not, when it’s “practical” to close all schools and ban us from visiting relatives? It all makes very little sense.
And the irony of it! We left the European Union precisely so we might have control over our own borders once again.
But having won that right, we decided not to use it.
Eu're in a lot of trouble
WHAT do you think will last longer: Covid, or the European Union?
The President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen gets more barking mad every time she opens her mouth.
She’s desperately trying to free the commission from blame for the incredibly slow rollout of the vaccine. But she can’t, because it WAS to blame.
Meanwhile, that fish-obsessed French dingbat Emmanuel Macron has been making ludicrous allegations about the AstraZeneca vaccine.
This is because only about nine people in France have been vaccinated. And Macron is under pressure in the polls.
Quite rapidly, the EU project is coming apart, which is why all the leaders are behaving in a deranged manner.
Let's remember them
IT was horrible to hear that Captain Tom had died.
A true hero.
But to pass away at 100, surrounded by your loved ones, isn’t a bad way to go, is it?
RIP, Tom.
And let’s remember the many thousands of elderly people who have died this last year alone, their relatives barred from visiting them.
BBC owes apology
ON January 11, the BBC’s Panorama focused on the rollout of the vaccine.
The virus was winning the war, we were told. The Government couldn’t possibly vaccinate enough people.
There were terrible problems getting supplies. Half an hour of doom and gloom.
Three weeks later, almost ten million Brits have been vaccinated, a sixth of the population.
We have vaccinated more people than anywhere in Europe. Supplies are holding up just fine.
Maybe Panorama could revisit the story. And say sorry.
She can't win
YOU’VE got to feel a bit sorry for Carey Mulligan.
Only a week or so ago the actress, above, got slated for her looks in the magazine Variety.
“They basically said I wasn’t hot enough,” she fumed. The magazine has now apologised.
But this week she’s been accused of being TOO hot for her latest part.
She plays a 56-year-old woman in the Netflix film The Dig.
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Carey is only 35 years old. Poor lass, seems like whatever part she plays she can’t win.
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Truth be told she got the Netflix gig because Hollywood doesn’t have much time for older women.
And most of the producers think that even at the age of 35 you’re “on the turn”.
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