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It is the run-in to a British General Election in which the Labour Party is certain to replace a Conservative Party which has been in power for almost 15 years. The charismatic Labour leader is warning his party against what he calls “triumphalism,” although he knows almost to a certainty that in half a year’s time the keys to 10 Downing Street will be in his expensively-tailored pocket. Labour are the bookies’ favorite by a country mile, and bookies are the only pollsters worth listening to.

Let’s stop right there. I have been rather slippery, because I have taken you back to the glorious English Spring of 1997. The clue, for those who know the British political landscape, was using the word “charismatic” as though it referred to the current leader of His Majesty’s Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer. Charisma is not easy to pin down, it’s like the school experiment where your teacher got you to try to put your finger on a drop of mercury. Personally, I judge charisma the same way Justice Potter Stewart viewed pornography 60 years ago during Jacobelli v. State of Ohio: It’s not easy to define, but I know it when I see it. I don’t see it in Starmer, and nor does anyone else.

I had promised myself — and you, gentle reader — that I wouldn’t bang on about how Keir Starmer was a year below me at school. But, given that I will soon be able to say I schooled with the Prime Minister, don’t you know, I am practicing in case I get to drop the name. If only I knew anyone. I never met him, and he is more likely to have been aware of me as I was constantly in trouble, and Starmer became friendly with someone in my year who was then a friend of mine. I was far matier with Quentin Cooke, aka Fatboy Slim.

But schoolboy reminiscences aside, Starmer went from the old place to become Director of Public Prosecutions, one of the highest legal offices in the land. From there, he won the 2020 Labour leadership contest and replaced old-school Leftist Jeremy Corbyn, who had himself taken over from Ed Miliband, who it is not easy to describe except to note that he is a man there is absolutely no excuse for.

Now, Starmer finds himself in a Blair-like position of assured kingship, but whereas Blair’s suave appeal never faltered in the run-in to the 1997 election, Starmer resembles a little boy whose birthday it is, and who is so distraught by the imminent arrival of his friends to his party that he wets himself. Many politicians are understandably tense when they speak in public or in an interview, but Starmer speaks and looks as though he is trying to hold a heavy coin between his clenched buttock cheeks. As for his voice, it resembles the late comedian Peter Cook doing one of his dull characters.

Starmer is the blankest of canvases, a pure weathercock politician, led by focus groups and pollsters and attentive to contemporary fads. He was photographed “taking the knee” to Black Lives Matter in his office, and famously couldn’t (or rather wouldn’t) define what a woman is, but Sir Keir Starmer is set to be the next skipper of a ship which looks increasingly holed below the water line.

For a decade I have believed that a Labour government was essential if Britain was to have even the remotest chance of surviving as anything more than a cold northern trading nation. This is based on the admittedly shaky principle that sometimes it is necessary to destroy the village to save it. Blair oversaw the final capitulation of Labour from the party of the working class to a playground for the rich, but it is unclear where Starmer will take it. Let’s start with what he will inherit, and see just how poisoned the chalice might be.

Let’s start with the economy. Economics is the only exam I failed in my life, but even a financial dunce like me can see the state of the account. Like many other Western countries, the United Kingdom is leveraged all to hell. Because economies are the ideal systems for technocrats to complicate and obfuscate, there is little point going through a rats’ nest of figures, but the similarity between the UK government and Johnny Boy borrowing money on the street in Mean Streets is inescapable. And look what happened to him. Then there are the “no shit, Sherlock” reports, such as the recent one by the Centre for Policy Studies informing an amazed public that immigration has somehow failed to boost the economy as predicted.

Inflation is not always the fault of the incumbent government, but neither is it anything you can do much about. Rishi Sunak made a fatuous pledge that his government would lower it, but you may as well try to nail a fried egg to the wall. This is why, incidentally, I find it a bit harsh to blame the Biden collective for America’s inflationary woes. Inflation doesn’t just happen in the space of a couple of news cycles, as the public thinks it does, but is set in motion (as far as I understand it) as soon as you fire up the printing presses. And It was Obama who doubled America’s national debt. But let’s stick to one gnarly country at a time.

The second hot potato Starmer is going to have to hang on to is British Islam, and this is not going to be easy given that the Jewish lobby expects Labour’s unwavering support at all times, particularly now in the wake of the party’s recent anti-Semitism crisis. Muslims won big in the recent council elections, at least one dedicating his victory to Gaza. Starmer is about to find out if he can be the servant of two masters.

Then there is the big one: immigration. The British have been meek little mice about their new neighbors thus far, but across the Irish Sea Paddy is not taking the invading hordes well, as mentioned in last month’s Union Jackal here at Counter-Currents. That the uniparty has no intention of stopping immigration is a globalist tale for another day, but records keep tumbling, and even the British stiff upper lip is starting to quiver. Starmer will be under more pressure than Sunak as he will have the harpies of various “Refugees Welcome” lobbies all over him like a rash.

So, as Starmer is about to discover, with great power comes great responsibility, and not in a nice, superhero way. Responsibility is a double-edged sword, the problem with it being that it comes in two varieties. Being responsible can be a good thing, but it can also be a tricky thing. A responsible person does not own a dog that is liable to bite someone. Should that happen, he is responsible. But, whatever Starmer is responsible for, what does he have in store for the great British public? Not even he knows, and he is already becoming known as “Mr. U-turn.”

Even Labour’s flagship policy for the coming election, to ban the appalling “zero hours contracts” which allow employers to allocate how long an employee will work from week to week, has been watered down, leaving employers with a loophole to exploit staff even more. George Galloway, the maverick, grizzled political veteran whose two-fisted politics recently won him a seat in the heavily Muslim area of Rochdale, is well aware of Labour’s abandonment of what was once their base, and named his latest political vehicle The Workers Party.

But so much for the inevitable new boss. What of the old? The Conservative Party, the world’s oldest, was traditionally seen as the party of the rich ruling class, the silk-hatted land barons and captains of industry, but the last decade and a half has seen them act more like Liberal Democrats. They have failed to stem immigration, legal and illegal, and had more success against COVID-19 than they have combating the fatal virus affecting academia and the public sector, and which goes by the irritating shorthand term “woke.” Even their much-vaunted “austerity” program folds under questioning, as an English emigré to the United States explains in The New Yorker:

Like the choice of the word itself, austerity was politically calculated. Huge areas of public spending — on the NHS [National Health Service] and education — were nominally maintained. Pensions and international aid became more generous, to show that British compassion was not dead. But protecting some parts of the state meant sacrificing the rest: the courts, the prisons, police budgets, wildlife departments, rural buses, care for the elderly, youth programs, road maintenance, public health, the diplomatic corps.

My view happens to be that the diplomatic corps can kiss the collective arse of the British people, but the other items on this inventory of neglect cannot. The NHS is still described as the greatest health service in the world, but this is a hard pill to swallow. Even when I worked for it over 30 years ago the waste and overmanagement was staggering, and that was before the diversity racket got into gear. As for education, vast sums of the public weal have not prevented — nor were they intended to — the hijacking of the classroom by gender and racial ideologues. Some of that money will also have been spent on metal detectors.

The Tories took their expected trouncing in recent local council elections and this indicator led to a brace of Conservative Members of Parliament defecting to Labour, a staggering example of careerism. This “crossing the floor” used to mean something in the days when the parties differed, but the UK has just as much of a uniparty today as the US. Dan Poulter MP, however, gave a baffling reason for turning his coat, describing the Conservative Party pejoratively as “a nationalist party of the Right.” Have I missed something?

With two major elections likely in the same month, the world’s eyes will hardly be on a foregone conclusion in an increasingly unimportant world player when the US is setting up the nastiest, dirtiest, strangest election in its history — maybe anyone’s history. But even though it is a political sideshow, a British General Election there must be by November. It could be sooner if incumbent Hindu Prime Minister Rishi Sunak decides to fall on his electoral sword and call a snap election in the next couple of months. Either way, barring a cataclysmic scandal, a Labour government is coming this year — not because anyone outside the BBC and The Guardian wants them, but because the Tories have excelled themselves in failing.

The biggest losers of the next General Election will be the indigenous, white British public. The political class sees them as an irritating extra, necessary on voting day (voter turnout for UK general elections is a reasonably high 65-70%) but a right royal pain in the arse the rest of the time. And this political class is starting to make me uneasy, not just because of what they do and say, but for what they might be, and you must excuse me if what follows reads like the screenplay for a movie with Tom Cruise in it.

Woman taken off Dallas flight after outburst that went viral on TikTok

Look at this photograph of the Irish Cabinet from The Irish Examiner. Is it just me? I find something about it disquieting, and I am reminded of the viral “plane woman” standing in the aisle on a Dallas flight and pointing back at someone she had been sitting next to and screaming “That motherfucker is not real!” That’s how the photo of Ireland’s leading politicians makes me feel.

Rishi Sunak's first speech as U.K. prime minister

Now look at this video of Rishi Sunak making his acceptance speech outside 10 Downing Street after being shoehorned into the Premiership to govern a people who were not given the chance to vote for or against him. I mean, don’t watch the whole thing because you can never get that time back; just skip to 6:08 and watch Sunak wave to the assembled journalists. Who the hell waves like that? It reminded me inescapably of working as a storesman for a Midlands company that marketed electronic drives and motors. One of the guys there showed me how he programmed a robot arm, one of those picking machines used in factories to select and pack whatever item the company makes. The guy wrote out a string of coding, entered it, and the arm came to life, moving to the left, closing and opening its metallic fingers, then moving to the right, then coming to a stop. He entered some more code and the arm did the same thing in reverse. Pick. Stop. Turn. Stop. Pick. Stop. Turn. Substitute “wave” for “pick,” and that is what Sunak is doing. Maybe this is what artificial intelligence really is. We all thought it is making machines act like humans, but it isn’t. It’s the other way around.

Whether or not we are ruled by malevolent AI, the task of what Margaret Thatcher’s faithful aide de camp Sir Geoffrey Howe called “managing decline” will soon fall to Sir Keir Starmer and his crew of Leftists. Whether he will be quite as much of a globalist shill as Sunak patently is remains to be seen, but the global village may have to wait while another one is destroyed in order to save it.