Starmer’s Christmas betrayals

Starmer’s betrayals are coming thick and fast. It wasn’t too long ago that Starmer was promising to abolish the House of Lords. In 2022 Starmer vowed to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a fully elected upper chamber. Yet the Labour manifesto for this year’s general election contained only a promise to get rid of the remaining hereditary peers in parliament, impose a mandatory retirement age of 80 for life peers and hold a wider consultation on the future of the chamber. Yet only the first of these measures has made it into Labour’s legislative program for its first year in office. Everything else has been kicked into the long grass.

This is all very reminiscent of Tony Blair’s promise to abolish the Lords when he won his landslide victory in 1997. The pledge kept being watered down until what we ended up with was the removal of voting rights from most – but not all – hereditary peers and the transformation of the Lords into the unelected Palace of Patronage we have today. Blair and successive governments have continued to stuff the Lords with cronies, donors, and failed politicians who have been turfed out of office by the electorate. In any other country this would be denounced as corruption. In the UK it’s an integral part of the system of government.

Starmer gives every indication of following in the corrupt and self-interested pattern of successive British prime ministers who had no intention of abolishing the Lords for two main reasons, firstly and most obviously, because the existence of the Lords gives the prime minister immense powers of patronage. The potential of a peerage is a useful means of encouraging wealthy donors to give money to the party and an even more useful bauble to dangle in front of party colleagues who might have issues in supporting a particular policy that the prime minister seeks to get through.

Secondly, as a chamber bereft of democratic legitimacy whose members owe their position entirely to the prime minister’s grace and favour, the Lords provides merely a token brake on the exercise of unfettered power by the prime minister. An elected upper chamber would possess democratic legitimacy independent of the prime minister and as such could act as a real check on the prime minister’s power. Starmer is not about to surrender an iota of the near absolute power he has spent the last few years scheming to get.

We can tell as much as Starmer’s first step is to – in his words – “rebalance” the Lords by stuffing yet more compliant Labour party hacks into an already bloated chamber. With his massive Commons majority he could have forced through an act to reduce the number of life peers and bring their party affiliation more into balance with the voting habits of the electorate. But instead he’s chosen to pump even more hot air into an already over inflated balloon. He’s balancing an undemocratic pile of ordure by dumping more undemocratic crap on the side that favours him.

30 new Labour peers have been appointed to go and join George Foulkes in conspiring to undermine Scottish democracy in the service of the UK.

One of these is the political reject Thangam Debbonaire, who had been the Labour MP for Bristol West until the recent election when the voters of her constituency ditched her in favour of Carla Denyer of the Greens. Debbonaire has accepted the peerage despite previously denouncing the awarding of peerages to political cronies. The Greens had warned that Debbonaire would be given a seat in the Lords if she lost the election in her constituency, something she had angrily denied.

Talking of political rejects, there’s a deeply welcome blast from the past in the form of a peerage for former Glasgow MP Magrit Curran who campaigned with the Tories during the Scottish independence referendum and danced in celebration when the No vote won. Magrit was unceremoniously ditched by the voters of her Glasgow East constituency at the Westminster general election the following year. Magrit was my MP at the time and had never achieved anything of note for the people of the East End of Glasgow. Although I don’t smoke, I celebrated her defeat by lighting a thick cigar. It left me green in the face, nauseous, and feeling ill, which appropriately enough is exactly how Magrit was feeling when the returning officer announced that she’d lost her seat.

Another unwelcome blast from the past is the peerage given to Wendy Alexander, the older sister of Wee Dougie Alexander, small in stature and small in political impact ,who is back in the Commons as MP for Lothian East, in which post he has supported the retention of the two child cap on benefits and the axing of the winter fuel allowance.

Wendy was of course the branch manager of the Labour party in Scotland in the 2000s before being forced to resign in 2007 after it came to light that she had accepted an impermissible political donation from a property developer based in Jersey. She was also at the centre of controversy and was reported to the procurator fiscal by the Scottish Parliament standards watchdog for failing to declare as gifts the donations that were made to the fund for her campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party in Scotland.

In the interests of full disclosure, I do owe Wendy a personal debt of gratitude. I was a student at Glasgow University alongside Wendy back in the early 1980s. I met my friend Shona after she switched seats to get away from Wendy on a coach load of students from Glasgow Uni going to a CND demo in London in 1982. Shona lied and told Wendy she’d just spotted me and I was her friend, even though she didn’t know me, because Wendy was a boring Labour hack. 45 yrs later Shona and I are still good friends and Wendy is still a boring Labour hack. As a dyed in the wool Labour party careerist, Wendy no doubt now supports Starmer’s renewal of Trident.

It was reported over the weekend that Starmer and Labour ministers are resisting calls to block Elon Musk from donating millions to Nigel Farage and Reform UK. The Observer reports: “There are concerns at the heart of the government that a hurried attempt to introduce rules targeting a Musk donation could backfire and hand Farage the chance to claim that Reform UK was being sabotaged by the establishment.”

And if you believe that you probably also believe that Thangam Debbonaire was shocked and amazed when Starmer offered her a peerage. I don’t believe for a single second that Starmer doesn’t want to ban Musk from donating millions to Reform because he’s afraid it might backfire. It has everything to do with Starmer not wanting scrutiny of the sources of Labour’s own donations, and overhaul of a system that permits Starmer and his allies to rake in the cash from private healthcare companies or property developers. Party before country as always. But let’s suppose it were true, this very Westminster type of complacency is infuriating, lazy, and reminiscent of the useless Remain campaign in 2016. You’d think by now people would have learned that the lying, fear-mongering and manipulative far right doesn’t play by the same ethical rules as democrats, has no sense of honourable conduct and sees fair play as weakness.

Due to his greed and complacency, Starmer is sleep walking us all into a buy out of democracy by the fascist enabling Elon Musk, and that is perhaps his greatest betrayal of all.

This is my last post of 2024. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a Guid New Year. I will be back after the holidays, continuing to make the case for Scottish independence and holding the Westminster parties to account in my own small way. With the rise of the far right, and authoritarian populist Anglo-British nationalism, 2025 will definitively prove why Scottish independence is so badly needed.

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