Starmer’s colonial office mentality

Keir Starmer’s government has not been in power for three months, but it is already shaping up to be as vile and corrupt as the Conservatives it replaced. A new poll has found that Starmer is now viewed as more sleazy than his predecessor Rishi Sunak. A YouGov poll asking people to compare the two as prime ministers found 35% of people think Starmer is more sleazy, while just 28% found him less sleazy than Sunak. Overall, the majority of people asked (59%) said the current Labour Government is very or fairly sleazy.

Sleazy is a British political euphemism for ‘corrupt’. British politics is full of such euphemisms, ‘tough choices’ means making the poor suffer, ‘donation’ means bribe in exchange for influence or a peerage.

The ahem, ‘donations’ scandal has been rumbling on since Starmer was elected in July, but never mind, our Prime Minister has fearlessly identified the person responsible for him being addicted to freebies from suspiciously generous millionaires and corporate lobbyists. That person is of course not Keir Starmer, who has assured us repeatedly in wounded tones that he’s done nothing wrong. He’s the real victim here. It’s not his fault if millionaires and the Premier League keep throwing luxury stuff at him, and in any case it’s got nothing at all to do with the Premier League’s efforts to intervene in plans for a new football regulator.

No, the real culprit here is not our greedy and entitled Prime Minister who cannot grasp the appalling optics of him taking expensive luxury ‘donations’ while making pensioners freeze and telling poor families with more than two kids that they can only get social security or tax credits for two of them. All this is really the fault of Sue Gray, his highly paid Chief of Staff for failing to shift the headlines away from her boss’s entitlement, avarice and sleaze. This is precisely the kind of blame shifting response you’d expect from a sleazebag politician. It’s all looking terribly Tory.

Gray has been bumped out of her job and installed in the hastily created non-job of envoy to the nations and regions. It’s funny how within the space of three months Labour went from pretending that Scotland would be at the centre of their government with a key role in formulating government policy, to deciding that we need an envoy to ensure that they don’t have to deal with us directly

Why is this new post needed? I thought Scotland was already the beating heart of this new Labour government. I’m sure BBC Scotland will doorstep Anas Sarwar and Ian Murray first thing on Monday morning to ask them all about the blatant mismatch between what they promised during the recent election campaign and what they are delivering now that they are in power. Yeah, right, ferries.

I thought that Scotland already had an ‘envoy’ from Westminster? Is that not Ian Murray’s job? Did Murray get as much notice of his effective demotion as the 90 minutes the Treasury gave the Scottish Government when Rachel Reeves decided that she was going to abolish the universal entitlement to the winter fuel allowance for pensioners and at a stroke wheech £160 million in Barnett Consequentials out of the Scottish budget.

The Scottish Government really ought to appoint an envoy to Westminster just to see Russell Findlay and Anas Sarwar have a meltdown at FMQs.

There is no explanation as to how this new job specially created for Gray, at her same high salary, will interact with the Scotland Office or the equivalent government ministries for Wales and Northern Ireland, but that’s because Starmer is making it all up as he goes along in an effort to get himself out of a difficulty created by his own greed and the rapidly dawning realisation that his promise of change was merely the latest and greatest of his many self-serving lies.

Yet again this episode demonstrates Starmer’s inability to grasp the optics, and that is a fatal flaw in a politician. He could hide from it while in Opposition because the Tories were – and still are – so corrupt, god-awful, and chaotic, but he can’t hide from it now that he’s in power. Envoy to the Nations and Regions smacks at best of a London-centric paternalism, at worst it’s out and out colonialism. We’re a very long way from “we’re all in this together” and more, “We’ll deal with you at arm’s length.” The very title Envoy to the Nations and Regions demonstrates that anywhere outside of London is a secondary thought (if that). It also proves yet again that in the Home Counties world view of the British Government, Scotland and Wales are deemed to be equivalent to a mere region of England. So much for equal partners in a family of nations.

The new post has been widely criticised across the political spectrum. Envoys are more typically associated with troubleshooting in regions and international relations which are seen to be troubled or problematic, such as when Tony Blair was appointed as an envoy to the Middle East by a government with no concept of the word irony. Chris Law, the SNP MP for Dundee Central and the party’s international trade spokesperson at Westminster, quoted the title of Gray role and added: “If there ever was a colonial mindset then this is it!”

Angus Robertson, the Scottish Government’s Constitutional Affairs spokesman noted on Twitter: “‘Nations and Regions’ is now a place that people are sent when they are sacked by 10 Downing Street under Labour. Can you hear the pennies dropping in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?”

Mabon Ap Gwynfor, a Plaid Cymru Member of the Welsh Senedd, noted: “Envoys were made redundant in the middle of the last century because they were essentially second tier ambassadors to what were deemed inferior countries.”

Scottish Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop added: “Nothing smacks of a confession from the UK Labour Government and Keir Starmer that they don’t understand Scotland than the need to have anyone from the UK Labour Government in the position of ‘envoy’ to the nations and regions.”

Gray has been replaced as Starmer’s chief of staff by Morgan McSweeney who was formerly the director of the right wing Labour think tank Labour Together, McSweeney’s wife is Imogen Walker, now the Labour MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley despite having no prior connection to the constituency. She was immediately appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Rachel Reeves.

Labour Together is the organisation which was dismissed by Anas Sarwar as a ‘fringe group’ after Josh Simons, Mc Sweeney’s successor as director of Labour Together, suggested asylum seekers could be sent to a Scottish island. Simons is now the Labour MP for Makersfield.As of 2 June 2024, Labour Together had received £1.92 million in donations since the start of the year, including a £1.3 million donation from a billionaire hedge fund manager. The altruism of hedge fund managers is legendary – in the sense that it doesn’t exist.

Labour is out of touch and as much in hock to corporate interests as the Tories before it. And all this is happening before the budget statement due later this month which has been widely trailed as containing yet more euphemistic ‘tough choices’. Labour’s already plummeting popularity will fall much further before the next Holyrood elections due in May 2026.

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