A brief look at the results of the recent Shadow Cabinet reshuffle tells me that Sir Keir Starmer the Labour leader has no idea how his decisions on who to pick for particular jobs will play in seats that Labour need to win. Two of those who have been appointed to shadow two of the Great Offices of State, Foreign Affairs and the Home Office, are individuals who are not likely to do down well in the former Red Wall seats in the North that Labour lost to the Conservatives in 2019.
For the post of Shadow Foreign Secretary Sir Keir has picked David Lammy, a race baiter who has been described as a hypocrite and a screaming Remainer is the distillate of everything that turned people off Labour a few years back. I find it incredible that Sir Keir should appoint someone to shadow the Foreign Secretary who, as we’ve seen on several occasions, rarely enters a battle of wits armed.
Would you, if you voted for Brexit, trust a party whose leader appointed a man, whom you can see in the video below, campaigned for a reversal of the 2016 Referendum result? I know I would not. This video is one that is doing the rounds on social media.
Then there is Sir Keir’s choice to occupy the Shadow Home Secretary position and it is another person who is liable to turn off those with major concerns about excessive immigration. Sir Keir has chosen Yvette Cooper who will be most familiar to British voters as being one of the loudest cheerleaders for the ‘refugees welcome’ project. This campaign saw thousands of unwanted often pretend ‘refugees’, often single Muslim men of military age, dumped on unsuspecting working class areas and making the already difficult lives of the residents in these areas worse.
Yvette Cooper
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#refugeeswelcome
Does Sir Keir really think that putting this awful middle class Leftist ‘refugee’ campaigner in charge of securing the nation’s borders would be a vote winner? This decision might go down well with the Metro Left but I suspect it will go down less well with communities that are already suffering from the effects of excessive levels of and inappropriate types of immigration. If you wanted to signal to potential Labour voters that the leadership of the party are open borders nutjobs then appointing Yvette Cooper is the way to do that.
I wasn’t going to vote Labour anyway next time, in fact I won’t vote Labour until it becomes the party that it was set up to be, a voice in Parliament for Britain’s working classes, but seeing how Sir Keir Starmer has promoted people who are either race baiters or open borders types I reckon that voting Labour is a vote against our own interests. Sadly for Labour I suspect that others, including many former Labour voters, will look at Sir Keir’s picks for his Shadow Cabinet and think along similar lines.
The Shadow Cabinet is designed to be a credible alternative government and should project such an image to potential voters. All Sir Keir has done with his reshuffle is put in front of the public not a credible alternative government, but a potential nightmare to be avoided.
Well, hmm, that is possibly a fairly unanswerable question and as I’m not Sir Keir Starmer’s official mind reader I will not hazard a guess. I do find it interesting though that he has risen to leadership from a newcomer in 2015 with less parlimentary history than many MPs.
David Lammy possibly has a more interesting history and there are reasons to consider both the pros and cons of his appointment. For a start he has a massive and apparently unshakeable majority in Tottenham, so a ‘solid’ MP who does not have to adapt his views to chase a marginal vote. Secondly Tottenham was once a working class area with employment in a number of manufacturing industries which have now all gone in deindustrialisation and much of the land space converted into speculative housing, inevitable social change with the repercussions.
Of course he makes public gaffes sometimes, but he gets possibly more media coverage than non ethnic minority MPs with similar backbench time and sporadic ministerial posts, so more opportunity for them. Many of the interviwers are hostile so maybe ‘race baiter’ as a description isn’t quite fair?
Neither Lammy nor Cooper are politicians with that wide an appeal. Their hostility to Brexit will not play well in Brexit voting constituencies. My view is that the promotion of these two and some of the other appointments show that there is a paucity of talent in the Parliamentary Labour Party. There are few big players and big intellects for Sir Keir to choose from unlike say Michael Foot had a brief perusal of the list of the Shadow Cabinet in 1981 shows big beasts from both the left and the right represented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Cabinet_of_Michael_Foot#Shadow_Cabinet_List
Sir Keir is somewhat constrained as he can’t bring into the Shad Cab any Corbynites as they will become an irritant. Therefore he’s somewhat limited in who he can pick.
As for Lammy whilst it’s true that he has a solid safe constituency, it’s one of those places where you could get a dog turd elected provided that you stuck a red rosette on it, there are also other Labour MP’s in similar constituencies elsewhere but can’t be picked because they either don’t have the talent for the job, are Corbynites or do not have any relevant experience in Shad Cab.
I’m with you on the deindustrialisation of Tottenham. It’s a tragedy. I used to do a job delivering bolts of cloth to garment factories in the Tottenham / Harringey and Walthamstow areas and these firms and the jobs they brought are all as far as I can understand gone with theland sold for speculative housing.
Some of Lammy’s public gaffes are pretty bad such as petulantly refusing to engage in debate over the report into racism as it didn’t back up his claim that there’s institutional racism. Lammy sticks himself out there as an opinionated individual so I would expect that when he’s interviewed the interview is naturally going to be somewhat hostile. I disagree with you view on Lammy as not being a race baiter. He seems obsessed by the issue and although he’s said some good stuff about absent fathers in the Black community, all too often he seems to want to keep racial wounds open rather than helping to heal them.
Lammy…Cooper…Why do the words ‘Yesterday’s Men’ come to mind?
Maybe Sir Keir is trying to bring back the days of Blair and Brown. The problem is too many of us remember the days of Blair and Brown and see no reason to want to return there. The idea of a ‘refugees welcome’ devotee like Cooper in the Home Office fills me with dread, I think I’d rather have Tommy Cooper in that role.
“Some of Lammy’s public gaffes are pretty bad…”
I believe that, shortly after the referendum he said that Parliament should simply override the result and keep Britain in the EU. Being a remainer is an acceptable position, saying that the referendum result should be ignored is not.
Yes an MP who says that a democratic referendum result should be ignored because he and his mates don’t like it is indeed a massive gaffe. As was the ‘there are no police officers around here’ one when Lammy was speaking about this and saying these words whilst a plod was seen walking around behind him.