One of the people who are well worth following because of their measured but sensible approach to politics runs an account called ‘Barrister’s Horse’. The owner of this account put up an interesting article about some of the pressures facing Sir Keir Starmer and how this might be influencing his reactions to current events.

Barrister’s Horse said:

This commentator is in my view correct in their assessment of the situation. Starmer must know that the longer public unrest continues the more questions are going to get asked and not just asked by the public but by his political opponents both inside and outside the Labour Party. I also agree with their assessment of Starmer’s mistakes such as tarring everyone who is protesting, including those who are peacefully protesting about Britain’s current politician created problems, as ‘far right’ is a bad mistake. This is because of two reasons.

The first is that those who he is targeting are so far from the far right politically that they might as well be in a different galaxy. This makes those targeted go ‘you what’ at such smears and therefore those and those around them will clearly see them as smears.

The second reason is that, as I’ve said both on here and elsewhere, Britain does not have a highly developed or populous far right of the sort that any reasonable person would see as such. The real far right, the proper Hitler worshippers are not a significant political force in the UK. From Moseley to Griffin via ‘Bomber’ Lecomber and Tyndall, this lot do shit at elections. This political current does not have the leadership manpower, the organisational ability, the funding or the number of ordinary footsoldier bodies that it would take for them to plan, organise or carry out the number of protests and disturbances that we’ve seen recently.

Of course there are far rightists involved in some of these disturbances, I’ve met and protested against enough of this type of person over the years to know that they love a good ruck, but I very much doubt that they have been, for the reasons I give above, running the show. Britain has had a reasonably good record post WWII for not voting for genuine extremists in large numbers and that can be shown to be correct by looking at just how few votes or seats genuine extremists of the far right and far left get at election time when they are standing on their own identifiable platforms. A good illustration of this aspect of the British character is to look at the electoral results for the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition Party which despite big money backing from Trade Unions managed a measly 354 votes in each of the 44 seats in which they stood a candidate.

To conclude: Starmer is doing what he is doing because he’s politically weaker than many would like to think and I reckon that the political fall out from recent events will last longer than any actual disturbances.