Actually, the Starmer address struck me as a blatant and wholly dishonest attempt to distract from the grooming rape gang issue; that is a systemic, multi-agency situation that should bring down councils, government, police and associated agencies. This knife attack, as criminal and egregious as it was, is not on the same scale. There is something profoundly rotten and corrupt in this country.
I'm sure there's an element of that - it's interesting the alacrity with which Cooper announced an inquiry into Rudakubana. Presumably this is because they feel they're on safer ground there...
I plan to write a post about this. Nobody familiar with the Chilcot Inquiry, the Covid Inquiry, or the Northern Irish Historical Abuse Inquiry can honestly expect that tactic to bear fruit.
Nohow and contrariwise. Combine the long-honed skill of inquiry chairs in ignoring facts, obscuring relationships, and making everything vague, with the public's attention span of about a week - whereas the typical inquiry lasts for many years - and it is the perfect burial technique.
As with the grooming gangs, this shines a harsh light on our public sphere. Not just the PM and his crew, but also police, social services, schools, local government, Prevent - a Potemkin structure that serves itself while pretending to ‘serve’ the public - who pay for this.
If you use biological structures as metaphors to compare with man made organisations, then you see that if follows that, any organisation brought in to being by whatever means must survive above all else. Its primary function is the existence of itself and under stress existence trumps all other functions. Under benign conditions existence is assured so it can perform other functions. That doesn't mean the other functions are beneficial or useful to society or that the organisations functions are immune to being modified, corrupted or otherwise changed. No different to the high minded individual who espouses virtuous aims finding his noble aims not surviving first contact with the enemy and discarding the moral in favour of survival. This has been going on for in the UK now for years, we move fro higher to lower and not the other way around. Calamity can be the only result and solution.
So the plebs feel reassured that ‘something is being done’ as the blob which feeds this monolith of failure continues as it always has. Michael Schellenberger on Public talks about this era of nihilism in our public agencies and government. The WEF tentacles have spread far and wide.
The craziest thing about this article is that, in some grotesque flight of illogic, it justified throwing hundreds of people in jail for years, just for shitposting on social media. Zero sense of proportion, zero sense of human decency. And the bombshell “conclusion”? Things aren’t quite right at the moment (!) Utter crap.
I would normally ignore a comment like this but I'm genuinely quite curious how you got to this interpretation of things. You're going to have to spell out where it is that I justify throwing hundreds of people in jail for years for 'shitposting on social media'.
You are right that my response was disproportional, and I apologize for its virulence. I think it is somehow very difficult for UK writers like yourself to understand the rage felt by many around the world at the unfathomable cruelty shown by Starmer and the authorities to those harmless social media observations. In fact, hundreds were arrested, and sentenced mercilessly for doing something that is just business as usual online, in Western societies, let alone any sort of “crime” meriting serious prison time. You state that “British readers” will agree that what they did was deserving of such condemnation. Is that true? The British people I know are appalled at the totalitarian ferocity of these actions. In my view, they should be condemned in the strongest terms, and attempts at even-handed reporting just come across as craven and pandering.
Looking at the UK, it is hard to conclude that it is in anything other than very, very, serious trouble—perhaps existentially. Many fear much worse is coming unless something definitive is done to remove the current government.
I don't wish to be misunderstood - nobody should ever be jailed for what they wrote on social media. All I said was that people should think first before they say nasty things online. I don't think anybody would reasonably disagree with that. A lot of the people who were sentenced said extremely nasty and stupid things, and they shouldn't have done so; that the law makes their conduct illegal is a travesty, but that doesn't mean that one has to approve of the sentiments expressed by all of these people.
Similarly, while I think the sentences handed down for many of the people engaged in actual violent disorder were in general excessively and almost vindictively harsh, it's still the case that violent disorder is a crime, and it's still the case that - whatever the reason - one never has an excuse to riot or try to burn down buildings with people inside. We have to be careful not to get carried away. The country is indeed in very serious trouble, but that isn't helped if people lose perspective on what is right and wrong.
You hit on a very good point, one I had noticed myself prior to this speech - that Starmer encouraged the harshest treatment of people for speculating on things he knew to be true. Knowing them to be true, or at least to have a grain of truth, Starmer could've taken a more collaborative approach with the native Brit, understanding their concerns and maybe explaining why there were some things he could and could not confirm... but he didn't. He hates the native Brit and *wanted* to punish them. And here's why. It was precisely the fact that the British people correctly suspected the perpetrator was foreign that Starmer hates, because it strikes at the core of multiculturalism and his dogmatic ideology. If multiculturalism worked, one would not be able to detect "the Other" in certain behaviours; the fact we can sniff out such differences with such regularity proves otherwise.
Something else struck me about the first paragraph that you quoted from Mr Starmer:
"There has been a failure here and I don’t intend to let any institution of the state deflect from their failures and I acknowledge that readily here."
That looks at first sight like a brave apology, a leader coming clean about failures and taking responsibility.
And yet if you look at it again, what it actually is, is a statement that Starmer himself was not to blame.
"There has been a failure here and I want to apologise to the victims for it" would have been a reasonable thing to say. Instead, he blamed the "institutions of State" and claimed he would stop them deflecting from their failures.
What was he "acknowledging readily here"? In fact he was "acknowledging" his own lack of guilt.
He was, in fact, refusing to take responsibility as leader of those institutions of State. He was telling everyone that wherever the buck stops, it is definitely not on his desk.
Brilliant. Thank you. You are like the joiner with his hammer driving the nail home and you just sense from the 'particular' sound made by steel on steel that the man knows his craft.
Excellent once again, David. As a philosophical pragmatist who believes in real-world effects, I was bemused by the description of this as a new form of terrorism. If you go tonto with a knife at a dance class the effect is the same whatever lunacy is going on in your head; or are we suggesting that it doesn't qualify as terrorism unless you scream allahu akbar? I understand that motivation is important for the downstream stuff like identification and indoctrination, but saying this was not a terrorist incident is laughable.
Starmer's party was elected to government by a mere 9.7M of the UK's 47M electorate. The lowest vote for a government party in the history of British elections since universal suffrage.
Because the electoral system is rigged this small minority of votes gave Labour a huge majority in parliament.
This has fuelled Starmer's disdain for the British people. To his mind he doesn't need their approval. He is free to do as he pleases.
Yes, there has been a failure here. But the fish rots from the head down.
I find it noteworthy that Starmer has attracted so many critical soubriquets. Such as Two Tier Keir arising from the swinging post Southport punishments. But there's also Free Gear Keir. Starmer the Granny Harmer. Starmer the Farmer Harmer. From a little earlier Captain Hindsight. Or even Keith.
I expect people identify a wrong 'un without being consciously aware of 2TK's actual failings.
"Yes, I knew the details as they were emerging. That is the usual practice in a case such as this. But you know and I know that it would not have been right to disclose those details.
The only losers if the details had been disclosed would be the victims and the families because it ran the risk the trial would collapse. I am never going to do that."
Maybe I am an idiot who does not understand the law, but I totally fail to understand how publicizing the fact the the killer was a Rwandan who was well known to the authorities for being a terrorist loving nutter would have caused the trial to collapse.
A conspiracy theorist would assume that this enforced withholding of information was in fact deliberately designed to ensure that the general public jumped to conclusions. It probably wasn’t deliberate just your average racial cringe induced incompetence, but as has been said before sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
"We feel like whenever a politician or public figure opens his or her mouth we simply don’t know whether he or she is telling us porkies. The fault for this, in fairness, lies across the political spectrum and it is an issue that has been afflicting British governance for a very long time (at least since the days of the Iraq War)."
Political lies date back at least to the days of Solon, but there is no doubt that Alastair Campbell weaponised the system, learning at the feet of his hero Goebbels.
A very fine piece. Excellent. Unlike our rancid government and its brazen Trotskyist leader. I personally doubt whether Starmer will last out the year - Labour MPs' self-preservation gene will presumably start to kick in soon.
And supported by the Muslim MPs whom Starmer fears will undermine the Labour vote at the next election - that’s if it doesn’t get cancelled/delayed like May’s local elections!
„… a petty, inhumane, almost spiteful man who considers himself to be morally superior to the mass of humanity and has no qualms whatsoever about breaking eggs to make omelettes.“
I used to believe in the idea of reform, like a house that needs a new kitchen or even a gut renovation. I also used to believe that this may happen internally, 'they' may decide to freshen up the place and clean out the cobwebs.
Now, I realise why history shows that things decay way past the point of repair, cling until some external event reveals them to be completely hollow and barely standing.
I wonder if that's in part why the Great British Blob are so up in arms with Elon sticking his nose in. Because they want to be left alone to do things how they see fit and on their terms with no one external to judge them.
That leaves me with the sense the release from all this comes from reality intruding somehow - not with any of them cleaning up the mess.
Starmer first appeared on my radar in 2020 when he became leader of the Labour Party. His every utterance during the COVID period identified him as a nasty piece of work and closet Big State authoritarian ("We need to lock down harder for longer", etc); completely indifferent to the damage to social cohesian and poorer members of our Society who were not members of the "laptop class", that lockdowns were causing. I have not been at all surprised by his approach to Governing and, although I was no fan of the last Tory Government, I perceive Starmer and his Government to have done more damage to the UK over the last several months than the Tories did in the prior several years (although their presidence over a managed decline began to accelerate in 2020). The Elite Political Class has a lot to answer for.
Actually, the Starmer address struck me as a blatant and wholly dishonest attempt to distract from the grooming rape gang issue; that is a systemic, multi-agency situation that should bring down councils, government, police and associated agencies. This knife attack, as criminal and egregious as it was, is not on the same scale. There is something profoundly rotten and corrupt in this country.
I'm sure there's an element of that - it's interesting the alacrity with which Cooper announced an inquiry into Rudakubana. Presumably this is because they feel they're on safer ground there...
I vaguely remember years ago an MP suggesting that public enquiries were often the best boot to kick the can down the road with...
I plan to write a post about this. Nobody familiar with the Chilcot Inquiry, the Covid Inquiry, or the Northern Irish Historical Abuse Inquiry can honestly expect that tactic to bear fruit.
Nohow and contrariwise. Combine the long-honed skill of inquiry chairs in ignoring facts, obscuring relationships, and making everything vague, with the public's attention span of about a week - whereas the typical inquiry lasts for many years - and it is the perfect burial technique.
That. And the fact that the people in the frame this time are not Labour led councils and MPs.
As with the grooming gangs, this shines a harsh light on our public sphere. Not just the PM and his crew, but also police, social services, schools, local government, Prevent - a Potemkin structure that serves itself while pretending to ‘serve’ the public - who pay for this.
If you use biological structures as metaphors to compare with man made organisations, then you see that if follows that, any organisation brought in to being by whatever means must survive above all else. Its primary function is the existence of itself and under stress existence trumps all other functions. Under benign conditions existence is assured so it can perform other functions. That doesn't mean the other functions are beneficial or useful to society or that the organisations functions are immune to being modified, corrupted or otherwise changed. No different to the high minded individual who espouses virtuous aims finding his noble aims not surviving first contact with the enemy and discarding the moral in favour of survival. This has been going on for in the UK now for years, we move fro higher to lower and not the other way around. Calamity can be the only result and solution.
The bigger problem is these organisms never die. They have to be killed off.
The situation can be summed up in a single word.
Parasitism.
Well said.
So the plebs feel reassured that ‘something is being done’ as the blob which feeds this monolith of failure continues as it always has. Michael Schellenberger on Public talks about this era of nihilism in our public agencies and government. The WEF tentacles have spread far and wide.
A competent politician loves to kill several birds with one stone. (If that isn't illegal yet).
The craziest thing about this article is that, in some grotesque flight of illogic, it justified throwing hundreds of people in jail for years, just for shitposting on social media. Zero sense of proportion, zero sense of human decency. And the bombshell “conclusion”? Things aren’t quite right at the moment (!) Utter crap.
I would normally ignore a comment like this but I'm genuinely quite curious how you got to this interpretation of things. You're going to have to spell out where it is that I justify throwing hundreds of people in jail for years for 'shitposting on social media'.
You are right that my response was disproportional, and I apologize for its virulence. I think it is somehow very difficult for UK writers like yourself to understand the rage felt by many around the world at the unfathomable cruelty shown by Starmer and the authorities to those harmless social media observations. In fact, hundreds were arrested, and sentenced mercilessly for doing something that is just business as usual online, in Western societies, let alone any sort of “crime” meriting serious prison time. You state that “British readers” will agree that what they did was deserving of such condemnation. Is that true? The British people I know are appalled at the totalitarian ferocity of these actions. In my view, they should be condemned in the strongest terms, and attempts at even-handed reporting just come across as craven and pandering.
Looking at the UK, it is hard to conclude that it is in anything other than very, very, serious trouble—perhaps existentially. Many fear much worse is coming unless something definitive is done to remove the current government.
Thank you for allowing me to reply.
I don't wish to be misunderstood - nobody should ever be jailed for what they wrote on social media. All I said was that people should think first before they say nasty things online. I don't think anybody would reasonably disagree with that. A lot of the people who were sentenced said extremely nasty and stupid things, and they shouldn't have done so; that the law makes their conduct illegal is a travesty, but that doesn't mean that one has to approve of the sentiments expressed by all of these people.
Similarly, while I think the sentences handed down for many of the people engaged in actual violent disorder were in general excessively and almost vindictively harsh, it's still the case that violent disorder is a crime, and it's still the case that - whatever the reason - one never has an excuse to riot or try to burn down buildings with people inside. We have to be careful not to get carried away. The country is indeed in very serious trouble, but that isn't helped if people lose perspective on what is right and wrong.
You hit on a very good point, one I had noticed myself prior to this speech - that Starmer encouraged the harshest treatment of people for speculating on things he knew to be true. Knowing them to be true, or at least to have a grain of truth, Starmer could've taken a more collaborative approach with the native Brit, understanding their concerns and maybe explaining why there were some things he could and could not confirm... but he didn't. He hates the native Brit and *wanted* to punish them. And here's why. It was precisely the fact that the British people correctly suspected the perpetrator was foreign that Starmer hates, because it strikes at the core of multiculturalism and his dogmatic ideology. If multiculturalism worked, one would not be able to detect "the Other" in certain behaviours; the fact we can sniff out such differences with such regularity proves otherwise.
Indeed WtW, and the heightened distrust caused by Starmer’s No.2 when dismissing facts known to be true as “fake news” and a “conspiracy theory”.
Something else struck me about the first paragraph that you quoted from Mr Starmer:
"There has been a failure here and I don’t intend to let any institution of the state deflect from their failures and I acknowledge that readily here."
That looks at first sight like a brave apology, a leader coming clean about failures and taking responsibility.
And yet if you look at it again, what it actually is, is a statement that Starmer himself was not to blame.
"There has been a failure here and I want to apologise to the victims for it" would have been a reasonable thing to say. Instead, he blamed the "institutions of State" and claimed he would stop them deflecting from their failures.
What was he "acknowledging readily here"? In fact he was "acknowledging" his own lack of guilt.
He was, in fact, refusing to take responsibility as leader of those institutions of State. He was telling everyone that wherever the buck stops, it is definitely not on his desk.
Yep.
Is that what some call the 'Progressive Passive' voice? Mistakes were made, lessons were learned etc forever.
Brilliant. Thank you. You are like the joiner with his hammer driving the nail home and you just sense from the 'particular' sound made by steel on steel that the man knows his craft.
Shucks, Adam!
Excellent once again, David. As a philosophical pragmatist who believes in real-world effects, I was bemused by the description of this as a new form of terrorism. If you go tonto with a knife at a dance class the effect is the same whatever lunacy is going on in your head; or are we suggesting that it doesn't qualify as terrorism unless you scream allahu akbar? I understand that motivation is important for the downstream stuff like identification and indoctrination, but saying this was not a terrorist incident is laughable.
Hey Gus. I think the fantastical idea that is a ‘new’ form of terrorism will be used to justify a ‘new’ type of response.
Namely that the law should be changed so the state has the right to closely monitor, and prescribe even more of our online activities.
Starmer's party was elected to government by a mere 9.7M of the UK's 47M electorate. The lowest vote for a government party in the history of British elections since universal suffrage.
Because the electoral system is rigged this small minority of votes gave Labour a huge majority in parliament.
This has fuelled Starmer's disdain for the British people. To his mind he doesn't need their approval. He is free to do as he pleases.
Yes, there has been a failure here. But the fish rots from the head down.
I find it noteworthy that Starmer has attracted so many critical soubriquets. Such as Two Tier Keir arising from the swinging post Southport punishments. But there's also Free Gear Keir. Starmer the Granny Harmer. Starmer the Farmer Harmer. From a little earlier Captain Hindsight. Or even Keith.
I expect people identify a wrong 'un without being consciously aware of 2TK's actual failings.
Keirman Mao?
Yep and I’ve heard “Our Care” by Angie Rayner and the Starmfuhrer by a friend of mine!
"Yes, I knew the details as they were emerging. That is the usual practice in a case such as this. But you know and I know that it would not have been right to disclose those details.
The only losers if the details had been disclosed would be the victims and the families because it ran the risk the trial would collapse. I am never going to do that."
Maybe I am an idiot who does not understand the law, but I totally fail to understand how publicizing the fact the the killer was a Rwandan who was well known to the authorities for being a terrorist loving nutter would have caused the trial to collapse.
As I noted recently (https://substack.com/@francisturner/note/c-87791819? ):
A conspiracy theorist would assume that this enforced withholding of information was in fact deliberately designed to ensure that the general public jumped to conclusions. It probably wasn’t deliberate just your average racial cringe induced incompetence, but as has been said before sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
"We feel like whenever a politician or public figure opens his or her mouth we simply don’t know whether he or she is telling us porkies. The fault for this, in fairness, lies across the political spectrum and it is an issue that has been afflicting British governance for a very long time (at least since the days of the Iraq War)."
Political lies date back at least to the days of Solon, but there is no doubt that Alastair Campbell weaponised the system, learning at the feet of his hero Goebbels.
Even after they've smelled the coffee, so many Brits are painfully slow to wake up!
A very fine piece. Excellent. Unlike our rancid government and its brazen Trotskyist leader. I personally doubt whether Starmer will last out the year - Labour MPs' self-preservation gene will presumably start to kick in soon.
Yes Tim. But he will replaced by Rayner. Sorry Wes, but it won’t be you, as much as you scheme.
Academic Agent predicts Chip Shop Debs may run the country - truly, the ashes and Kali Yuga in action.
I think a resurgence of the Corbynistas is the most likely - and bleakest - scenario,
And supported by the Muslim MPs whom Starmer fears will undermine the Labour vote at the next election - that’s if it doesn’t get cancelled/delayed like May’s local elections!
have labour ever ousted one of their own PM's?
Blair hung on longer than he promised to the chagrin of Brown etc.
I'm not sure have a mechanism to remove their own leader.
Labour MP's may need to resign the whip and start a new party, that'll do it.
I have a similar feeling.
„… a petty, inhumane, almost spiteful man who considers himself to be morally superior to the mass of humanity and has no qualms whatsoever about breaking eggs to make omelettes.“
A Fabian you say?
Please don't write "hone in on". It's "home in on". Honing is sharpening a blade.
Grammer natsis of the world untie.
I say this approvingly.
I used to believe in the idea of reform, like a house that needs a new kitchen or even a gut renovation. I also used to believe that this may happen internally, 'they' may decide to freshen up the place and clean out the cobwebs.
Now, I realise why history shows that things decay way past the point of repair, cling until some external event reveals them to be completely hollow and barely standing.
I wonder if that's in part why the Great British Blob are so up in arms with Elon sticking his nose in. Because they want to be left alone to do things how they see fit and on their terms with no one external to judge them.
That leaves me with the sense the release from all this comes from reality intruding somehow - not with any of them cleaning up the mess.
I find myself in a similar position.
Excellent as ever David.
A ‘spiteful man who considers himself to be morally superior to the mass of humanity’
sums up not just Starmer, but his entire front bench, and indeed the rancid ideology which drives them.
Many thanks.
Starmer first appeared on my radar in 2020 when he became leader of the Labour Party. His every utterance during the COVID period identified him as a nasty piece of work and closet Big State authoritarian ("We need to lock down harder for longer", etc); completely indifferent to the damage to social cohesian and poorer members of our Society who were not members of the "laptop class", that lockdowns were causing. I have not been at all surprised by his approach to Governing and, although I was no fan of the last Tory Government, I perceive Starmer and his Government to have done more damage to the UK over the last several months than the Tories did in the prior several years (although their presidence over a managed decline began to accelerate in 2020). The Elite Political Class has a lot to answer for.