Thread by @Angry_Voice

I watched Keir Starmer's interminable #LabourConference21 speech so that you don't have to.

Here's my report (THREAD):

Keir Starmer's cheerleaders in the corporate media insisted that this would be the speech that would stop all the navel-gazing about the past, look to the future, and turn around his lamentable and profoundly unpopular systematic abstention of a leadership so far.

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But it turned out to be just another over-long, backwards-looking, boring speech, lazily rehashing the same tropes he's repeatedly resorted to in the past, that was only enlivened by bouts of heckling from the audience.

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The leaders' speech is usually the packed highlight at Labour Conference, but this time the organisers had to hide banks of empty balcony seats behind curtains, and use the Tory-style trick of cramming the limited crowd in at the front to make it look packed for the cameras

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The Labour Party paid a fortune to get a video link to Starmer's speech to appear in the Twitter trending bar, but the video barely scraped above a paltry 2,000 viewers through the entire thing!

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And a large proportion of this paltry online audience were journalists and other political commentator nerds like me ...

because no remotely ordinary person is going to waste two hours of their life listening to such dull and uninspiring fare are they?

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The heckling will be the aspect of the speech that will be remembered the most.

Starmer sycophantic supporters pointed to his obviously rehearsed comeback about “shouting slogans or changing lives?” as some kind of glorious victory over Corbynism ...

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The standout moment of the whole speech came when Starmer's balloon was absolutely punctured by a shout of "it was your Brexit policy" as he was vitriolically trashing the Labour Party brand, and cynically blaming socialist policy for the 2019 election disaster.

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Later on Starmer was floored by another heckle of "15 pounds an hour" reminding everyone of the way he hypocritically engineered the resignation of his employment minister by instructing him to argue against the £15 per hour policy Starmer himself had previously supported.

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Despite all the promises that this would be a revolutionary new kind of speech from Starmer, he trawled up his tired old "my dad was a toolmaker" schtick again, but this time with an absolutely pathetic jibe about Johnson's parents also making tools.

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The corporate media hack pack absolutely adored this pathetic pre-written dig at Johnson, but if Starmer's going to get himself into a petty muck-slinging competition with an immoral rabble-rouser like Johnson, he's going to get an absolute spanking isn't he?

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The most egregious moment came when Starmer used rape victims as emotional leverage to push for more police powers, which he did on the very day we learned how a serving police officer abused his powers to arrest Sarah Everard, before abducting, raping, and murdering her

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To invoke rape victims to add emotional ballast to his call for greater police powers, on a day like today, was a profoundly insensitive piece of timing.

It demonstrates what a clueless bunch he's surrounded himself with that nobody even thought to edit that bit out.

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It was only last year that Keir Starmer forced his Labour MPs to abstain on legislation designed to allow undercover cops to get away with raping women!

Yet today he's pretending that he cares about rape victims.

Give us a break.

skwawkbox.org/2021/03/14/sta…

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Starmer also tried to play up his military credentials, saying how proud he was of Britain's appalling and failed intervention in Afghanistan, and that he wants to "do right by people who serve in our armed forces".

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Just last year Starmer forced his MPs to abstain on a Tory bill designed to give legal impunity to people who commit war crimes in British uniforms.

Then he purged his cabinet of anyone with the integrity to vote against legalising war crimes!

independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

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Giving British military personnel the freedom to commit war crimes paints a target on the backs of all British soldiers by tarnishing them all as potential war criminals, but Starmer somehow thinks this is a way of "doing right" by British soldiers!

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One of the least self-aware moments came when Starmer name-dropped Marcus Rashford, as if to remind people of the way he's been completely missing in action for the last 18 months, leaving a footballer to organise any actual opposition to this malicious Tory government.

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Another self-awareness failure happened when Starmer accused Johnson of overseeing "a botched Brexit", as if he expects everyone just to forget the way he "forensically" whipped Labour MPs to vote in favour of Johnson's shambolic Brexit deal, before he'd even read it!

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At one point Starmer insisted that he wanted to hold the Tories to account over "cronyism and corruption", but this is a guy who has resurrected the political career of the multiply-disgraced Perter Mandelson (pictured here with child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein)!

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He says he opposes corruption, but he's backed by the "Labour Together" faction who hid a whopping £800,000 from the electoral commission, and he's happy to see Labour paying for services from his NEC henchman David Evans' old company, which is now owned by Evans' wife!

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There were obviously some good talking points in the speech, because his script-writers know that stuff like talking up education and the NHS is a guaranteed way of getting applause out of a Labour Party audience, but even then it was unusually tepid stuff.

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On the NHS Starmer used a bizarrely Cameronesque line about no more "pointless reorganisations of the NHS", despite Cameron famously going back on his "no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS" promise, to launch the biggest top-down reorganisation in NHS history!

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On education, Starmer's strategy is clearly a huge step backwards from the previous National Education Service policy, and the idea that education is a right, not a commodity to be monetised by the rich.

Starmer clearly doesn't believe in principle politics.

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Starmer complained about the current state of the education system, but didn't mention the way that since 2010 the majority of state schools in England have been given away, for free, to a bunch of greedy and unaccountable private sector profiteers.

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One decent point Starmer made was about the terrible Tory neglect of the creative industries, and his belief in the Corbynesque policy of funding theatre, music, and the arts in state schools, and ensuring all kids get the opportunity to play sports in school.

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Starmer could and should have highlighted Johnson's display of utter contempt for the UK's £111 billion cultural industries, through his appointment of a ridiculous radical-right culture war grifter like Nadine Dorries as his culture secretary.

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But if anything is guaranteed in politics, it's that whatever Keir Sarmer does manage to do, he'll do it without any kind of flourish.

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A Starmer speech wouldn't be complete without some venomous invective aimed at the SNP, & continuation of his ridiculous pretence that British nationalism is some kind of righteous/unquestionable state of being, while it's only Scottish nationalism that's driven by ideology!

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Who knows how Starmer thinks he's ever going to win back any of Labour's lost Scottish heartlands when he adopts such a sectarian position, shit-talks Scotland as a country, and openly ridicules the Scottish people for repeatedly handing landslide victories to the SNP?

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And it's a total mystery how the #ProgressiveAlliance types have any faith in Starmer's Labour to head up an anti-Tory coalition, when Starmer & the right-wing ghouls he's surrounded himself with clearly have so much more animosity towards the SNP than they do for the Tories

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One of the most hypocritical moments came when Starmer turned his attention to the environment, and started bragging about Labour's green credentials.

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We all saw the appalling video clip of Starmer arrogantly snubbing the young Labour Party Green New Deal activist just a few days ago, so he just makes himself look a total hypocrite by trying to talk up his environmental concerns in a scripted speech.

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Another moment of total hypocrisy came when Starmer claimed he was going to "tackle discrimination" just days after he forced through hyper-partisan changes to the Labour leadership election process that would've blocked 4 out of 5 women to have stood for leader since 2010!

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Starmer's factional rule change would also have forced out both of the people of colour to have stood for leader in the party's entire history!

If it means shoving women & people of colour down a political mineshaft to have a swing at the left, Starmer's more than willing.

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One of the weirdest things about the speech was Starmer's insistence on repeatedly trash-talking the Labour Party's reputation, portraying its founding socialist principles as anti-British, and insisting that the manifestos of 2017 and 2019 were useless unpopular rubbish.

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What does Starmer hope to gain by continually harking on about how shit Labour was before he took over, when everyone knows that at the time he says it was so shit, he endorsed it all by serving in the shadow cabinet?

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And this nonsensical trash-talking wasn't the only time Starmer insisted on harking on about the past.

At one point he read out a list of New Labour achievements like some kind of cultish incantation, & at another he was even blethering on about the industrial revolution!

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His outriders promised us that this would be a forward-looking speech of a lifetime.

What it turned out as was a backwards-looking borefest, squarely aimed at the Blairite faithful and liberal capitalist hacks, because he knew that nobody else would even be listening.

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