the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Tag: keir-starmer

October 26, 2025

33:64 presents “Bob Dylan.”

The defeat suffered by Labour in the Caerphilly by-election would be incredibly ironic were it not for the fact of it being an ominous portent.  

To begin with, the irony is that the same electoral discontent that propelled Labour into government is exactly the same as that which caused them to be so  comprehensively rejected in Wales. Just as how their victory in the general election of 2024 wasn’t evidence of some long dormant upswell in Labour values amongst the voters, more than that it reflected their collective disenchantment after fourteen years of Tory Government, so to does its defeat last Thursday indicate less of a desire for Welsh independence than to send a message to Stymied.

No matter how much Plaid Cymru (PC) might claim otherwise, their basic shtick to the people of Caerphilly was ‘We’re not Reform’. Which was a shrewd piece of electoral maths. Anyone that might have otherwise have voted for Labour, the Conservative, Liberal Democrats or the Greens would have calculated that tactical voting was far more important than the result of one inconsequential by election.

Because no amount of testiculation can alter the fact that by-elections are the medieval equivalent of the government of the day being dragged to the stocks by voters and then pelted with rotten fruit, eggs and faeces. They prove only how unpopular a government is, which can be discerned from the both the voter turnout and who it was that the voters bothered to turnout for. 

Which in this case amounted to 50.43% of them, of whom only of those 47.4% voted for PC of which significant proportion of those were the aforementioned tactical voters. The change in vote share bears this out, the short version being that Labour and Conservative vote share collapsed from the general election and from which PC benefitted. 

My point is that this not only highlights voter disaffection generally – as evidenced by by the low turnout – but also a specific disaffection with the options open for them to choose from. If the main reason for your electoral success is from hoovering up ‘x’s from voters who detest another party more than they support your one, then that isn’t good.

It is also ominous because if we consider the success in 2024 of the six Independent Alliance MP’s and the barely over 30% of the vote they got on a roughly 40% turnout, and then factor that in with the collapse of traditional voting allegiances, then its clear that times are indeed a changing. Gone are the old class based loyalties. There was a certainty about them, rooted as they were in tangible differences which essentially boiled down to rich or poor. 

Yes they were simplistic but the Britain of  1970’s, 80’s or even the 90’s, were simpler times, there was no hint of just how complicated politics were to become. But whilst the Britain of 2025 is still one of simpler times, it is not the simple one of of recent history, but rather the simple dvision of identity politics. 

This is an inevitable consequence of a society that champions, rewards and celebrates an ever greater division based on identity.  One that is increasingly partisan, intolerant and self-righteous but also a society which rewards those politicians that seek to fashion that discontent into political opportunity. By perpetuating the very division proclaims it opposes and by fostering more grievances, more reasons for division, they are like political alchemists; they turn impotence, frustration and alienation into electoral opportunity.  

With little or no broad policy agenda – other than being opposed to things – and with scant regard for voter engagement beyond their core base and having no upside in remedying that, we are seeing a new kind of politics. Typified by Rasin, who hasn’t just divided along traditional political sectarian lines – left and right – but also among left and far left, and incredibly, those in the far left who don’t share her vision of what the far left is. 

But then again, is she all that different to Stymied or The Cunning Stunt? Only by degree’s, not by instinct or motivation. They have spent the last eight years vilifying people who believed in the wrong kind of democracy. Would ideally prefer that it had never happened, traduced and impugned the reasons of the people who caused it to happen and ignored their point of view. How different is her divisive politics to those politicians who can’t accept that Brexit happened?

How is her continual repetition of the lie of there having been a genocide in Gaze not too dissimilar Stymied and Co banging on about the racist, xenophobic or bigoted motivations of Brexit voters? Or her pandering to disaffected former Labour voters, those who imagine themselves progressives or else those who feel more than they think any more cynical than than those politicians who citing Russian interference, manipulation by the ‘far right’ or fundamental ignorance as comforting explanations for Brexit?  

It’s all on the same spectrum. I disagree with you and because you’re wrong, you’ve forfeited any right to be treated with the same respect I demand of others. That’s why the tactical voting in Caherphilly was so ominous, not because of what it was so much as to what it foretold. A growing willingness on the part of the electorate not to vote for who they want but to prevent the election of someone they want even less, And along with that, the idea that society should prioritise your grievances, needs and values above any other concern. 

Now there’s a cheery thought.

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July 4, 2025

33:64 presents “Harold Wilson.”

For quite a while I used to feel almost sorry for Boris’s Johnson. Everything he’d ever done in his life was in the ruthless pursuit of one day becoming PM. The irony was so blatant it was absurd. For someone who loved dropping Latin phrases into conversation, his story was a tragedy worth of Seneca. When, after all the years of philandering, lying, resignations, treachery and backstabbings, he finally achieved his goal, it was at the worst time in post war British political history.

The Brexit deal was yet to be done and the EU were being all EU about it. The angry divisions in Parliament were matched only by those in the country. Everyone felt betrayed. The press was hostile. The Supreme Court got involved.  And to cap it off, he lied to the Queen.

Yet somehow, he still managed to win the 2019 general election with an 80 seat majority. Brexit hadn’t been done yet but there was renewed vigour, a feeling of a corner having been turned. It was all going to be alright. Phew! It was getting all a bit squeaky-bum time there for, but onward and upwards towards those sunny uplands and….COVID?

What the fuck is COVID? Why has does some ‘flu in China mean we have to stay indoors? A year of this? Are you insane?And then when we think it’s all over, we’ll have to do it all over again? This time in the winter?  And it’ll push us to near bankruptcy as well? 

That why I almost felt sorry for him. He’d imagined being PM as one thing and it turned out not to be that thing at all. But whilst Brexit was a uniquely British thing, COVID very quickly became a global thing and for all the rights and wrongs regarding the government’s response to COVID, no-one said that it was their fault that COVID had happened in the first place.

So whilst I used to feel sorry for Boris’s Johnson, it is as nothing when compared to the nothing I feel for Stymied. The one year anniversary of his general election triumph must be tainted by the knowledge of what that year held in store. Because if the oft-quoted dictum is indeed true, and a week really is a long time in politics, then how much longer must a year feel? Especially given how, at the start of that year, Stymied was seen as all things to all men. Remember that? When the press and the public were united in their adoration of him. An adoration he earned by doing the bare minimum, which basically involved not saying or doing anything that might upset people and most importantly, not being Boris. That was it. Keep your head down and not be Boris. 

Unfortunately, when he did eventually have to raise his head during the election campaign, he neglected to raise his game as well. Or maybe he did, maybe that was him trying his level best, trying to be all dynamic, and not like the boring technocrat he really was. His performance during a live televised debate between himself and Prada was a shambles. Labour strategists must’ve been in tears. Stymied had the record of fourteen Tory years to throw at Prada, but unbelievably, he floundered and spluttered his way through it. The watching public must’ve thought, “Well at least he wasn’t lying, his dad really was a toolmaker.” 

The election campaign itself was basically one gigantic waste of time. The day it was announced, they could’ve held it and there’d have been no discernible difference in the outcome. Apart that is, from Reform UK springing up out of nowhere and having the audacity to win over 14% of the votes cast. That got them five MP’s. Even more outrageously, Labour got a smidge over 33% of the vote  which somehow got them 411 MP’s. But the important thing was that the grown-ups were finally back in the room. That seriously minded people were going to do seriously minded things and that Britain would be the better for it.

But then things started to wrong very quickly indeed, and as is the way with politics, when things go wrong they invariably create a domino effect, causing more things to go wrong. Whilst politicians can only ever react to events – and in the case of Stockport, it was the mass stabbing and murder of three children at a dance class and the subsequent rioting that escalated throughout the England  – it is up to politicians how they react to them. As I wrote at the time, no matter how distasteful the motivations, opinions and the sometimes violent means of expressing them the rioters used were to the new government, simply dismissing the rioters as ‘far-right’ negated any sensible discussion of any underlying causes.

Then the law got involved. The speed and severity with which rioters were treated was seen as disproportionate to their crimes, not least when compared to the more lenient sentences handed by the courts to arguably more violent offenders. Then problems with prison overcrowding meant that prisoners who were more of a threat to public safety were released early to make room for them. It emerged that one prisoner released early under the scheme was charged with sexual assault relating to an alleged offence against a woman on the same day he was freed. This in turn highlighted flaws in the probation service, whose job it was to monitor them.   

Quite aside from the most alarming and unexpected events that any politician has to deal with, it was the domestic events that seem to blindside him, even though these were of his own making. Having made much in the election campaign about how he wasn’t going to tax working people, he did what all new governments do, and blamed the last one for leaving the country finances in such a bad way that he had no choice but to. 

No matter the country had had a year of COVID, of a furlough scheme which meant no tax venue to pay for it and thus massive borrowing, the way Stymied would have us believe it, Boris’s Johnson had basically Johnson’d the money away.  This had created a £21.9 billion “black hole”, and because of this, certain winter fuel payments would be scrapped for around 10 million pensioners. The farmers inheritance tax protests and employers increase in National Insurance tax storms followed. More scandals engulfed him.

All of which culminated in a weird kind of buyers remorse. People felt cheated. This wasn’t what they’d voted for. Although as Labour only got 33% of the vote, meaning that more people didn’t bother to vote in the first place, it was difficult to feel much sympathy for their nonsense. But now, how people feel is a big thing in our society, and because of this, we live in age where if you feel unhappy about something you start a petition and if you tell people about it on social media, hopefully enough people sign it and something will be done about whatever it was that made people sign it in the first place.

Over three million fuckwits signed one demanding that a new election was held, and in so doing, highlighted one of the inherent problems with a functioning democracy. Namely, in order to be considered as such, its electorate should some level of basic understanding of how it works. And how a government is elected is about as fucking basic as it comes. Its not complicated.

But thats where Britain was at the end of 2024. With a public who thought our government was like a crisp manufacturer and that by signing a petition calling for a new election was no different to  one demanding that prawn cocktail Wotsits to be brought back. But this is a public addicted to social media, so used to sharing their thoughts and opinions, that they delude themselves into thinking that how they think or feel has greater worth than others who don’t think the same way. 

So it can’t have been too much of a surprise then for Stymied to discover that Corblimey had a special anniversary present for him. A parliamentary expression of the same way of thinking, as equally blinkered and dogmatic, of the most performative virtue of the age, the least virtuous of all the virtues that have infected peoples minds, opposition to the Israeli war in Gaza. Yes, he and co-leader Raisin might’ve thrown in the odd references about socialism, to benefit cuts, poverty and the disabled but it was all just blah, a smokescreen to conceal their true intent. 

Which is to pile on yet more troubles for Stymied, to weaken his position still further and to hasten the calls for him to go. With the year he’s had, one could hardly blame him if he did.

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May 23, 2025

34:63 presents “Mr. Kobayashi.”

All of the chatter last week about the assisted dying bill was concerned with MP’s voting for an amendment to give health workers an ‘opt out’, and a slew of measures that had been added ostensibly as ‘safeguarding’ vulnerable persons, to protect them from coercion. 

Because of this, one might be forgiven for thinking that this was a fine example of MP’s putting ‘country before party’ and voting on principle, that the grubby business of party politics had been temporarily suspended in pursuit of some notion of a  higher moral obligation. 

You’d be wrong though.  

To understand why, first of all you need to question who exactly it is those MP’s were so keen to safeguard and then to ask yourself who are the vulnerable people at risk from coercion? It is never fully explained what safeguarding is, or what a vulnerable person is, is it? Not really. ‘Safeguarding’ and ‘vulnerable people’ have, in regard to having any meaning within the whole assisted dying debate are as meaningful as calling a trans-woman a woman.

Where is any there notion of safeguarding the public purse in all this, of putting economic probity first, of safeguarding all the other public services that would face ever more drastic cuts to help pay for an increasingly ageing population? According to the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), whereas today 18% of the population is over the age of 65, by 2065 they predict it will be 26%. It gets worse because whilst 26% of people will be over 65, an additional 15% of them will be under 16. Thats nearly half of all the UK’s population not paying tax, but still expecting the state to provide for them. Granted, eventually the young might become taxpayers, but by then quite a lot of them them will be working in the kind of low-wage job that requires government bailouts – working tax credits, housing benefit and the like – to avoid even more government help.

It’s all a vicious circle, and part of the blame lies with the NHS. Yes the NHS, so beloved by, well everyone, being as it is an institution that occupies such a unique place in our collective psyche that a segment extolling it was included in the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. Because all of its various health initiatives – to help people to stop smoking, improved detection leading to better survival rates for heart disease, cancers and other previously life ending conditions for example – have been too successful. 

So successful in fact, that of the 26% of the population that will be aged over 65 by 2065, the that the Office for National Statistics estimates that by 2045 there will be 3.1 million of them or 4.3% of the population will be older than 85. So to my way of thinking, anyone over the age of 85 who is claiming a state pension is guilty of benefit fraud. It may well be through no fault of their own, but they’re still claiming a benefit to which they’re not entitled.

To misquote Mr Kobayashi in ‘The Usual Suspects’, the fact that they were unaware that they were committing fraud is no excuse.  When the current crop of pensioners – those over 80 I’m talking about here – were adults of working age and paid tax, successive governments had a realistic expectation that their time as a pensioner might last for maybe 15 years or so. Wasn’t that the deal with state pensions, that when they were of working age, the they tax paid then paid for pensioners pensions then?

The pension bill is only going to increase, whilst at the same time the umber of people paying that bill is decreasing. It is a state of affairs that is as unaffordable as it is unconscionable. Adult social care alone cost £26.9 billion in 2021/22, up 3.8% from 2020/21 and according to the OBR, pensions will account for 42% of the welfare budget this year, that’s £124 billion, the largest single expenditure – more than we spend on defence, transport and education combined. And those numbers are only going to get bigger.

Thats why the Assisted Dying Bill is hopefully a much needed first step towards state sponsored euthanasia. And just because people find something distasteful to even to contemplate, doesn’t make any the less urgent. If anything, the fact that people do find the subject of euthanasia, or assisted dying a topic they’d much rather avoid altogether is precisely the reason why it has become so urgent.

The government could offer pensioners upon retirement a deal, a lump sum equal to the value of their pension for 15 years – that’s the state sponsored bit – in return for a guaranteed undertaking for voluntary euthanasia on their part. 15 years seems about enough time for people to pit all their affairs in order, take all the holidays they’d never had and generally depart with dignity. Of course, when the 15 years had elapsed they could renege on their part of the deal, of corse they could, but that would mean an immediate termination of any governmental – local or central – responsibility for them. 

And of course the financial benefits to society would be worth it. In addition to the savings garnered from a reduced welfare budget, the savings to the NHS, and local authorities, if people knew what the deal was, then the money invested in private pensions – estimated to be £112 billion in 2021 by the Institute for Fiscal Studies – quite a bit of that might be ploughed back into the economy. It would also help the NHS. There’d also be a societal benefit. In the housing sector, as more stock became available, house prices and rents would fall. Employment too. There’d be a huge swathe of jobs that were no longer needed, thereby creating new employment opportunities

We urgently need our politicians to do the leading part of leadership, as opposed to them being constantly fixated on what the media or the public think and constantly aware of their ow career. Of course MP’s have a idea of themselves as being all kinds of wonderful to everyone – after all being an MP means they have to take part in a popularity contest every five years – but unfortunately for them, economic reality makes their ideals unaffordable. Its those ideals that are actually coercing millions into hardship, creating the vulnerable they seem so concerned with protecting and plunging the country state ever closer to civil unrest. Generational inequality is not something that can be ignored for much longer.

Tough choices should mean exactly that, because otherwise they’ll only get tougher.

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May 3, 2025

34:63 presents “Asterix”

I must confess to feeling slightly disappointed upon waking this morning to discover that the sky hadn’t fallen in. Because yesterday, the media were full of either grim pronouncements or jubilant celebrations about exactly what Reforms UK’s performance in Thursdays elections meant for the future of British politics.

Brexit, as it is for most things nowadays, was involved, being the catalyst that lay behind this wholly predictable, and indeed, widely predicted drubbing. Indeed, in all the coverage I’ve read, what is striking is just how much opinions are shaped by Brexit. In a tangential yet unremarked way, Brexit was but a symptom of a greater, more fundamental problem confronting democracy, not just in the UK, but elsewhere. One that moreover, has the capacity to fatally undermine it by using its own inherent flaws to achieve this, voter turnout, or more accurately, voter absence.

In all of the mayoral elections contested on Thursday, not one of them had a voter turnout of more than 34% and neither of the ones that elected Reform UK mayors managed even 30%. Why no media attention is being given to this problem is beyond me, especially as a little over a year ago the dangers were revealed to exist. 

Remember George Galloway’s campaign in the Rochdale by-election last year? Where he made it clear from the outset that he was targeting the Muslim community in Rochdale – 30% of its population – and instead of focusing on local or even national issues, but rather on Israel/Gaza? It was an act of effectively strategic masterstroke, resulting him getting 40% of all the votes cast, which sounds impressive, until you realise only 39.7% of voters actually bothered to. And then suddenly that 40% seems even less impressive, especially when you realise that that once impressive 40% translates into 12,335 actual votes.

This trick – targeting a specific community and focusing on an issue not directly related to their daily lives – was repeated a few months later at the 2024 general election. Whilst George Galloway wasn’t re-elected, five candidates were, all pandering to concerns of a minority but crucially, a minority who turned out to vote. Together with Jeremy Corblimey, they formed the Independent  Alliance and their ranks could easily have been increased to nine, because three candidates,  standing on a similar platform were narrowly defeated.

It isn’t that surprising that Labour is so quiet on this issue – low voter turnout – because it suited them very well at the 2024 general election. Despite the fact there was a load of guff in some of the media about how constituency boundary changes and the need for voter I.D would work against Labour, like so much political speculation, that didn’t happen. Voter turnout  was about 60%, and despite Labour getting a lower share of that, 34%, somehow they got 412 seats or 63% of them. 

Some awfully clever people have worked out that the you take into account the number that did vote for them, the number that didn’t and the number of people who could have voted but chose not to, combine all of that and only 20% of the UK electorate did so. Of course the media are predicting all manner of things, because that’s what the media do. Political forecasting is as good at predicting the future as reading tea-leaves, checking ones horoscope or listening to a clairvoyant.

Its much easier than them questioning why this keeps happening, why political parties have consistently failed to engage with voters the way seem all to happy to do with lobbyists. And by not doing this, they’re not only perpetuating the problem, they’re failing to do their job. Nearly as much as the politicians.

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