Starmer Suicide or Calculation?
Apparently Obsession With Reform May Be a Tactical Gamble
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Starmer’s worst own goal to date. That’s the Telegraph’s verdict on Two-Tier’s Reform-obsessed speech at the end of what was probably his first and last speech as party leader and Prime Minister.
“Presented with a free shot at selling his vision of a better Britain, he instead chose to poke the ball into his own net by opting to take up his time talking about Nigel Farage,” wrote the paper’s Associate Editor.
With Starmer and various other senior Labour figures repeatedly sending the message that they regard millions of ordinary voters as ‘racists’ and ‘the enemy’, they immediately compounded the damage by displaying the extraordinary degree to which Nigel Farage is living rent free in their otherwise rather empty heads.
David Lammy’s utterly ridiculous claim that Farage had “flirted with the Hitler Youth” when a schoolboy in the 1970s was the worst example of this obsession, but he was only following Two-Tier’s lead. Between them, they managed to turn the Labour conference into a giant promotional plug for Nigel Farage and Reform.
If there were any voters who still didn’t know that the best way to take revenge on the political elite in general, and Labour in particular, for everything they’ve done to ruin our country and to marginalise us, they certainly know now.
The Mail, Express and Sun, the BBC and even Sky all watched with the same morbid fascination. Even the Guardian thought that perhaps it was all somewhat unhinged. Only the faithful, moronic Daily Mirror stuck to the Labour party line that the spectacle showed a Labour party under the control of a leadership with a plan. Other than that, there is general agreement that it was one of the most disastrous, if not downright suicidal, ruling part conferences ever.
That was my first feeling too, and I still think that, in the end, that will be how it will be regarded in political history. But, having thought about it carefully, I do suspect that there was at least attempted method in their apparent madness.
You see, I’m an old-hand observer, and I’ve seen these sort of tricks played before.
Way back in the summer of 1973, the death of the Tory MP for Ely caused a by-election in the Fenland constituency. It was less than two hours from my home so, as a committed and experienced Conservative campaign worker, my father volunteered to go over for a day’s campaigning.
I went with him, and we were given a bundle of leaflets, a local map with a few streets marked in red, and told to get on with it. The job – which even at that age I knew was not the stuff of a serious campaign – was soon done and we returned to the constituency office. My father collared the campaign manager and quizzed him about the campaign.
The more he heard, the more agitated he became and, for most of the journey home, he returned over and over again to the fact that the campaign was a shambles, woefully inadequate and tantamount to handing the Liberals an important by-election on a plate.
The following day, my father phoned the Ely headquarters to reinforce his compliant, while also kicking up a fuss with the head of our local constituency association and MP. After which he in turn got a phone call. It was from a big-wig from the Eastern Region, who told him that he understood his concern, but that he and the party would be very much obliged if he would kindly drop the whole thing.
The reasoning was simple: A General Election was quite likely to be held the following year (which, in fact, saw two, as Ted Heath lost control) and, if the Liberals were to go into it with an extra bounce and credibility as a result of an unexpected by-election victory in Conservative Ely, then they would inevitably split the anti-Tory vote in many constituencies. Which, clearly, would be to be benefit of the Tories. The by-election in Ely was therefore being deliberately thrown, a sacrificial pawn in the overall game.
Fast forward to the Labour conference this week. Labour’s (and it most definitely would not have been solely Starmer’s) decision to focus so heavily on Reform could very well have been not a sign of madness born of desperation, but of a similarly cold and cynical calculation.
For all that Reform is also taking Labour votes and seats, it is a party of the ‘right’. By boosting its credibility, Labour therefore splits the right-wing vote. Tactical voting may limit the impact of this when it comes to helping Labour but, overall, such a split will benefit the parties of the left collectively.
Labour know full well that their chances of winning the next General Election are almost non-existent, but for their rump to be able to slip back into government as part of a left-of-centre coalition would be a consolation prize. And one which would keep the overall cultural Marxist revolution rolling along.
There’s more, too: By boosting Farage and Co., Labour will push the Tories to the right. That in turn gives the parties of the left more potential support in the centre ground. And an increased threat to Reform from the Tories is liable to make Reform shift towards them, potentially forcing some harder right voters to the very reasonable conclusion that Farage is just another shape-shifting politician and that they may as well stay at home.
Then there’s the impact on Labour’s real base: Its Union financiers, its own activists, hard-left voters and immigrant communities. Making the next election a contest between Labour and “not-far-from-fascist” Reform is the only shot left in Labour’s locker to get them all back onside, and to persuade them to throw their weight into the campaign. These are Labour’s birds, and Farage is the ideal scarecrow.
Labour know that their election machine is way ahead of that of the Tories, and miles better than the pitifully amateurish operation being cobbled together by Reform. Their problem is motivating their workers and herding their voters. And Nigel is the man to do it!
Labour played this trick repeatedly back in BNP days, and it worked repeatedly, pulling in millions of pounds of extra funding and untold extra man-hours from grass-roots activists. We saw it particularly strongly in Barking and Dagenham, where our outgunned, outsider challenge was used to leverage Labour support across all the neighbouring seats as well. No matter how angry they were over New Labour for Iraq and all the rest, when there was a serious “fascist” threat, they all came obediently back into line.
If this is what is behind Starmer’s superficially crazy Conference speech, the Labour calculation will also be that the closer Reform get to being the next government, the more their policies, and potential MPs and Ministers, will come under scrutiny. That won’t push their potential voters back to Labour, but they can realistically hope that it will help the Conservatives to claw back some of their support, this helping to deliver a heavily split ‘right-wing’ vote rather than the Reform landslide predicted by the polls at present.
All in all, then, I believe it entirely possible, if not probable, that the Labour leadership’s apparent obsession with Reform is simply a re-run of an old trick; one which worked for them in the first part of the last decade. That being the case, then even when their conference turns out in the next week or so to have boosted Farage even further, they will keep on playing. This is not madness; it’s a calculated risk.
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As such, of course, there is a chance that it is a miscalculation. But I’m not necessarily saying that it will work, I’ve merely told you what I think they’re doing and why. I might be wrong, of course, it may all simply be blind panic, the result of politically incontinent group think by mediocrities fuelled by coke and out of touch arrogance.
If it does turn out to be a miscalculation, then it could be a very big one. There is one particular danger’ one which, once again, personal experience bears out. Back in the early 2000s, when we were knocking doors in target wards all over England, we found that the most common reason for hostility to us wasn’t the fact that we were BNP, but that we were politicians.
You’re all the same. Only in it for yourselves. I wouldn’t p*ss on any of you if you were on fire” was the general tone from such people. But as the years went on, building up to our – under the circumstances – massive breakthroughs in 2008 and 2009, we encountered this less and less. What was happening was simple: The more the other parties hurled abuse at us, the more people decide that perhaps, just perhaps, we really were different.
Further, if the others hated us that much, voting BNP was the best way to make them sit up and listen, and stop taking the electorate for granted.
At the last General Election, some 40% of the entire registered electorate failed to vote. Perhaps half of them are now too dumbed-down or low-bred ever to bother, but the other half are different. They’ve given up voting because they hate what Lib-Lab-Con have done to our country. If Reform strikes them as a good way to hit back, they are liable to turn up to vote in droves. That would be an extra 20%, on top of the huge piles of votes they’re going to be taking off Labour and the Tories. Which would give Nigel Farage a landslide.
I reiterate, I’m not saying that would be a good thing, or that it would change very much. But it does have a bearing on what genuine nationalists need to be doing while we wait to find out. Watch this space…..
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