Labour put this Tweet out yesterday:
This is way below the belt.
Politicians do not sentence criminals, as Keir Starmer should know.
They do not even bring cases to court, as Keir Starmer should know.
And the provisions for sending abusers to prison for up to 14 years do exist, and have for a long time, as Keir Starmer should know. If they are not used we have to assume judges do not use them for good reason. As Keir Starmer should know.
So what is this advert all about? It is about making the victims of abuse the plaything of politicians. And that is utterly unacceptable. Just as it is unacceptable to suggest Tories control the courts.
Labour should be ashamed of itself. This attack advert is playing in the gutter.
Some of the best advice I ever got was that I should not ever fight a pig. I would only get muddy, and the pig would enjoy it. The inference was 'do not descend to the gutter'.
Labour clearly has not heard or taken heed of that advice. They would be wise to do so and never go near such base messaging again.
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Never acceptable.
Johnson and the Tory press have spent years trying to smear Starmer with similar lies. Lies continued by Sunak. Attempting to fight evil with evil is always a desperately dangerous tactic.
Now whenever anybody complains the Tories will use this advert as a ready made justification.
However, as the Trump presidency and his all too nearly successful attempted coup demonstrated to Democrats and Non-fascists everywhere turning the other cheek to vicious lying abuse can have near fatal consequences.
Never fight a pig, or more brutally perhaps, never get in a pissing contest with a skunk. Starmer is now even more of a flag shagger than the rest of the Tory front bench. I can never vote for him.
Well said.
This is pure fascist technology at work isn’t it?
Obviously, the reason (perhaps) there have been so few convictions might have more to do with Tory austerity than the law or policy. The courts /legal system have backlogs at the moment and pay crisis all of their own like many public services.
But Labour chooses not to fight austerity and just goes around it and goes for the ‘everyone hates paedophiles’ trope instead – appealing to our emotions.
I’m not saying its wrong to be angry at child abuse, but I’m afraid it just leaves the notion of austerity totally intact. And therefore nothing fundamentally changes.
Oh, the cunning of unreason.
Agreed re austerity
Labour might as well call itself a “justice party”. That it believes that it should be the administer of justice and not be the one who creates the law which it thinks is best for society.
Completely agree.
We use have a magistrate come into my school to talk to Year 11 about the law, as part of their social education program.
He was asked about a case in the papers where someone seemed to have ‘got off’ for a serious offence.
He gave a broad reply explaining about newspapers wanting to sell outrage, technical guilty, intention etc but the summary was ….you have to have heard all the evidence , to have been in the court, to form a proper conclusion.
Magistrates run an excellent outreach exercise where JPs (who volunteer for Magistrates in the Community, as they volunteer to be magistrates in the first place) go to junior schools to explain to the children how the court system works. They do it by enacting a trial, with the children taking a variety of roles in the little drama. It is very effective. Of course, one of the coalition and succeeding Tory governments’ indefensible policies greatly reduced the number of magistrates’ courts in England, damaging the principle of local justice profoundly. They also increased the number of state paid District Justices (available to be given the touchy political cases, like that of Julian Assange) and their “reforms” made the recruitment of voluntary lay magistrates very challenging. Then of course there was the shredding of legal aid, denying access to equal justice (one of the pillars of the Welfare State) to the majority of the population.
The point of that last being to facilitate the erosion of social security by denying legal aid to those suffering due to the doing away of established benefits and the introduction of new ones like UC and PIP. The reasoning was, I believe, that since all existing case law was relevant to the old benefits it was all now rendered irrelevant and long-established legal precedents would have to be fought and established through the courts all over again, this time without the benefit of legal aid to help. The longer term view presumably being if benefits could be made impossible to claim it would herd society into the gaping maw of the private insurance industry. I recall the names Duncan Smith, Grayling and Lord Freud being mentioned in this lamentable context.
I am ashamed to be a member of such I party – I will contact them immediately to protest….. but will they listen?
BTW. My father gave similar advice…. but it was about chimney sweeps rather than pigs… but I got the idea.
I have just left, the party seems irredeemable to me. Sadly.
Has the Labour Party ever been more right wing than it is today?
Probably not since Ramsey MacDonald led his caucus into coalition with Baldwin’s Tories. Ideologically, there’s nothing between the two parties. Who can appear more patriotic? Who will be firmer on crime? The level of political discourse is at an all time low, despite your best efforts, Richard.
As you have said before, Labour no longer represents working class voters and pretty much any normal rate taxpayer, or the less well off.
They are fighting on a Tory agenda and the effect of this will likely be that people will stick with voting Tory.
We had a credible alternative in Scotland for a short while, but Sturgeon and her cronies fouled thst up. I do hope their demise removes a massive obstacle to independence.
Richard, I feel you pain; but the gutter to which you refer is the playing field of British politics. There are no mirrors in British politics; nobody dare look into them. We are still incapable of addressing the nature of our own history; notably the sentral place of slavery in the British Empire’s growth and development (an area I am researching).
We have created a fiction about ourselves that the whole world can see through; but we dare not admit to ourselves. Hence we live in a political fantasy, run by those most able at disortion; most able to deliver, unblinking the bland lie; a world that is so preposterous, it makes the politics of Rufus T Firefly plausible; “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.” (attributed to Groucho Marx, the prophetic Machiavelli for our own age).
The prisons are full
The detention centres are full
Hotels are full
None of the big parties have ideas to deal with this
The smaller parties do have ideas to deal with this, but get called fascists as if that shuts the issue and means the big parties don’t have to do any work coming up with better ideas such as making us more free.
We are doomed I tell ya.
Labour cannot attack the austerity because they have no answer to it
The Liberal Democrats do well in Portsmouth, but not well nationally. It’s a Tory/Lib occupancy in a generally conservative vote. Are we conservative? Yes I believe we are. However, I believe, the next ten years there will be change and I’m not sure for the good? Things and everything look pretty shit!
My personal belief is, that only revolution will change the status quo and all the cards are collapsing.
I’m also a half glass full, so let those cards collapse. God help us all.
richard, as there is an answer to austerity, why don’t Labour have one? It isn’t rocket science, as it were.
The current Labour leadership are ideologically neoliberal.
They are not looking for an alternative to austerity. They believe in it.
Worst fears realized.
As people here say – so much to attack – the real cause of all these failures – undermining and defunding all public services including the courts.
Probably reason they don’t address this, is they have no idea how to restore public services and in particular how to ‘fund it’, and don’t want to find out.
Who on earth is running their ‘comms’? None of the front bench seem to have any feel for how to communicate in a politically effective way. And they daren’t admit they might have put a foot wrong under god Starmer.
But this suggests it’s even worse than that – as some on here say – they are prepared to compete for the quasi -fascist vote – anything to avoid saying how the Tories have undermined and defunded our democracy – and how they will put it right.
If I was in the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, I would contact the General Secretary of the Labour Party and ask for this poster to be withdrawn, making no other demands or threats.
And then if it was still up after 96 hours, I would resign from the Labour Party and explain why.
Liebore has plenty of other targets it could have picked – “Enjoy swimming with turds in the sea or our rivers? – vote Tory” Of course this would then beg the question: so what is Liebore going to do about it (short answer: nothing). The ad carries no financial costs, it does not cause voters to ask “how to pay” & of course Libeore has no answer to the “how to pay” question on any subject that requires gov spending.
The issue of course as the Secret Barrister will point out is that The Courts have to apply The Law, and if it says that The Defendant should not go to prison then je or she doesn’t.
Simon Jenkins in The Guardian points out that we have an obsession with prison while Nick Pettigrew in this book and Byline Times
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50705512
Has a lot to say about offending and what might reduce it
It is, of course, disgraceful and the crassness almost hurts. But it is also teeth-grindingly, toe-curling, chew-the-carpet stupid. There are so many reasons why this will backfire that it makes me dizzy. How many hands did this pass through before it was made public, and it seems no-one asked: “Hang on, is this a good idea? What could go wrong?”.
Catastrophic on so many levels.
I imagine for the current Labour front bench this doesn’t feel like the gutter, more like a routine day at the office. For them this isn’t any kind of descent into low politics, it’s just the way they typically are. I can’t see myself ever voting again, not at this rate.
if there was one area that people would tend to have given Starmer some credit for, it would be for having some sense of decency. This kind of behaviour really damages that strength. Who ever came up with the idea should be sacked from Labour.
The last thing Labour should be doing is fighting on the Tory’s ground and descending to their sordid level.
At first I assumed that this would be taken down and Labour would explain that an individual posted this and this isn’t the view of the party itself, and the individual has been spoken to. However, Owen Jones tweeted several members of the shadow cabinet have retweeted or supported this. I haven’t checked this but I will take his word for it. It hasn’t been take down after 23 hours as I write this, which means that Starmer personally supports this message, because if he didn’t it would not still be up.
A few days ago Suella Braverman claimed (falsely) that most grooming gangs who groom young girls for sexual abuse are made up of Pakistani-heritage men. Now, only a few days later, Labour claims that Sunak, who has Indian and Pakistani heritage, supports those who perpetrate such sexual abuse. This is not a coincidence.
The poisonous and racist nature of this ad has been covered elsewhere so I won’t add to that, but what I believe also needs to be emphasised is what it tells us about the Labour leadership’s views on the separation of powers between the executive, legislature, and judiciary, which are necessary to maintain democracy and prevent the executive from gaining too much power. The implication of this tweet is that the Prime Minister should be able to direct judges in what sentences they pass, or more broadly to direct the judiciary in its duties. One of the characteristics of authoritarian rulers is the executive taking some control of the judiciary, as we are currently seeing in Israel, Hungary, and Poland, among others, and as we have seen throughout history, with the terrifying consequences that arise from this.
We have already seen Starmer taking this approach in his own party with regards to Corbyn’s statement on the EHRC report. Most of Corbyn’s statement has been forgotten – he called antisemitism abhorrent, condemned antisemitism in the Labour party, expressed regret at not doing more to deal with it when he was leader, and supported the recommendations of the report – but his line that antisemitism within the party was “dramatically overstated for political reasons” was condemned despite being a statement of fact – in 2019 there were journalists saying a Labour government would want to reopen concentration camps, so if Starmer doesn’t think that was an overstatement he needs to explain why (what’s also forgotten is that the point Corbyn was making about antisemitism being overstated was that it was harmful to Jewish people and that was why it was important for it to be stopped). A complaint was made and Corbyn was found to have done nothing wrong. One of the complaints of the EHRC report was interference by the leadership in disciplinary matters (as it happened Corbyn’s leadership did interfere in the disciplinary process but only to try to make it go faster). However, despite Corbyn being cleared, Starmer decided that his leadership should do the opposite of what the EHRC report recommended and interfere in the disciplinary process by excluded Corbyn from the PLP. This was widely praised in the media and very few seemed to care that the party leadership was interfering in the “judiciary” of the party, despite what this told us about how he would act in government.
We also see Starmer’s view on executive control of the legislature in his actions towards his party. Starmer campaigned to become leader by promising that the NEC would not impose candidates on local parties and that local parties should choose their candidate, but now we are seeing exactly that with a purge of left-wing potential candidates. In other words, the Labour leadership is selecting what could be the legislature of this country to be a cohort of yes-men and yes-women with a narrow set of views and fielty to the leadership, who are selected by overriding the democratic wishes of the party.
We also saw something similar with the leadership’s actions for the NEC, which in some senses is the “legislature” of the Labour party. Last year Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, a left-wing Jewish woman, was elected to the NEC. She was then suspended and then expelled from the party on her 70th birthday in order to prevent her taking her place on the NEC. The main story is that the Labour right claimed that by electing a Jewish woman to the NEC the left showed they were not serious about dealing with antisemitism, but the right showed how tough they are with dealing with antisemitism by suspending and then expelling this Jewish woman in order to prevent her place on the NEC, to which she had been democratically elected. However, it also shows the leadership is happy to enforce its will onto the Labour “legislature”, as it did when Starmer changed the rules for election to the NEC in order to make it harder for those on the left to get elected (Wimborne-Idrissi has appealed her expulsion, but given that many expelled Jewish members have been waiting over a year to hear back about their appeal I wouldn’t expect much to happen there any time soon).
The Labour party rules state that union-backed candidates are automatically put onto the long list to potentially be selected to stand to be an MP, but the leadership is going against its own rules by excluding union choices. Again, almost no one seems to care what it tells us about the leadership that it is willing to break the party rules to give itself more power, and what this tells us about how it would act in government.
One of the fundamental characteristics of a democratic government that contrasts with authoritarian regimes is the separation of powers between the executive, legislature, and judiciary, and so I am deeply concerned about how the current Labour leadership is revealing its authoritarian intentions for the executive to breach these separations.
We saw the leadership’s authoritarian tendencies early on when local party branches were banned from criticising Starmer, leading to the comical situation where some felt the only action they could take was to put forward a motion of confidence in Starmer and then vote overwhelmingly against it, because even Starmer couldn’t come up with a reason why party branches should not be allowed to put forward motions of confidence in him. A few weeks ago we saw a Holocaust survivor and Labour member, Stephen Kapos, told that if he went through with his plans to give a talk about the Holocaust on Holocaust Memorial Day then he would be expelled from the party (which caused him to resign from the party and accuse the leadership of “McCarthyism”). Jewish members have in some instances been barred from talking about antisemitism or their support for Corbyn at branch meetings on the grounds that it would make the party unwelcome to Jewish members. We now have some left-wing Jewish members who are frightened from attending local meetings because of the how their opinions are not permitted by the though police in the leadership. I find the leadership’s control of what people are allowed to have opinions on and what they are allowed to talk about scary.
And then the leadership have refused to follow the party membership in its support for proportional representation, which shows they are against democracy both in their own party and in the country. Lies also greatly damage democracy, something which the leadership does not appreciate, as they erode the legitimacy of democratic institutions and disenfranchise voters, yet it was considered good politics for Starmer to lie to tens of thousands of leftwing members to get their votes and then dump his pledges and try to force them out of the party. Hardly anyone seemed to care what his treatment of and lack of compassion for these tens of thousands of people showed us about how he would treat the people of this country if he becomes PM. We therefore have a leadership that believes the the executive should have increased power over the legislature and judiciary, doesn’t believe it should follow the rules, should be able to control what people can say, and is against democracy.
Richard, I’m sorry for writing what is by far the longest comment I have ever left on your site, and one covering some areas you are understandably reluctant to get involved with, but the Labour ad really bothered me and I am genuinely concerned about the increasing authoritarian tendencies of the current Labour leadership and what it would do if given control of the country, although I will understand if you choose not to post this comment. Of course a Labour government would be slightly less bad than a Tory one, but I have now reached the point where I see Starmer as a more dangerous Prime Minister than Sunak, and I do not say that lightly as I consider Sunak to be one of the people most responsible for giving the UK one of the worst pandemic responses in the Western world, with tens of thousands unnecessarily dead because of that response, and with hundreds still dying unnecessarily every week because of that response (although Starmer’s Covid policy going back to the start of the pandemic and his current almost non-existent Covid policy was and is almost as bad). I can only pray that we end up with Labour getting as few seats as possible while still being able to form a government, so that they are so weak they have to accede to Lib Dem demands to introduce PR in exchange for the Lib Dems putting them into government.
I agree: there are issues here I usually avoid.
But right now asking questions about Labour seems appropriate
I might not agree with all you say, but the idea that Labour is now corrupted is worthy of discussion.
This is a shocking bad advert and it is demeaning of Labour MPs to be forced to support it.
What would it take to get Starmer removed as leader? Perhaps the time has come (or will come) for a confidence motion that members would be encouraged to vote in favour of.
Interesting idea…
While I can see Labour ignoring all individuals who want to leave the party, I am surprised that any organisations have not voiced their displeasure, or disassociated themselves. The Co-op and the unions all seem happy to support new blue Labour.
That is very weird, I agree.
I assume the unions have been infiltrated in a similar manner to Labour.
What’s even worse is that Starmer is attacking the guidelines that he wrote when he was DPP.
If they were competent but cynical, I could just about understand this sort of behaviour (though I obviously couldn’t condone it).
However, they are managing to be both inept and cynical at the same time. How do they think this could possibly be an effective line of attack? It is just crass and will alienate more of their own voters than it could ever hope to bring on board.
A failure to win the next election outright should surely lead to the departure of Starmer but I’ve no faith that anybody with half a clue would be there to take over.
All the opposition needs at the moment is a basic level of competence, but that seems to be far beyond them.
Apparently Keir Starmer was influential on the committee that set the sentencing guidelines the exercise of which he is criticising, whilst he headed the Crown Prosecution Service (rather badly): https://skwawkbox.org/2023/04/07/starmers-child-abuse-sentencing-attack-explodes-in-his-face-he-wrote-the-sentencing-guidelines/
An ‘own goal’ in every way, but it is a shame he is taking the Labour Party down with him, as he utterly fails to offer meaningful opposition. Or is that his mission from his billionaire sponsors or his friends across the water?
I understand from various Red Wall family members that this ad is very popular in that constituency…..
Maybe Starmer sees himself as Judge, jury and executioner.
As well as being incorrect and offensive that poster is also bad politics. I am sure the retaliation will be crushing.
I was so horrified by this I did something I have never done before. I wrote to my (Labour) MP to complain. Hopefully many others will do the same.
Like Amy, I have just emailed Keir Starmer and my MP
Dear Keir Starmer,
Although I am a Labour Party member, there is no way I can support the party’s smearing of the Prime Minister over child abuse.
(1) There is zero evidence to suggest that the Prime Minister in any way condones child abuse. It is totally dishonest to suggest otherwise.
(2) Courts may sometimes get it wrong, but I have more faith in decisions based on the evidence heard, rather than bowing to vote-chasing politicians.
(3) The figure of 4,500 is completely meaningless. It does not indicate the proportion of cases where the offender was not imprisoned, which could be tiny. It does not indicate the time scale (indeed, you may have been Director of Public Prosecutions for part of the period). It says nothing about the cases that never make it to court.
Every week I hear this sort of misrepresentation from the Conservative Party. I am deeply saddened that Labour sees the need to descend to the same tactics.
Michael Green
Excellent