As Politico notes in an email this morning:
Starmer is visiting troops on the HMS Prince of Wales naval flagship [this morning] before it sets off on an eight-month voyage to the Indo-Pacific.
4.8 million children in poverty, and we're still pretending we have an Eastern Empire.
What sort of insanity is this?
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“What sort of insanity is this?” The cognitive dissonance sort.
Starme/McSweeney-Todd & all the other junveniles in LINO have made the political calculation = these children’s parents are unable to vote (due to Tory ID requirements) and thus don’t count. & thus can be ignored.
Obvs big useless naval vessels are a diff matter & everybody loves a salior – No?
& there is NO political party willing or able to shame the LINOites on this.
Thank you, Richard.
I don’t disagree, but wish to put some context.
Britain needs to make itself relevant / useful to the biggest bully on the planet, especially outside the EU. This predates Trump as Johnson sent the sister QE II there in 2022 when Biden was president.
Most of the ships on that QE II expedition were not from the Royal Navy. Some of the Royal Navy ships broke down as they are designed to operate in the North Atlantic and Arctic, not the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Fisheries patrol vessels, sic, were sent to replace. Most of the aircraft on the QE II were American. One F35 crashed on take off.
Britain is a sick joke, but that does not matter as Starmer and his gang will make money soon.
It’s the continuing delusion of the political class. Who do they think they are fooling? It’s a variation on the notion that somehow we have taken back control by leaving the EU and we are now a buccaneering nation on the high seas of global free trade. Its’ about time that Farage, Frost, Johnson and Gove (and many more) we forced to explain how kissing Trump’s ass for a “great trade deal” equates with having ‘taken back control’. Unsurprisingly, Starmer seems only too willing to plough that same furrow now. Why?
Thank you, Martin.
I don’t disagree, but caution that it’s not Trump. The political elite got us into scrapes when Reagan (Libya and Lebanon), George Bush I and II (Iraq), and Obama (Libya) were in charge. We need to get over the Trump Derangement Syndrome and see the rapacious and imperialist US elite as a problem.
Aurelien was a UK government official in the former Yugoslavia and recalls how rival factions and NGOs in the Clinton administration made the war more violent and longer.
With regard to Brexit, Johnson ordered Royal Navy ships to be painted in camouflage soon after, pretending that it was the EU preventing that.
That is not the first time I have heard of NGOs and the U.S. government exacerbating what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and I don’t think it will be the last.
Another area BTW that could blow up at anytime – I worry that Putin knows this only too well.
Had he been at the dressing up box before he went?
They do so love an opportunity to dress up, don’t they?
Did Starmer dress up in the novelty outfit ‘Prime Minister’, as a change from his normal outfit of corporate shill?
If anything reifies that we are living in a world created by the rich it is things like this. Evoking the days of the Raj – project, project ever outwards, and let the innards rot.
Starmer is British capital’s envoy – he’s taking care of business – which is not about the hungry children and cold pensioners. Will his voyage be on Putin’s yacht – one of them? So whose in charge then? Mc Sweeney? Peter M?
Eight months? Is that enough time for a progressive coup? I’ve always been a dreamer…………………
I think McSweeney is in charge. I was with some good friends yesterday who still have the misfortune to be Labour members, as they are councillors.
I was very much left with the impression that everything is tightly controlled from the top, and the top isn’t Keir Starmer.
I can’t recall a previous version of the Labour Party chucking out the former leader and shadow Chancellor for being too left wing.
It takes a certain level of paranoia, ruthlessness or incompetent insecurity, to feel that deposing Corbyn and his Chancellor by means of a very dirty coup, was not enough. They got the leadership, they got a huge majority, but rather than GOVERN – they focussed their energies on authoritarian CONTROL, they had to drive Corbyn out the party completely, and then withfraw the whip from McDonnell, for daring to bother about child poverty.
But am I surprised? No, that was the party HQ doing what it did best.
Now they are in office, and they haven’t got a clue what to do with the opportunity they have been handed by an unprecedented Tory meltdown, to make the world a slightly better place. Because that was never part of the plan anyway. They have no vision, McSweeney never did have a vision, at least not one he has ever shared with the country. (and “where there is no vision the people perish” Proverbs 29.18).
Any Labour MPs reading this, you can change things, right now. Tell the Chief Whip to stick his threats where the sun doesn’t shine. There’s over 400 of you for goodness sake. His future is in YOUR hands, not the other way round. Start with the 2 child benefit cap, and a simple amendment to scrap it. The economy will hardly notice (but some lives will be saved and many others will be kept from or released from poverty).
“What did YOU do to stop the fascists Daddy?”
“Well, I just kept my head down, darling, and obeyed orders. That’s how I got my peerage and this nice house and my position on the Board. We did THINK about rebelling, but quite frankly, we didn’t have the bottle. It did cost lives, and that horrible Mr. Fa***e won the 2029 election, but really, there was nothing we could do. You must see that….”
Quite so
Thank you, Richard.
My parents and I are chuckling.
Dad joined the RAF in December 1964, having arrived from Mauritius in May 1964. He served east of Suez, Aden and Gan / Maldives. In 1982, mum, my late and younger brother and I waved him off with the task force.
We laugh at chicken hawks.
🙂
We have a lot in common?
My dad did RAF WW2 finishing in India, Borneo, (his real war, the post ww2 battles about broken British promises), Ceylon (1951 – RAF Colombo) then home, incl. Northern Ireland (late 50s) and Aden 1963 (where I got a tour of an aircraft carrier at sea, Hermes or Victorious I’m not sure which.)
Unlike Starmer, we knew the empire was OVER.
The illusion that Britannia Rules the Waves is a hard one to shake off, and it’s still evident in the flag-waving inanity at the last night of the Proms, despite nobody in the UK having living memories of our imperial glory.
Waiving the Rules, more like it, another great British tradition.
Thank you and well said, Helen.
I used to think that it was good that embassies (often) and the likes of the Foreign Office and Treasury* and Bank of England are housed in rather grand buildings.
I increasingly think that the buildings encourage delusions of grandeur abroad and a know it all and imperious culture at home.
(Lord) Paul Myners, who like me worked at NatWest, came to that conclusion years ago.
*I also think the Treasury should be broken into three, finance / budget, economy and economic development. I increasingly think the title of chancellor should be abolished for the above reasons.
I agree with your last.
I agree with all. Start the return to service and humility of governance being reflected in its buildings with the dismantling of Stormont Castle in Belfast. A pompous, arrogant bully of a building atop a hill looking down on all around it. I have long since lost my initial awe of its disproportionate grandiosity since its inhabitants seem to only ever politically mimick its architectural structure.
Do you think the ship will manage to get there and back without breaking down?
No, of course not.
It will spend monghs in an Indian dry dock, if it gets tht far.
India has the largest shipbreaking yard in the world (more a vast polluted beachfront). Nice to know that it’s there if (when?) the giant floating waste of space croaks for the final time.
I understand that there are issues with the propeller shafts in the carriers
The maths for setting them up are not, so I am told not complex BUT we dont build enough ships to get it right
(Stay off model railway forums where it is all explained)
Its not as bad as the Admiral Kuznetzov though – the Russian carrier – turbo compressor boilers anyone (AARGH!) which doesnt go anywhere without a cloud of black smoke and a tug – even the lavvies dont work.
The Chinese however seem to have got the ‘Kuzetznov’ they bought from the Russians to work properly
I don’t know if my comment is relevant to the present discussion, but here goes!.
Taking a brief break from my ‘day job’ of ‘feeding the nation’ as a sheep farmer-yay I saved a lamb!
I decided to watch a You Tube talk between Yanis Varoufakis and Jeffery Sachs, both commentators I have admired for a long time and I am sure many of your blog followers do?
It was long …..and of course many of their conclusions may not meet with your approval, but I do believe that their pragmatic analysis of many of the problems that we face should be met with a considered discussion.
I do not have time for long discussions, to be honest