It is occasionally worth reminding oneself about promises made in the past and then forgotten.
These were the pledges made by Keir Starmer to become leader of the Labour Party:
What have we got?
None of those things.
We have, instead, a dying Labour Party superating the stench of rotteness from every one of its remaining pores.
Some legacy and proof that breaking promises can have consequences.
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My goodness. Thank you for dusting that off. Wouldn’t it be great to have PMs do an ‘exit interview’ where they are grilled on their broken promises? As it is, they just slope off through the revolving door…
I found The Spider’s Web on YouTube yesterday. Chilling. With reference to another of your posts today, talking about the four nations making up Britain, I thought “there is another, the city of London”. It really is a fiefdom of its own. It has a strong and malign influence on Britain and the world.
Thanks
Quite. If B.Liar (warmonger & bar) established the trajectory that LINO took over +/- 30 years, one could argue that Corbyn, tried to move the party back to something closer to the “Wilsonian” party that meant something to UK citizens. This was quite clearly unacceptable to part of the party hence events and the arrival of Starmer, his “promises” & the extripation of anybodty in the party that was in favour of “social democracy” & thus dissent.
The only place for Starmer (& McSweeney) now is a shared cell in the Hague. If the SNP wants to guarantee a landslide in May, a suggestion: commit to this: when Starmer crosses the border – have him arrested (assisting and abetting genocide) and shipped to the Hague. Apparently Starmer wants to campaign in Scotland to help Scottish LINO – demonstrating how utterly out of touch he is.
In a sentence, and simply put:
Starmer has sold out.
Those people, mainly Labour members, including myself, believed him. Why wouldn’t we?
I was warned by many Corbyn fans that Starmer was not what he proclaimed in the promises he made. But, like many others, I thought that Corbyn was so bad as a leader, that Starmer was almost certain to be much better.
Well, he certainly fooled me. Fool me once, shame on him: fool me twice, shame on me.
He isn’t a socialist in any sense of the word and should not even be in the Labour Party I once knew. The sooner he goes, the better. He has opened the Pandora’s Box of a hard right coalition which is very likely to trample on everything I believe in. What a fine mess you’ve got us into, Starmer.
I am roughly in the same boat. Still a Labour member – although no communication with the local party – presumably they don’t want local – or indeed any kind of democracy.
A large majority of the public now believe that all politicians ‘are in it for themselves’. As I’vwe have noted here – the increasing flow of vested interest money into politics means that ‘wealth and the power of wealth are now deeply wired into the British state’. The constitution is making it more and more inevitable that politicians become tainted and corrupt. ‘Donors’ to political parties expect something back – and they tend to get it
Starmer and Mandelson are symptoms of this constitutional corruption – with off the record meetings to cook up Palantir contracts in New York etc etc .
Despite the breathtaking scope of Starmer’s original pledges he doesn’t include ‘clean up politics’ – although I think it was in the manifesto . The Greens could clean up if they pledged to outlaw donations, 2nd jobs, revovling door jobs, covert lobby ing by MPs and peers … but will they?
Corbyn wasn’t that bad as a leader, delivering defeats to the Tories in Parliament, energising the country with old fashioned public meetings, being decent and approachable. Agreed, he was incapable of being other than a harmoniser in a pit of vipers, a fatal error.
John, I never thought badly of Corbyn as a very decent human being and an old school socialist. I liked him for that. I desperately wanted rid of the Tories, but couldn’t see him doing it. Maybe I was wrong. If the media hadn’t sabotaged his chances with the wider public… who knows?
Do you think the gap between what politicians say and what they do in any way explains the complete lack of trust in them?
The man is a complete disgrace. Well reminded
Thank you for the stark reminder. I hope The Green Party draw attention to this in their campaign to win the Gorton & Denton by election.
This morning we have Starmer asking the odious Jim Ratclffe for an apology when he should be demanding police action and the immediate payment of the huge sum of tax avoided by Ratcliffe.
Most in LINO say Starmer is a fundamentally decent man even if they criticise him for ineffective leadership.
NO!
That’s a wicked lie. He is NOT a decent man. Nowhere near it.
He is a calculating, manipulative deceiver who lied his way through a leadership election, who destroyed decent opponents by smears, slanders and hypocrisy, and then lied his way through a General Election promising change having already been paid to deliver more Tory sleaze and austerity, as well as supporting genocide and persecuting those who oppose it.
His cabinet are equally complicit with him as are the media who smoothed his path to power, helped destroy his opponents, and even now shield him from proper scrutiny.
Sources:
FRAUD by Paul Holden
COMPLICIT by Peter Oborne
Labour Leaks report
The Forde Report
See also, The Trilateral Commission, the proscription of Palestine Action, the suppression of protest, the abuse of remand legislation, and the complete sellout to overseas interests, and the contempt for international law, along with the progressive destruction of our economy, our essential infrastructure, and much of our social cohesion. He is also deeply complicit along with our entire government, in genocide and other war crimes.
Keir Starmer is NOT a decent man.
Given the amount of money flowing into the Labour Party from vested interests, both commercial and state entities (USA, Israel, Gulf States), none of this is surprising.
What IS surprising is that anyone has either the gall or the guillibility to call him “a decent man”.
I got this “devemnt man” argument from a long standing friend at the weekend.
I opened up with both barrels, I am afraid. A full broadside. We agreed to differ.
Surely some other Kier Starmer, one who vanished from Labour along with Jeremy Corbyn?
How about starting an e-petition on the UK Parliament petitions website about his breach of promises, to force a debate in Parliament? I think 100,000 signatures looks achievable, eh?
The great irony is that if Starmer were to focus on his original deliberately deceitful Ten Points, he would have a good chance of working a winning formula that could reverse his current fortunes.
I don’t want to open old arguments, but for all the talk about Starmer winning a landslide,
and Corbyn losing twice, Corbyn won more votes on a similar platform in both his general elections.
But I don’t expect the Labour right to learn from that.
Yes, I remember this! It should be a total embarrassment to Starmer and Labour now. Worth showing at every opportunity.
Recently, like others, I received my water bill for this year. It’s up 10% (a reminder, CPI inflation is around 3%). Last year it was 26%. Labour, when in opposition, were very clear that the criminal polluting private water companies should not be allowed to pass the cost of cleaning up the mess on to us — the people. That was Starmer’s Labour in opposition, behaving like Tories, lying their way to power.
In Government, they are doing the neoliberal thing, and allowing it.
The fact that point 5 — common ownership, including water, has been totally rejected shows what a fraud Starmer is.
The irony is, everything under point 5 is now popular and well-supported in the country.
Labour lost any chance of my vote in the future on this alone. Not that my vote in a Tory, likely to be Reform seat next time makes any difference, or means anything under FPTP (No mention of PR under point 8, either).
Thanks
Clive Lewis and Prem Sikka have stuck to the commitments. Few others have.
Cory Doctorow has an article today on Starmer selling out the NHS to Palantir despite there being a better, safer, UK based alternative:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/12/palantir-is-ice/#robo-mengele
Thanks
A bit more on the e-petition idea. The wording would need to be neutral in tone, and not a personal attack on Starmer, or a call for his resignation. It would need to be something like the following. And there would need to be 5, I think, email addresses in support.
Title:
Require the Government to publish a detailed report on delivery of its 2024 manifesto commitments
Petition text:
We ask the Government to publish, within three months, a comprehensive report to Parliament detailing progress made against each commitment in its 2024 general election manifesto.
The report should set out which commitments have been delivered, which are in progress, which have been amended or abandoned, and the reasons for any changes.
We believe voters are entitled to transparent information on how manifesto commitments are being implemented, so that Parliament and the public can properly assess the Government’s performance.
This would not get through as it is about politics, not government.
Starmer is apolitical.
He must be as he has taken life ‘as he finds it’ and accepts that he can do very little about anything.
I have tried and failed to find this epitaph for Lloyd George:
“Count not his broken pledges as a crime
He meant them, ah how he meant them, at the time.”
The McSweeney doctrine. Lie as much as you need to in order to win.
With regard to Corbyn…
He had (and has) his faults, but those leadership weaknesses were NOT the ones that his opponents attacked him for, and they weren’t the reason for his 2 GE defeats.
He was smeared, lied about, and sabotaged by MSM and crucially, his own party, which makes his performance in the 2017 GE all the more remarkable – it certainly scared the life out of the Labour right.
In 2024, Starmer “increased” Labour’s share of a (reduced) turnout vote (28m cf 32m), from Corbyn’s 2019 “collapse” by just over 1%, yet amassed >400MPs.
Popular vote for Corbyn’s Labour in Dec 2019 = 10,269,310 – a failure, a wipeout, a heavy defeat & resignation.
Popular vote for Starmer’s Labour in July 2024 = 9,708,716, a +1.6% swing (in terms of vote share but a DROP in popular vote) cf 2019, a 33.7% vote share, (incidentally the LOWEST vote share for a victorious party on record) – he won his sizeable majority on a pathetic vote performance because of a Tory collapse. A “forensic”victory, “grown-up” (ie. dishonest) politics
In 2019, defeated Corbyn got 32.1% of the vote, 10,269,310 votes, ie. MORE than landslide-winning Starmer got 5 years later.
Corbyn never wanted to be Labour leader or PM.
He was an honest man with limited leadership ability but an ability to connect with ordinary people.
He presented a popular, moderate social democratic manifesto to the electorate.
I understand how Starmer deceived the public in 2024 – I don’t blame ordinary people for believing the lies told them by the media, the algorithms and the billionaires.
What I cannot understand or forgive, however, is the way Labour Party members were taken in by Starmer’s deliberate calculated deceit in 2020. Why be a member of a party, if you are not going to pay attention, stay informed, and get involved?
Anyone who did, would have learned the truth about Starmer soon enough, even if they hadn’t noticed the scandalous interference of the Board of Deputies in the leadership election from the outset, or hadn’t wondered why Starmer was concealing his donors (Trevor Chinn) till AFTER the leadership election. Why does this matter?
Because we are about to do it all again, with another unprincipled LINO liar, backed by a corrupt media & oligarchy, and it’s time we stopped pretending.
Tahnks. Much to agree with
Question – why is no one holding this accountable, how have we got to the place where this can be promised and not delivered. If we brought a fridge that said it would chill food, and freeze chips, we take it home and instead it boiled eggs and roasted veg we would want our money back. Why can’t the same be said for government. I want the greens to do well but this is as clear as day, if a knight of the realm, a lawyer and a humanitarian rights defender can frog up on this list and sell his soul to the devil wha is to stop any other politician doing the same. I thought this is why we had the Magna carter. Do we now need a magna carter for the government too?
Good question.
I think you can guess my answer.