May the Titanic sail faster

The iceberg man cometh

Sir Keir Starmer QC MP

They call the Parliamentary performances of Sir Kier  at Prime Minister’s Questions “forensic”. The best serial killers are also called that, by FBI profilers.

As the leader of his namesake’s party, formed from the bowels of the trades union movement, you might think that the consignment of the working person’s life and livelihood to the bottom of the economic ocean, is something this Kier would be keen to avoid.

Not at all. He is the Scylla to Johnson’s Charybdis. The clashing rocks which shall destroy all upon the SS Britannia, who seek to pass between.

The political conversation is like trying to have a quiet drink with an alcoholic. He wants more, always more, faster and stronger. More lockdown. Should have been sooner. Chance not any lifting. Hazard not any virological risk, lest his constituents have a single job left between them.

Fuller speed ahead on the SS Britannia, and damn the iceberg.

Boris seeks to draw his inspiration from Churchill. Although the fated trammels of his panic, have led to a drinking deep from the toxins beloved of Churchill’s nemesis.  

Sir Keir would have done better to have looked to the laurels of Harold Wilson. Faced with a genuine epidemic which actually killed 80,000 Britons (compared to less than half that in this hyper-crisis), Mr Wilson looked that virus square on and noted phlegmatically that it were worse in the war. Check out the newspapers from that period.

Starmer, anointing himself John the Baptist, seeks to treat Boris as a noble trier. Following the right path, but stumbling and dragging his feet unto the promised land of utter desolation.

While Boris has abdicated power, so as to remain in office, Starmer has abdicated all but the nominal form of his office. Clement Atlee rightly joined forces with Churchill to face a genuine existential threat to the people of Britain. Yet, sadly, it is now Johnson, and his covidiot Cabinet, who are the threat.

It is Starmer’s constitutional duty to oppose. Instead, he is re-enacting PG Wodehouse, with the virtual Commons as country manor. Playing the ever-reproachful Jeeves to Boris Bertie Wooster: I believe you omitted to remember the small matter of foreign nurses, sir; Perhaps the covid tests should have been sent out in square packets not circular ones.

One understands the political imperative. Starmer’s Red Wall constituencies comprise the people most cowed by Govt UK’s threat messaging. They are the furloughed, enjoying the phony summer of Rishi Sunak’s payday loans.

An opposition leader, conscious of the constitutional duty imposed upon him, and aware of reality, would be firing his flare gun incessantly, illuminating the genuine danger.

Instead, Starmer plays the stern bosun, standing at the shoulder of his brave captain, and directing him ever onward in his course of mutual destruction.

Jeremy Corbyn was a true believer in the old Leninist ideology that noble class ends justify any means. Sad and comic by turns, but at least comprehensible. What Starmer’s forensic soubriquet disguises, is that here stands at the despatch box a man to whom means and ends are the very same thing.

Starmer is not a cross-examiner, passionately advocating a necessary opposition case. He is a dark knight of nihilism.

One day Starmer will inherit the Prime Ministerial ashes remaining from Johnson’s act of unpatriotic self-immolation. I explain the prediction in Worlds Ends at You Only Live Twice.

He will then roam the blackened landscape of Britain, seeking targets of vengeance to slake the wrath of the millions of unemployed and ruined. Late-dawning consciousness that it was he who facilitated and encouraged these enemy acts against his own people, will drive his faked fury ever onwards.

Starmer is evidently not presently aware that an existential threat to SS Britannia from covid exists only in hyper-reality. He chooses to marshal only that evidence which assists in pin-pricking the prime minister. He awaits the next opinion poll briefing, so he can appreciate what line to take, the next time he opens his mouth.

There ceased, on 23 March 2020, to be a circus show of parliamentary debate, the frothing of hot-air bubbles, disgorged from the actuality of events. It became hyper-politics. A gruesome pantomime of Punch and Judy, danced over the grave of Britain.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2019/04/14/a-geological-study-of-the-titanic-shipwreck-site/