high comedy in Westminster
Posted by kit on 2024-July-16 06:04:32, TuesdayIn reply to Trump announces next POTUS posted by Sick Rose on 2024-July-15 19:04:45, Monday
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The new Lab-Lite government is already delivering high comedy, as Starmer's cabinet - many of whom have made extremely unflattering remarks about Trump in the past - now attempt to negotiate the nightmare scenario of dealing with a second Trump administration. JD Vance, who has also made some quite unflattering comments about the Orange Man in the past, has also created a headache for Labour ministers with his statement to the National Conservatism Conference that the party's win in this month's general election makes the UK "the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon." So far, government MPs have been hilariously restrained in their response to this comment, Deputy Leader Angela Rayner simply stating with atypical mildness "I don't recognise that characterisation." James Murray, the Treaury Minister, has even more amusingly pretended that he didn't understand what Vance was saying: "I don’t really understand those comments... I don’t know what he was driving at in that comment, to be honest. " Strangely enough it is the Conservative Party, now in the safety of opposition, that has seen fit to defend the nation's honour. Tory peer Lord Daniel Finkelstein has gone into bat for Britain, claiming: "Vance’s obvious intelligence makes this sort of outrageous racist comment even worse." And Andrew Bowie, the shadow Veterans' Minister, has said: "I think it’s actually quite offensive, frankly, to my colleagues in the Labour party." If the Tories had shown this much moral backbone at any time in the last 14 years, they might have won by a landslide. But it is the Labour Party's craven impotence that is already the main headline here. Labour's self-styled "centrists" have always been pathetically in thrall to American power. Starmer will not criticise an American president (or president-in-waiting) any more than Blair would. And speaking of Blair, there is quite a good opinion piece in yesterday's Guardian from Simon Jenkins, in which he warms that Starmer's militarism surrounding Ukraine risks producing another Iraq. It will be interesting to see how the prospect of a Trump presidency inflects Starmer's sabre-rattling against Russia. Brexit has made Britain more reliant upon its (largely illusory) trans-Atlantic bonds. If Washingtion gets cold feet for the fight - and perhaps wavers in its commitment to NATO - then Starmer's thundering New Cold War rhetoric will start to sound very hollow. |
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