Why does Starmer keep insisting that the public are wrong?

Keir Starmer was elected as Labour leader on the back of 10 pledges, which promises party unity, the continuation of Corbynite policies, and a clear cut commitment to communal ownership of vital infrastructure and services like water, rail, and energy.

Starmer knew he couldn't win the Labour leadership without promising these things, because public ownership is not just overwhelmingly popular with the Labour Party members who were voting, they're popular policies across the entire British public.

Polling consistently demonstrates that overwhelming support for renationalisation of the energy sector, the water supply in England, and the railways.

In the two years after his election as Labour leader circumstances have handed Starmer a series of ideal opportunities to promote these overwhelmingly popular renationalisation policies.

Raw Sewage

In 2021 Johnson's Tory rabble triggered a massive public backlash when they voted to allow privatised water companies to keep artificially inflating their profits by dumping vast quantities of raw sewage into our waterways and coastal waters.

Starmer could easily have used this scandal to promote the popular policy of bringing England's privatised mess of water suppliers back under public ownership.

Instead he sent his subordinates out to argue that the profiteers must stay in charge of the water supply, in order to signal that Labour represents no threat to vested capitalist interests.

Energy Crisis

We've all seen the chaos of massively inflated energy bills, soaring energy producer profits, a sequence of energy suppliers going bust, and the government regulator forcing abandoned customers onto much more expensive tariffs.

Starmer could have highlighted the way the French government imposed a 4% cap on energy bill rises onto their publicly owned energy company (EdF), while the Tory government allowed EdF and other energy companies in the UK market to raise bills by an astonishing 54%.

He could have offered the public the renationalisation policies they want, but instead he decided to once again adopt the position that the public are wrong, and that the private profiteers must stay.

And Starmer didn't just spurn the opportunity to promote the energy renationalisation policies that the public want, and that he pledged in his leadership bid, he even publicly bragged that he lied in his leadership campaign, and insisted that he'd lie to people again to win more power!

Rail Strikes

Labour is supposed to be the party of working people (the clue is in the name), but Keir Starmer has decided to oppose the RMT rail strike against below-inflation pay offers and mandatory redundancies.

He's so vehemently opposed to the strikes that his minions are trying to force Labour MPs to apologise for showing solidarity with striking workers!

It's truly absurd to see Starmer's shadow cabinet team insisting that they won't support the strikes because they don't want to "pick a side".

It's capitalist profiteers and a profoundly malicious Tory transport secretary against ordinary low-paid rail workers (not train drivers).

If Labour won't even pick a side in this scenario, what the hell is the point in them.

And then the polling has come out to show that the British public are overwhelmingly on the side of the rail workers, meaning once again Starmer has positioned himself far to the right of public opinion.

Outflanking the public to the right

Despite pledging popular renationalisation policies in his leadership election, Keir Starmer has deliberately placed the Labour Party well to the right of the British public on water, energy, and now rail.

Instead of offering the public what they want, Starmer is siding with the capitalist profiteers and insisting that the public are wrong to want things to just be a bit better and fairer for British consumers and British workers.

Starmer's dedicated to the protection of vested capitalist interests, so he's going to keep Labour positioned well to the right of public opinion; offer a bland and uninspiring "more of the same" policy platform; and hope that he can win the next election purely by not being quite as repulsive and divisive as Johnson.

It looks a lot like a deliberate attempt to replay Ed Miliband's catastrophically uninspiring 2015 Tory-lite election campaign, in which Labour decided to pathetically imitate Tory austerity ruination, rather than opposing it and pledging to invest for the future instead.

It seems an absurdly inexplicable strategy to repeatedly chide the public that they're wrong to want things to be a bit better, and then expect them to vote for you regardless.

Unless of course Starmer considers the protection of capitalist profiteering to be so important that he'd risk driving millions of traditional Labour voters away, and throwing an election over it.

And if that's the case, what the hell is this absurd person doing as leader of the Labour Party?

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OR

The Tories are claiming that cycling to work instead of driving causes congestion and air pollution!

The latest anti-Labour Tory attack line is so unbelievably stupid that you have to see it to believe it.

The Kensington and Chelsea Tories have been handing out flyers attacking the development of London's cycle infrastructure with absurd claims that measures to increase the number of people cycling to work instead of driving will increase "traffic congestion" and "air pollution".

Air pollution and traffic jams

Now, every evidence-based air pollution study I've ever seen on improved cycling and walking infrastructure has detailed massive reductions in air pollutants like nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and black carbon.

According to a study by Sustrans, if the number of UK cycling trips could be doubled, and the number of short walking trips increased, this would produce such a significant reduction in air pollution that 8,300 lives a year would be saved.

Aside from the improvements in air quality and life expectancy, their study estimated a £5.67 billion boost to the UK over the course of 10 years. 

These are huge quality of life improvements with a significant economic benefit to boot, all for a relatively modest initial outlay in infrastructure improvements (the £42 million the Tories are shitting themselves with rage over is significantly less than 0.1% of the projected cost of HS2).

Research into a similar Cycle Highways scheme in the Netherlands found that the construction of 675 km of cycle highways resulted in a 3.8 million hours per year reduction in traffic jams!

Another study in Waltham Forest demonstrated a massive reduction in severe air pollution after the introduction of a Mini-Holland cycling infrastructure plan.

And another study in Washington DC indicated a 4% reduction in traffic congestion that was directly attributable to their Capital Bikeshare scheme.

If the Tories want to claim that improved cycling infrastructure increases traffic congestion and air pollution, they really need to show some counter-evidence to the numerous studies demonstrating the exact opposite effect.

Local Businesses

The claimed "damage to local businesses" is at least just misleading, rather than an outright inversion of reality.

Of course some local businesses may be inconvenienced during the construction phase, but you'd have to be utterly delusional to believe that more people walking and cycling along your street, rather than driving through in cars, would be a bad thing for local shops and businesses in the long run.

Trees

As for the tree removals that the Tories seem so upset about, I'm pretty sure the reduction in CO2 emissions from reduced car trips and traffic jams would be more than enough to offset the loss of a few trees, and if the Tories really did give a damn about trees, they could easily demand that the developers plant two or more trees in the local area for every one they need to remove.

The Tories obviously don't give a shit about trees, they've just added it because a list with two bullet points (one of which is the most absurd of lies) would have looked absolutely ridiculous.

True motivations

The worst thing about this Tory nonsense is that we know what all of this is really motivated by.

The Tories are blatantly pandering to car users because they know the kind of people driving massive pollutant-billowing SUVs around London are one of their core demographics.

Their attitude is screw people on bikes, and those in the poorer areas of London who are far more likely to suffer toxic levels of pollution, they're never going to vote Tory anyway, so "fuck them".

In fact the Tories have such contempt for people living in high pollution areas that Boris Johnson and his Tory minions deliberately buried a damning study about the dangerously high levels of toxic air pollution in London for several years, rather than do anything about it.

The Tories obviously don't give a damn about air pollution, or congestion, or trees, they simply want to disguise their real car-supremacist agenda with a load of misleading drivel instead of being honest about it.

So fuck all the people who would like to cycle to work but don't feel willing to risk their lives because the current infrastructure is too dangerous. Fuck all the kids with asthma and allergies that are triggered and exacerbated by air pollution. Fuck the thousands who die each year because of the filthy air in our cities.

As far as the Tories are concerned the car is king, and car drivers are the only demographic they're interested in pandering to, and they're going to pander so hard they're resorting to outright and easily disprovable lies.

What a noxious bunch they are.

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OR

Boris Johnson's leadership pitch is a pack of lies

It's no wonder Boris Johnson skipped over his shameful and shambolic tenure as Foreign Secretary in order to gloss up his record as London Mayor to pitch for the job of Tory Prime-Minister-by-default.

People are far more likely to have forgotten his tenure as London Mayor than recent stuff like the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe farce, "fuck business", gratuitous Nazi comparisons, endless gaffes and insults, and quitting his job to oppose Theresa May's Brexit deal only to decide to actually vote in favour of it the 3rd time she put it before parliament!

Also people outside of London are less likely to know how lazy and incompetent he was because they didn't have to deal with it on a day-to-day basis.

So Johnson and his backers have decided to create a revisionist history of his glorious time as London Mayor that would have made Stalin proud.

Crime

Johnson's boast that he cut crime in London is staggeringly dishonest. Crime was falling when he came to power, but then he administered the process of annihilating London policing once his Tory mates and their vile Lib-Dem enablers took over government in 2010.

Tory austerity resulted in a 30% reduction in police numbers, and a 65% reduction in Community Support Officers (a reduction from 18,937 police and CSOs to 11,576 in just 8 years).

£600 million was slashed from the London police budget and 120 police buildings were shut down and sold off to property developers.

By the end of Boris Johnson's tenure the consequences of this agenda were becoming clear, knife crime rose in his last two years in office, and violent crime has continued to soar ever since (with ever-cynical Tories attempting to blame this violent crime epidemic on Johnson's successor Sadiq Khan!).

Investment

One of the biggest cons the Tories pulled when they got into power was their use of the austerity narrative to justify reducing infrastructure spending in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, and the north of England whilst actually increasing infrastructure spending in London and the wealthy south east.

With London getting £24 per person spent on transport for every £1 per person in the north east of England, it's no wonder Johnson resorts to infrastructure boasting. When the game was so ridiculously rigged in his favour he'd be a fool not to.

However a look at some of the waste that went on under his watch tells us that London could probably have benefited an awful lot more from this vast spending disparity with someone competent in charge of delivering infrastructure projects.

£53 million wasted on the Garden Bridge project that never went ahead, a £40 million overspend on Routemaster busses, £24 million on the cable car to nowhere (a truly extraordinary sight for us northerners who have suffered one cancelled infrastructure project after another), £5.2 million on an Estuary Airport that never got built, renting West Ham the Olympic stadium for just £2.5 million a year when it cost £323 million to build and then convert, and another £300,000 spraffed up a wall on unusable water cannons that were eventually flogged off as scrap.

Living Wage

Every time the Tories boast about their "living wage" decent people should be absolutely furious at the Orwellian chicanery.

The National Minimum Wage was invented by Labour and vehemently opposed by the Tories at the time.

In 2016 David Cameron decided to rebrand the Minimum Wage as "living wage" principally to undermine the work of the Living Wage Foundation who promote the idea that the minimum wage should provide enough for people to live on.

Their calculation for London is £10.55 per hour. The Tory fake "living wage" in London is £8.21.

So when Boris Johnson brags about this fake Tory "living wage", he's actually bragging about employers underpaying London workers by £2.34 per hour.

Housing

The Tory track record on housing is absolutely atrocious. Between 2010 and 2017 they oversaw the lowest level of peacetime house building since the 1920s. They also deliberately pumped up the unsustainable house price bubble again by restricting supply and inflating prices with ludicrous schemes like Help to Buy. They slashed the already shockingly low levels of social home construction, And to top it all off they decided to redefine "affordable housing" as a £450,000 starter home in Greater London.

Boris Johnson contributed to this atrocious track record by missing his targets on affordable housing, and virtually eradicating new council housing in London.

Pollution

Of all of the issues that Boris Johnson should be keeping quiet about, London air pollution is up there with the fact that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is still in an Iranian jail after his decision to lazily repeat Iranian accusations against her as facts in parliament.

In 2013 the consultancy firm Aether handed in a report on London air pollution to Boris Johnson's administration, but instead of publishing it, they buried it for two and a half years until it was found by Sadiq Khan's team when he took over.

The report detailed shocking disparities in toxic nitrous oxide pollutants between poor and wealthy areas.

Instead of doing anything about it Johnson and his cronies just buried the report, and now he's got the absolute gall to brag about what a wonderful job he did of combating air pollution!

Alternative facts

Despite the fact Johnson's Tweet is incredibly deceptive, it's still generated hundreds of shares and thousands of likes, demonstrating his Trump-like relationship with his supporters.

It doesn't actually matter what he does, or how many lies he tells, the people who adore Johnson aren't actually interested in any of that stuff.

If reality gets in the way of their Boris-fandom, then it's quite clearly reality that has to make way, and unfortunately it's a tiny band of around 70,000 Tory tribalists, Brextremist infiltrators, and BoJo-worshippers who get to pick the next Tory Prime-Minister-by-default, while the other 70 million of us have to deal with the consequences.

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OR

Opportunistic Tories are trying to take credit for an EU policy they steadfastly opposed at the time!

In 2014 the European Parliament held a vote on reducing disposable plastic bag waste. The Tory MEPs in the European parliament voted against the measure and demanded a load of concessions from the European Parliament.

In 2015 the legislation was finally passed in the European Parliament. The new measures oblige member states to either adopt measures ensuring that the annual consumption level does not exceed, on average, 90 lightweight plastic carrier bags per person by the end of 2019, and not more than 40 bags per person by 2025; or alternatively, to ensure that they are not given for free at stores and sales points by the end of 2018.

Tory MEPs refused to vote in favour of this legislation.

Now we fast-forward to January 2018 and suddenly Michael Gove and Theresa May are  trying to claim credit for the shiny new Tory policy of ... errrm ...clamping down on disposable plastic bag waste.

Neither the Tories, nor their sycophants in the mainstream press have bothered to point out that these measures against plastic waste originated in the EU. And neither is anyone pointing out that the Theresa May and Michael Gove are actually trying to steal credit for a policy that their fellow Tories in the European parliament voted against, and worked to undermine and obstruct.
 

 Take the coverage of the extended 5p plastic bag charge in the hard-right Daily Mail propaganda rag.

There's loads of praise for Theresa May and the Tories in the article, yet not a single mention of the fact that the plastic bag charges are a result of EU legislation to clamp down on plastic waste, nor of the fact that the Tories tried to scupper these rules as they made their way through the European Parliament.

If the rabidly anti-EU Daily Mail had any integrity whatever they wouldn't be presenting this extended plastic bags charge as a glorious victory for Theresa May, they'd be howling with rage at the nasty EU interfering with our God-given British right to lob as much plastic waste as we like into our waterways and oceans.

Just like the Daily Mail, it's obvious that the Brextremist Michael Gove is not going to admit that the policy he's attempting to soak up all the credit for is actually a product of the EU that he hates so much.

And neither is Theresa May going risk upsetting the new blue-kip demographic of rabidly right-wing and ultra-nationalistic ex-ukippers she's rendered herself completely reliant upon with a dose of the truth.

There's absolutely no way she'd dare to destabilise her own position by explaining to this fickle and reactionary mob that her shiny new policy is actually one of the measures that her party tried and failed to defeat in the European Parliament.

Of course it's a good thing that measures are being taken to address the shocking levels of plastic pollution in the environment, but to see Tories attempting to wring as many positive headlines as possible out of a policy they steadfastly opposed in the first place is yet another demonstration of what a shifty and opportunistic bunch of charlatans these people actually are.

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OR

Why did Boris Johnson bury that damning air pollution report?

  
In 2013 the consultancy firm Aether completed a report for the Greater London Authority on the state of air pollution in London and submitted it to Boris Johnson's administration who then sat on it for two and a half years until his successor Sadiq Khan uncovered it shortly after taking office.

The Analysing Air Pollution in London report contained an awful lot of damning information about the state of pollution in London, including the fact that 433 London primary schools were located in areas where levels of the toxic pollutant Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) exceeded European Union pollution limits.

Nitrogen Oxides

Nitrogen Oxides are toxic pollutants that most often come from road pollution, especially from diesel engines. Other sources of Nitrogen Oxides include electricity generation and industry.

Nitrogen Oxides are proven to trigger asthma, coughing, skin irritation, aggravate bronchitis and pneumonia. Repeated exposure can cause permanent damage to the lungs and reduced lung capacity. It is estimated that Nitrogen Oxide pollution causes thousands of premature deaths per year in London alone.

Nitrogen Oxides are also linked with the formation of ozone which occurs when Nitrogen Oxides and volatile organic compounds react in the presence of heat and sunlight. Children, the elderly, people with lung diseases such as asthma, and people who work or exercise outside are at risk for adverse effects from ozone, including reduction in lung function, respiratory illnesses and respiratory-related hospital admissions.

Poverty

Some of the most shocking findings in the report were the disparities in pollution levels between poor areas and wealthy areas. 83% of the schools with illegally high levels of Nitrogen Oxide pollution were classified as "deprived" (40%+ children on free school meals). Meanwhile less than 20% of the schools located in areas below the pollution limit were classified as "deprived".

This means that over 80% of the schools suffering illegal levels of pollution were in poor areas, and over 80% of the schools with acceptable air standards were in rich areas.

The research also showed that over half of the very poorest areas of London suffered illegal levels of pollution, while the illegal pollution rate was just 1% of the very richest areas of London.

Why did it get buried?

Nobody but the most rabidly right-wing sociopath could try to claim that it's perfectly acceptable that tens of thousands of primary school children, mainly from poor and ordinary backgrounds, are being poisoned with health destroying pollutants.

Once the information that this is the case in London would have reached the public domain it would have meant that Boris Johnson would have had to either take the incredibly unpopular stance of doing nothing about the inequality on the grounds that the affected primary school children should have had the good sense to be born into richer families, or actually try to do something about the problem.

Boris Johnson and the Tories clearly didn't want to do anything about the appalling inequality between levels of air pollution in poorer parts of London and richer areas, but neither did they want to be seen to be doing nothing. Hence the logical course of action from a self-serving Tory perspective was to bury the report so that the public had much less evidence on which to base their demands for action.

Cherry-picking the good bits

The decision not to publish the report was clearly a political one because despite deciding to not bother publishing the full report, Boris Johnson's team were happy to cherry-pick and publicise some of the positive conclusions in the report, whilst completely ignoring the bits highlighting the severe inequality in exposure to air pollution.

The director of the company that produced the report Katie King said that "The crux of the report was about understanding the inequalities of air pollution, so they chose not to make public the findings regarding inequality ...The information that they did take from the report was the positive, that exposure was predicted to fall in the future".

There's no way that the decision to cherry-pick the best bits of a scientific report, whilst completely ignoring the negative parts can be seen as anything other than a display of the worst kind of cynical political opportunism.

Conclusion

I really do pity people who are so lacking in political insight that they can't see Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as the ruthlessly self-serving political careerist that he so clearly is, rather than the harmless foppish buffoon he pretends to be. In 1951 (13 years before BoJo was even born) Bertrand Russell warned of the dangers of politicians like him when he said "our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them".

Boris Johnson is a man so lacking in principle that he refused to answer the charge that he wrote two completely different versions of his famous Telegraph article, one opposing the EU and one supporting it, then chose the one that he thought would be best for his own political ambitions.

He's so lacking in basic human morality that he buried a report into the toxic environments suffered by tens of thousands of primary school children because to publish it would have negatively impacted his own career, yet had his team cherry-pick good bits out of the report to make him look good.

The reason Boris Johnson failed to publish the damning report into air pollution levels in London schools is obvious. It's that he's one of the worst examples of the ruthlessly self-serving over-privileged Tory careerist type. It's just a damned shame that so many people fall for his foppery act and allow themselves to forget who he actually is, and what he actually represents.
 
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OR

The Trafigura toxic waste scandal

A Dutch cleanup team deal with toxic waste in Abidjan.

Trafigura are a Dutch oil trading firm and one of the world's biggest independent oil traders. The company has been involved in numerous scandals including UN sanctions busting in Iraq during the Oil for Food Programme and more famously the Abidjan toxic waste dumping scandal.

The toxic waste dumping incident began in 2002 when Mexican state-owned oil company Pemex began to accumulate significant quantities of coker gasoline, a poor quality product which contained large amounts of sulfur and silica. By 2006 Pemex had run out of storage capacity and sold the coker gasoline to Trafigura.

In early 2006, Pemex trucked the coker gasoline to Brownsville, Texas, where Trafigura loaded it aboard the Panamanian registered Probo Koala tanker, which was owned by Greek shipping company Prime Marine Management Inc. and chartered by Trafigura.

Trafigura decided to strip the sulfurous products out of the coker gasoline to produce naphtha, which could then be sold. Instead of paying a refinery to do the work, Trafigura used an obsolete process on board the ship called "caustic washing", in which the coker was treated with caustic soda. The process worked, and the resulting naphtha was resold for a reported profit of $19 million. The waste resulting from this kind of caustic washing typically includes highly dangerous substances such as sodium hydroxide, sodium sulphide and phenols.

The Probo Koala tried to offload the waste in Amsterdam, but when the contractors discovered the toxicity of the cargo they quoted €500,000 to dispose of it. The toxic waste was then pumped back onto the ship and transported out of the Netherlands. The company were eventually fined €1 million for the illegal transportation of toxic waste into and out of the Netherlands.

The Probo Koala then travelled to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast (a country with no toxic waste disposal facilities) where the toxic waste was offloaded for a fee of just €18,500. Over the following weeks the toxic waste was dumped at landfill sites, at roadsides and on open ground in poor neighbourhoods. An official analysis of samples of the waste carried by the Probo Koala indicated that it contained around two British tonnes of the highly toxic substance hydrogen sulphide. More than 30,000 people from Ivory Coast claimed they were affected by the ­toxic waste and eventually brought Britain's biggest-ever group lawsuit against the company.

Trafigura, originally issued statements in 2006 denying the tanker was carrying toxic waste claiming instead that the ship only contained routine "slops", the dirty water from washing out the fuel tank. Executives of the company repeatedly denied that the waste contained any hydrogen sulphide and the company hired famous libel lawyers Carter-Ruck to stifle any media reporting of the incident.

Trafigura eventually paid the government of the Ivory Coast £100 million to cover the clean-up costs but as part of the deal the company demanded and received immunity from prosecution, however prosecutions against the local Ivorian subcontractors that dumped the waste continued, with one of them receiving a sentence of 20 years.

Trafigura spent the next few years obtaining numerous restrictive legal injunctions and suing media sources that dared to cover the case (BBC, The Guardian & The Independent) forcing them to take down numerous articles from their websites. The company were even accused of using a super-injunction in an attempt to gag the UK Parliament. In September 2009 the Guardian revealed that Trafigura employees knew about the toxic nature of the cargo, publishing internal emails that said "this operation is no longer allowed in the European Union, the United States and Singapore" and that it is "banned in most countries due to the 'hazardous nature of the waste" In the wake of these revelations the company (despite their previous litigiousness and protestations of innocence) quickly agreed to pay $46 million in compensation to their Ivorian victims.

It seems that in order to save around €480,000 in disposal fees somebody at the company decided to remove the toxic waste from the Netherlands and transport it to a country without proper waste disposal facilities where it could be dumped, a decision that eventually ended up costing over €200 million in clean-up costs, fines and compensation. No Trafigura employees have ever been convicted in relation to the Abidjan toxic waste dumping incident.