A rather interesting thought occurred to me today, as I was sitting in the lobby of the blood test department, reading the paper this morning. The front page of The Guardian had a headline that Democrats were condemning the 'State of the Union' speech, stating that it was a 'work of fiction'. I always rather enjoy Thursday's Guardian, as John Crace, who writes the Parliamentary sketch is a brilliant writer. There is little in the Guardian I actually find readable these days, but Crace is one of the reasons I still read the paper. In the last paragraph, he recounts that Starmer skewered Kemi Badenoch, with the killer line "You are just an irrelevance". I pondered on this and a rather odd thought came to me. Had Donald Trump uttered those words to Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton in a Presidential debate, the liberal left would have been up in arms, and citing it as proof of Trump's misogyny. When Starmer utters it, the Guardian simply assumes he's right. In my mind, I started to imagine Donald Trump uttering those words. They would roll off his tongue far more easily than Starmers.
In my bored day dream, I started to wonder, maybe Sir Keir Starmer is more like Donald Trump than we care to realise. Mayve what Starmer needs is to unleash his inner Donald Trump. The more I thought about it, the more similarities I started to see. They both thought it was an excellent idea that Peter Mandelson was ambassador to the USA. They both are out of step with the party they joined, both being far to the right of the machine they inherited (the Labour membership loved Jeremy Corbyn and many think Starmer too right wing). Both won big at the last election, with seemingly unassailable victories.
But the differences are far more marked. Trump has used his mandate to do the things he believes America needs to be great again. It is a matter of opinion as to whether he is right, but whatever he does or doesn't do, we all know that he believes he has the answers and his agenda is the right one. Sir Keir Starmer doesn't even know what his own agenda and mandate is. With his majority, he could have bulldozed through a whole raft of populist measures that would have cemented Labour as the party of the people (something it has always pretended to be). What did he do? Put the boot into pensioners, whilst sucking up to the rich and powerful. He could have gone after multi national corporations that make billions in the UK and pay little tax, to fund a whole swathe of programmes of national regeneration. If he clobbered Amazon for £10 billion, butr said "Listen mate, your vans use the roads that we are fixing the pot holes in with the money", he'd have been highly popular and even Amazon may grudgingly admitted that it was a good idea, as their vehicles would ultimately require less maintenace. Multinationals like to have bases in the UK as English is the worlds business language, so a few quid from them to improve schools, universities and colleges would be an excellent idea, one they would ultimately benefit from.
We may hate Trump and his tarriff scheme, but he has found a way to fix the US budget deficit. I'd love to see Starmer have the balls and do something similar here. Not in an American way, but in a way that would benefit the whole country. Starmer has a maassive majority, but he is a coward, so he is squandering the opportunity. I'd hate to have a Trump style leader in the UK, but I would like to see Starmer have the guts to pick fights with vested interests in the way Trump has.
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