Starmer gets a media monstering AT LAST & it’s all on camera too!

Right, so in no small part this channel came into existence because the mainstream media fails so often to hold power to account and even during an election campaign where there are rules governing such events, so many establishment so-called journalists, who are little better than stenographers, just reporting what politicians are saying rather than challenging them on such things. But every now and then you see a journalist for a mainstream outlet, or a TV channel as is the case here, who demonstrate that they can actually hold power to account when they want to and when the individual in question here is a 30 year old local news correspondent absolutely tearing Keir Starmer apart for again not giving a straight answer to a straight question, it shows on one hand that the wrong people still occupy the top jobs in national journalism and on the other how unstuck Starmer keeps coming when his own dishonesty keeps catching up with him.
Right, so that was Keir Starmer being interviewed on ITV Westcountry, ITV’s regional service for my end of the country here in the South West and that was Lucy McDaid, their political correspondent asking him six times in the space of a minute for a straight answer as to whether or not Starmer would get rid of the Bibby Stockholm, the formerly, at least I hope by this point formerly, legionella riddled prison barge as it has become most commonly referred to, though of course is the vessel we here in the UK are paying rent on, whilst also having paid to outfit it in Falmouth to house asylum seekers whilst their claims are being processed, now in it’s ‘permanent’ mooring off the Dorset coast.
Now on one hand you’d think this would be an easy thing for Starmer to respond to, the barge’s presence off the coast of what is amongst the staunchest Tory voting areas as Dorset is, has not been popular, especially in the constituency of South Dorset, which takes up most of the county coastline and given that South Dorset is being predicted, according to the Electoral Calculus website, to fall to Labour, not held by Starmer’s lot since Blair lost it in 2005, you’d think Starmer would be keen to shore up that vote by saying he’ll ditch the barge, cruel, expensive headline grabber being all it functionally was, but no, he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t say he’d get rid of it, just that there would be no more of them under his watch and well, we’ll wait and see if his words end up being worth anything on that score won’t we?
Again, just like the other day when the screws were put on him by an ordinary member of the public on LBC, asking him whether he would have joined a government led by Jeremy Corbyn if Labour had won in 2017 and 2019, he couldn’t answer a simple yes no question as far as this barge was concerned either. Will you get rid of the barge, yes or no was the question, people in Dorset don’t want it there, it is a symbol of cruelty and failure and treating people fleeing goodness knows what in an appalling manner because the Tories thought it would win them votes and instead it has lost them votes, so will you Keir Starmer commit to removing the accursed thing, stop wasting money on this pointless vanity project of insufferable nastiness and malice and send it back from whence it came? OK I might have embellished a bit, Lucy McDaid didn’t go quite that far.
What Starmer did say however was no better for him and again frankly echoed where the Tories have been and have failed on regarding the issue of migration and seeking asylum here in the UK, because all he basically did was copy Rishi Sunak in that regards, stop the boats, stop people getting into boats, and one of his election pledges – newsflash folks, he has a long track record of repeatedly not sticking to them – and effectively renaming border force as border command isn’t going to stop desperate people attempting to come here, even if that means climbing into a tiny boat at the risk of their own lives, because people with nothing left, have nothing left to lose and in their minds everything to gain by getting to a country they believe will be better for them.
Instead of acknowledging his own plan for solving the small boats crisis is just a repackaged version of Tory failure, with even more money thrown at it however, he deflects to the issue of the barge as being a symbol of Tory failure. He’s right, it is, in which case it should be the easiest thing in the world to point at that barge and say you’d scrap it then wouldn’t it? Instead you fail to say six times that you’d ditch what has been a disease riddled public money black hole, because only the Tories could be so inept, only Suella Braverman could put her own callousness and profligacy ahead of any semblance of humanity as to do up a boat they’re paying thousands in rent on, because instead of outright purchasing it, they’ve simply hired it! So the answer to the question put to Starmer should at it’s very simplest be the due date of the lease, which we might well be obliged to see out, but that doesn’t mean you can’t mothball it as the PR disaster and outright symbol of intolerance and cruelty it is. Come on Mr human rights lawyer, do human rights matter to you or not? Six times and he could not say he’d do away with it, so he may very well keep it himself in which case.
Twice more he was asked would he get rid of the barge, he just carried on answering the question he wanted to answer though, rote response on migration, the Starmbot 3000 has glitched once more, he just carried on talking about record breaking numbers of boat crossings, that he thinks small boat crossings hit record numbers that day that that interview took place. Well, that interview happened on the 19th June, and it just so happens that the government publish all small boat crossing data on their own website and on the 19th June, the number of crossings was…zero. No boats, no migrants, no nothing. If he was looking at the day before, with 882 migrants on 15 boats, that is anything but the largest, for example the 3rd September 2022 saw 1305 migrants cross in 27 boats, so even if he meant the day before, he’s still being dishonest as ever.
We already have control of our borders, that was his next nugget of Torylitism wasn’t it? We never didn’t have control of our borders, it’s a Faragist nonsense to excuse much of the misery we all live through, that they didn’t cause. We have poverty, housing and food crises, but if you think some bloke from Eritrea or Afghanistan is the cause of that, then you’re soft in the head. But as an island, we have an enormous coastline and people are prepared to risk their lives to reach us frankly just hoping they land somewhere and as a wealthy country, even though wealth inequality is amongst the worst in the world, that still makes us an attractive destination.
Then McDaid confronted Starmer with the opinion of Starmer’s shadow immigration minister, Welsh windbag Jr, Stephen Kinnock, who is on record as saying he wouldn’t want to use them, frankly he’ll do whatever Starmer tells him, every Labour MP seems completely terrified of him at this point, fearing for their own position and their own seats, I hardly think Kinnock’s pips would squeak if Starmer told him to keep using the barge and when put to him again would he get rid of the barge, or would he keep using them, he could only whine that Labour are not planning on having more barges!
Fundamentally, you will not get a peep out of Starmer saying he disagrees with Tory policy, he is positioning himself as simply not being leader of that most inept and corrupt administration in living memory as his path to power, but he has no intentions of actually doing things any differently, merely acting as though he’s competent at it. In that regard he will do or say nothing that will lose him Tory votes that he may have attracted and laughably, this strikes me as a lame attempt at trying to stop them bleeding away to Reform UK as well, since it is their favourite policy area. The truth of the matter is many Tory voters will never, ever vote Labour no matter how big a Tory might lead them, because it’s a tribal and class issue for many of them. They’d rather go to Farage, he’s their class, he comes from wealth, he went to one of the right schools, despite his flat cap wearing man in the pub schtick and while Starmer seeks right wing votes, he’s losing others he’s taking for granted, though the dangers there do seem to at last be becoming more apparent to him, as legal threats against the author of the report evidencing Labour’s hierarchy of racism because of what he has said have emerged. Find out all about that story in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.