Starmer to make Blairite has-been Jacqui Smith an unelected minister

Right, so whilst Wes Streeting busies himself welcoming back into the NHS Tony Blair’s privatisation or perish health secretary Alan Milburn, this is certainly not the only Blairite resurrection in Starmer’s government, as Gordon Brown’s former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is now going to apparently be a minister in the education department. Who elected Jacqui Smith you might ask? Well nobody did. Despite having over 400 MPs to choose from now, Starmer is opting to pull the same trick Rishi Sunak did to make David Cameron Foreign Secretary, by handing out a peerage and bringing her in that way, but given her own track record, her comments since leaving politics, this is an appalling appointment for a multitude of reasons and begs the question as to why Keir Starmer even needs to do this.
Right, so Jacqui Smith is coming back into government, but coming via the David Cameron route of being stuffed into the House of Lords and therefore being made a minister in a completely undemocratic way, plus, just as we saw with David Cameron, being a peer means she cannot ever be questioned in the Commons.
Most famously becoming the UK’s first woman Home Secretary, under Gordon Brown in 2007, she equally famously resigned from the role 2 years alter in 2009, when she was found to be one of 40 MPs embroiled in the expenses scandal which dominated the news in that year, she had been found to be designating her sister’s London residence as her main residence, whilst claiming expenses on her actual home back in Redditch, referring to this as her second home, whilst explicitly stating on her website that she lives in Redditch. This allowed her to claim something in the region of £116,000 of public money, since she became an MP as a result. She also famously was found to have claimed on expenses two adult films her husband had watched whilst she was away.
Gordon Brown defended her over this, but the then chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, Sir Alistair Graham said that Smith naming her sister’s spare bedroom as her main residence, was near fraudulent. Near fraudulent you might think is being generous, but she did stay at her sisters in London and did so most of the time, but that didn’t take away from the fact her main residence was very much the one in Redditch and therefore the breach of rules was genuine. Despite later resigning over it, it didn’t stop her from claiming she was scrutinised on the basis of being a woman and was disappointed that matters had not led to a fairer set of conclusions. In fact she ought to have been grateful that at the time, not everything she had been up to had been uncovered, as two years later, in 2011, two prisoners that were supposed to be conducting community service were found to have, by Smith’s arrangement, painted a room in her house!
But another comment she made in 2009, is causing much amusement again now, which is that on the matter of stuffing cronies into the House of Lords, she said on BBC Question Time:
‘“I don’t think people who have been disgraced should go to the Lords.” Pressed on whether that included her, she said “Yes, I think, to a certain extent I have been.”’
So you are a disgrace then? You admit as much yet will become a Starmer imposed ‘vermin in ermine’ and will be making policy in the Department of Education under Bridget Phillipson, as, so I’m told, the new Minister for Higher and Further Education, which if true, will put her in charge of stuff like post 16 education strategies, higher technical education, student finance and the student loans company – tuition fees folks - university and higher education reform and so on and so forth. It’s a hefty education brief, handed to somebody not elected and not able to answer questions on such matters in the House of Commons.
Where it can be argued Rishi Sunak had run out of anyone remotely competent to appoint to roles, resulting in Cameron’s return, it seems Starmer has 400 MPs and still has no talent, so is resorting to the same measure already! Well this is what happens when you put up yes men to vote as they are told rather than have people elected based on competence and ability I suppose!
Now if I’m to be charitable to Smith for a moment, prior to politics, Smith was a teacher, her first ministerial brief under Blair was as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment, never staying in any role she ever held incidentally for more than around 2 years, so she got through a few roles in that time. Following her stint in education the first time around, she went on to be Minister of State for Health Services, Deputy Minister for Women, Minister of State for Industry & the regions, Minister of State for Schools and Learners and Chief Whip before finally Home Secretary followed by that expanses scandal resignation. And now it is back to education for a third time, though with no mandate to do so and scandal be damned, this is what passes for high quality in Starmer’s Labour then! Is Jacqui Smith high quality? Well, it would be remiss of me to not mention the fact that in 2009 a leaked poll of party members, coincidentally released alongside those ongoing expenses scandal allegations, found that Smith was regarded as the worst performing member of the cabinet, just 56% believing she was doing a good job as Home Secretary.
So having left politics in 2010, losing her seat to the Tories as she did in that election, she’s been a regular face on mainstream political commentary shows and most recently has shown a particular pro Israel streak, for example she has openly expressed the belief that Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions is antisemitic and denies that Israel is an apartheid state and this is interesting because Smith was a big detractor of apartheid in South Africa, which of course was overcome by BDS, South Africa was sanctioned, business ties were severed and in an interview on Good Morning Britain on this subject, just last May, she said:
‘I think there might be people saying: “But Jacqui, you argued for disinvestment in South Africa.” I don’t believe the situation in Israel is the same, I don’t believe it is legitimate to suggest that there should be no trade. Therefore, for example, they are also arguing that you shouldn’t have links with Israeli universities. It’s a different issue, you can fundamentally oppose the Israeli government, you can have enormous concerns about what is happening in Gaza, but to go that step further and to say that nobody should engage with Israel is what I think people believe is antisemitic.’
The obvious takeaway there, is that it isn’t antisemitic to oppose Israel in any way, the nation state of Israel is not equal and equivalent to the Jewish faith and making that connection is actually what I would consider antisemitism, but the example she chose I thought noteworthy as of all the things you could break ties with Israel over as part of BDS, she chose to bring up Israeli Universities and now she is the minister literally overseeing such ties between those institutions and Universities here in the UK.
Jacqui Smith was a Blairite MP who voted for the Iraq War and when challenged on her part in that, when accused directly by George Galloway on BBC TV that she had killed a million Iraqis she just rolled her eyes at him.
This is a woman who, as Home Secretary tried to build a DNA database of innocent people’s DNA, only to be stopped finally by the European Court of Human Rights and had to destroy it.
She introduced as Home Secretary a law that made immigrants go through a period of probationary citizenship, in which they had to prove their worth and also said that if immigrants want to come to the UK, they should hold a masters degree and planned to raise the immigration salary threshold from £17K in 2009, to £20K. Many people in this country still don’t earn that in 2024.
She also brought in rules to force foreigners to pass an English test, before they would be permitted to marry anyone from the UK.
Every one of those, would be something Suella Braverman would be proud of surely?
Unelected, pro Israel, anti migrant, scandalised. And back in government. Keir Starmer is already wasting no time making his poor reputation even worse.
Meanwhile though, the opposition to Starmer’s government, obviously I don’t mean the Tories, in the form of a new Gaza Bloc of MPs looks likely to form a consistent an ongoing thorn in the side of the new Labour government, for it isn’t all about Gaza with them, though of course they aren’t going to have that taken off the agenda either and all were elected in no small part because of Keir Starmer’s own self serving actions, a problem of his own making, so familiarise yourself with this group of mostly brand new MPs in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.