Starmer's Deportation Hypocrisy Just Flew Off The Charts!

Right, so prison overcrowding in the UK. Labour are bleating about it, blaming the last government, which for once might not be a lie, but given they’ve just sent another 4 Just Stop Oil protesters down for the crime of protest, it isn’t like Labour are helping the situation much themselves, however they might have hit upon a somewhat hypocritical plan for dealing with this despite public denials to essentially deport prisoners to Estonian gulags. Estonia having piped up and offered room in their prisons should the UK want it. Keir Starmer has this inate ability to make as many people as possible detest him all at once and yet again left and right wingers are united insofar as their disgust at this concept, though naturally for very different reasons.
Right, so currently across England and Wales there are only 1,098 prison spaces left, such is the crisis in the prisons system, yet another casualty of privatisation, done in the 1990’s as the answer to prison overcrowding then and of course it has only made matters worse as profits are sucked out rather than the necessary investment put in. The mere fact Keir Starmer is for example trumpeting rail renationalisation right now as a positive headline, should be spun into a negative frankly because if renationalisation is necessary in one area of privatisation, then that undermines privatisation across the board and renationalisation of every service that was functionally stolen from public ownership over the last 40 odd years must be restored to us – none of it has ever worked in our interests, just the interests of the shareholders, but that is an argument for another video.
Confronted with this prisons crisis Starmer has already talked about shortening or ending sentences early for some prisoners to ease matters, but with overcrowding a worsening issue, prisons falling apart through lack of investment, more practically speaking needing to be built, it comes across as all the more pathetic when more protesters get given custodial sentences as we’ve now just observed with 4 more Just Stop Oil protesters having been handed jail time of up to three years, again for peaceful protest, having dug a tunnel to block an oil terminal and occupying it for 13 days back in 2022, protesting against the new oil and gas exploration licences, the burning of fossil fuels of course contributing to the climate crisis and these sentences coinciding with news that 2024 was the Earth’s hottest on record, made this move all the more perverse.
Sadly, that’s 4 more prison places lost, which frankly should have gone to real criminals and not people being punished for protesting in a non violent manner, the sentences getting handed down for non violent protest are a sick farce, but this is Starmer’s new authoritarian Britain.
Consider what else he’s having people arrested for for a moment, the arrests of journalists reporting on Israeli atrocity, exposing them and taking an even handed approach to the Israel Gaza situation right now, when are government are completely on one side of that. Richard Medhurst arrested upon his return to Britain from the Middle East, Sarah Wilkinson who house got turned upside down in what was a blatant show heavy-handedness. Will they got to prison next for telling the truth? Julian Assange all over again? Well, we know about Starmer’s involvement there too after all, don’t we?
On the flipside of this though, there is obviously a need for prison spaces for people who are committing real crimes, and we’ve just seen in that vein for example the longest prison sentence handed down to one of the fascist rioters, Thomas Birley of Rotherham, sentenced to 9 years who attempted to burn down a hotel by filling a bin with wood, lighting it and pushing it up against one of the exits, trapping people inside, risking their lives in doing so. Sentence frankly isn’t long enough, but such is the issue when prisons are overcrowded.
And so we come to this Estonia plan which got floated on Sky News and which several of the right wing hate rags have also run with, as Starmer’s government is now apparently considering anything to alleviate the prison overcrowding, except of course renationalising them, though even that isn’t exactly waving a magic wand over the issue. And even though Number 10 is denying it, it has been reported that the Minister for Justice, Shabana Mahmood, the woman who seconded Keir Starmer’s motion to keep Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour MP again, so what does she know of justice anyway? Is what always springs to my mind, is heading to Estonia next week to speak to her counterpart over there, Liisa Pakosta, in regards to leasing prison cells over there.
Mahmood has already been forced to commute sentences for some crimes by up to 50%, in order to free up room, but thusfar there is little sign of doing anything proactive to ensure we have a prison system fit for purpose going forwards, aside from talk of finally building more prisons, though if they are just going to be palmed off to private interests too, it only kicks the can down the road.
The government are, it has to be said, currently denying any plans to use Estonian gulags to house British prisoners, but given that during the height of the rioting and the detentions being made over that the number of spaces in male prisons in the UK fell to as few as 100, the prison system really is on the verge of collapse and as much as Starmer’s government cannot be blamed for that, this is a mess of neoliberalism’s making, of Thatcherite policy, which has been continued by Tories and Labour alike and this new government is no different in it’s thinking on that score. And people know it too.
Starmer has managed to upset both left wingers and right wingers over this matter.
On the left, we will point to the arrests and detention of climate protesters as sick and completely uncalled for. Instead of arresting them, try listening to them. Aside from that, there is the simple fact privatisation of prisons hasn’t worked, has led to this exact situation and to have a prison system fit for the future, it must once again be in public ownership. Stop outsourcing, and bring it back in house. On top of that, it is frankly inhumane and disgusting to even consider deporting British citizens to a foreign prison because we lack the capacity through decades of right wing government and it’s stupidity. Whoever these people are, they are our problem and how much is the stupidity of past Thatcherite governments going to cost us, if Labour do push ahead with this, because with Starmer’s relationship with the truth, I’m not inclined to just take their word for it, that this won’t go ahead. Lets see if Shabana Mahmood does end up in Estonia next week shall we?
As for the right wingers, the fash, well Starmer has wound them up with this policy too, because their eyes the problem isn’t prison overcrowding, it’s why aren’t we deporting the people that are being kept in hotels seeking asylum, or waiting to be returned from whence they came?
Why deport British prisoners, when we should be deporting migrants? The wrong people are being looked at here they might think and given how quickly Starmer and Yvette Cooper binned the Rwanda deportation scheme, the thought of them now deporting prisoners, well you don’t have to agree with these racists, to see the hypocrisy of the situation Labour have placed themselves in do you? The double standard is pretty obvious.
Equally these are accusations that Labour as well as the media it has to be said, have brought on themselves. Labour is all about their new border command to smash migrant gangs, but as usual it’s failing. Day after day the media insist on publishing figures for how many people have arrived by small boat on our shores. It doesn’t matter that we take only a small proportion of migrants arriving in Europe, the likes of France and Germany and others take many more than we do, the racist headlines and the obsession with counting heads arriving on our shores by certain media outlets, is scum sucking stuff, when for one it ignores the plight these people may have been in, especially considering the dozen who died trying to cross the channel just this week, half of whom were I believe children, people forget to consider how desperate you must be to try and make that crossing. Instead we’re primed by the media and government rhetoric, especially under the last Tory government to ignore this and to bash these people, when a safe, legal route would actually put the traffickers Starmer claims to want to put out of business so badly, actually out of business.
So this prisoner deportation scheme, how far it is legitimately being considered still, remains to be seen, the fact it even got reported by newspaper and television media, meant it was considered to sufficient extent to go on their radars, and we need to be vigilant for how far it now continues to be considered for, but it really does sum Starmer’s Labour up, that no matter what they do, the manage to get everybody hating them.
Speaking of, whilst Starmer has absolutely no problem suspending MPs who vote against keeping kids in poverty and looks set to deal with any would be rebels next week when the winter fuel allowance cut on pensioners goes to a vote, Keir Starmer hasn’t done a thing to parliaments biggest landlord, or slumlord as the case may be, Jas Athwal still has the Labour whip, but then, he’s a right winger like Starmer and after all the effort that faction went to get Athwal into parliament, why would they roll over on him now? Get all the details on that story in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.