“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none”

 – from All’s Well That Ends Well, William Shakespeare

In part one we looked at Kensington & Chelsea Council’s determined self-deception ahead of publication of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report next week. Nationally, there are parallels with a policy-lite Labour government reinforcing the establishment, albeit with a fragile mandate.  

General Election – Kensington

Last month’s general election was greeted with widespread apathy; the UK’s lowest turnout since universal suffrage and the lowest vote share for a winning party since 1832. In Kensington, turnout nosedived by 17%, around double the rate of the national decline.

Compared to 2019, Labour increased their Kensington vote by 407 to 17,025 while the Conservatives lost 2500 votes to finish with 14,122. The boundary changes that created the new Kensington & Bayswater constituency incorporated 17.1% of Westminster North (an area that elected five Labour councillors and one Tory councillor in local elections.) Factoring in the new boundaries, it is possible that Labour’s Joe Powell received fewer votes in North and South Kensington than Emma Dent Coad in 2019.

Few Tories turned to the Liberal Democrats, whose vote declined by 6,402. The Green Party, with support among anti-genocide former Labour voters, saw their vote rise from 1% to 7%, a similar vote share to Reform. The number of spoilt ballots rose from 92 to 213, reflecting growing ambivalence among the electorate.

Starmer

Nationally, Labour attracted half a million fewer votes than five years earlier, when their result was derided by the mainstream media as an historic embarrassment to the party and blamed on Jeremy Corbyn, a leader who in 2017 secured well over three million more votes than Starmer managed this year. Starmer was the chief architect of Labour’s 2019 second Brexit referendum policy, which guaranteed five more years of Tory rule, yet party members rewarded him with a comfortable victory in Labour’s 2020 leadership contest.

Labour’s loveless 2024 landslide was helped by Rishi Sunak’s decision to call an early snap election which handicapped independent and small party candidates going up against the traditional parties of state. With a bit more campaigning time, strong independent candidates, such as Leanne Mohamad and Faiza Shaheen, would surely have defeated two of the Uniparty’s most zealous NHS privateers and kid starvers, Wes Streeting and Iain Duncan Smith.

Labour eased into power, with 412 of 650 seats in parliament. All’s well that ends well? A comforting thought for those with the “picnic, wine, sunglasses, pac-a-mac and participatory spirit” in Holland Park on June 14th.

Sir Keir Starmer was politely ushered into power by his predecessor and an accommodating media establishment. It was as if we had to get our little election out of the way with minimum fuss so we could then obsess over Trump and Harris’s personalities and domestic policies despite their irrelevance to the lives of 70 million people in Britain.

In his North London constituency, Prime Minister Starmer lost 17,000 votes, a sign that any sheen he once had has worn off. With a rise in marginal seats, any Tory resurgence will threaten Labour’s majority, as would the formation of a new Left party or movement focused on the issues that matter to the population. This leaves Starmer and the wider Uniparty establishment in a bind. Millions of people want government to enact policies that help them, their families, and communities, but Labour took power on a mission to transition smoothly from Conservative government to another pro-austerity, pro-war, Atlanticist, Zionist, Russophobic regime.

Selections?

The choice for Britain is between policies and Kamala-style selections mixed with culture war. Labour is accelerating the latter. Having rigged its own candidate selection processes all over the country, once in power it took less than a month for an ugly manifestation of the divisive, class-driven politics that Labour has fully participated in to overwhelm the police in English towns and cities and in Belfast.

The riots were not happenstance, they exploded out of a political scene in which senior figures within the supposedly left or liberal option for government targeted Britain’s Bangladeshi community shortly before the election. Were the people who briefed Starmer to do this the same people dictating Labour’s Middle East policy, which also boosts white supremacist fascists?

The Zionist lobby and its corrupting funding are a common denominator among some of those who have incubated irrational hatred of Muslim and non-white communities. High-profile culprits include Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, Elon Musk, Douglas Murray, Keir Starmer, Jonathan Ashworth and the Daily Mail.

Faced with civil unrest and an emboldened violent extremist faction, Labour responded in characteristic fashion, writing to all the party’s councillors to strongly suggest they should not attend popular anti-racist protests on Wednesday 7th August, as this email sent to us by a Kensington councillor shows:

In the wake of the police’s inadequate response to the violence just three days earlier, the advice to abstain from the one thing that people could do to oppose the far right and save lives suggests that the safety of our most vulnerable communities is not a priority for this government.

Metropolitan Police Chief Mark Rowley heaped praise on anti-racists for saving the day:  “I think the show of force from the police, and frankly, the show of unity from communities together, defeated the challenges that we’ve seen.”

Starmer, with questions to answer over his role in so many disturbing episodes in Britain’s modern history, supports the same apartheid state, replete with its rape dungeons, as Yaxley-Lennon and many of the other anti-Muslims shilling for a genocide in which 70% of the victims so far are women and children. 

Socialist MPs are now a tiny minority in the parliamentary Labour party, with Starmer suspending seven who opposed impoverishing children. Most of the rest are self-defined pragmatists, and this was the conceit of the 2024 election; that technocrats speaking the language of corporate efficiency can bring the change the country needs. Not many believed it, but it was enough to secure the status quo. For those who benefit from the prevailing order, all’s well that ends well, for now at least.

by Tom Charles

@tomhcharles